Snowflake warehouse review: sizing, idle time and expensive queries
Use warehouse and query history from Snowflake account usage to find oversized warehouses, idle credits and the queries that cost the most.
Runs in
Claude · Slack
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
Which Snowflake warehouses cost the most last month, and how much of that was idle time?
TRANSFORM_WH (Data): €11,200 last month, 31% idle between dbt runs. Auto-suspend at 60s instead of 600s would recover most of it. Top query: a full-refresh dbt model rebuilt hourly, €1,800/month.
The data team resizes, changes auto-suspend or fixes the query.
Playbook
What the agent does
From what Costory notices to what you decide. Costory suggests the next step in conversation, and you decide whether to go ahead.
Costory notices
A warehouse's idle share or top query cost rises.
Context used
Remembered
Costory investigates
01
Connect account usage
Costory reads usage in currency plus warehouse and query history.
02
Rank warehouses
Credits by warehouse, team and workload.
03
Find expensive queries
Top queries by cost and frequency.
04
Claude proposes
Resize, auto-suspend or query changes for the owner to review.
Where you see it
Claude
You decide
The data team resizes, changes auto-suspend or fixes the query.
Why it matters
Snowflake bills credits per warehouse. Without warehouse and query context, it's hard to know whether to resize, suspend sooner or fix a query.
Who it’s for
Data engineers, analytics leads
Where it runs
Claude · Slack
What you get
What lands in front of your team
Warehouse-level clarity
Credits by warehouse and owner.
A query hit list
The few queries worth optimizing.
Practical settings
Resize and auto-suspend suggestions.
Sources and assistants
What it connects
Data sources
Example prompts
Or drive it yourself
Rank
Which Snowflake warehouses cost the most last month, and how much of that was idle time?
FAQ
Questions about this playbook
Does Costory guarantee savings?
No. The agent investigates and recommends with the evidence attached; your team decides what to change. Impact figures are estimates based on your own data.
How long does this playbook take to set up?
Connecting your billing data and the Costory MCP takes under 30 minutes with Terraform or CloudFormation. The playbook itself takes minutes: pick the scope, the trigger and the Slack channel. The first billing data lands the next day, and the agent starts from there.
Can we adjust what the agent does?
Yes. You choose the trigger, the scope (team, service, environment), the channel and the format, and you can pause or change it at any time.
Does Costory change anything in our cloud accounts?
No. Costory reads billing exports and the metrics you connect, and has no write access to your cloud. Actions it takes create Costory objects only: alerts, reports, dashboards and events. Your team stays in control of every change.
Step-by-step guide in the Costory docs
Related playbooks
Run these alongside it
Costory notices
Daily, as Snowflake usage refreshes.
Snowflake cost by warehouse, team and workload
Allocate Snowflake credits to teams and workloads using warehouses and query history, next to your cloud bill.
See the playbook
Costory notices
A dbt model's cost jumps or a new expensive model appears.
BigQuery cost by dbt model, package and team
Label BigQuery jobs with dbt metadata and allocate processing and storage costs to models, packages and owners.
See the playbook
Costory notices
Every week, across every connected provider.
One showback across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, AI and data platforms
Teams see all their costs in one place, whatever the provider: cloud, Kubernetes, data platforms and LLM APIs.
See the playbook
Put this playbook on call
Included in every plan, from €250/month. 30-day free trial: connect in under 30 minutes, get your first optimization recommendation the next day.
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
Setup
About 30 minutes
Data residency
EU
Access
Read-only on your cloud