June 21, 2023

phData Announces the Advisor Tool for Snowflake Optimization

By Grant Henke

Attention users of the Snowflake Data Cloud! We are excited to announce the launch of the new Advisor tool in the phData Toolkit. Our Snowflake Advisor is a software tool designed to help optimize your use of the Snowflake Data Platform.

The Advisor Tool is also available on the Snowflake Marketplace for free.

What is the Advisor Tool?

With the Advisor tool, you can quickly and easily identify opportunities to improve the configuration, security, performance, and efficiency of your Snowflake environment. We have worked closely with our Snowflake data and operations experts to ensure that our Snowflake Advisor delivers actionable recommendations based on best practices and phData’s vast real-world experience on the Snowflake Platform.

The Advisor tool comes with a pre-configured set of checks to identify opportunities and provide recommendations that ensure your Snowflake environment is following best practices and industry standards across a variety of categories, including:

  • Configuration Best Practices: Recommendations for your Snowflake environment configuration based on best practices and industry standards.
  • Security Enhancement: Identify and fix potential security risks in your account and maintain a compliant security posture going forward.
  • Operational Risks: Uncover operational risks such as data loss or failures in the event of an unforeseen outage or disaster.
  • Performance Optimization: Locate and fix bottlenecks in your data pipelines so that you can get the most out of your Snowflake investment.
  • Resource Utilization: Optimize the use of resources, such as compute and storage, to ensure that you are not overpaying for resources you don’t need.
  • Environment Scale and Capacity: View critical metrics about the scale and features used in your account to help you understand your current state and plan for growth. 
A dashboard showing how the Advisor tool from the phData Toolkit can help provide critical Snowflake insights at a glance

The check results are provided in a rich interactive report for users to view and use to address them. The default set of checks run in a report can be customized, and new checks can be defined using simple configuration options to tailor the reports to your organization’s needs. 

Once all of the checks pass, the Advisor tool can be run on a schedule and automatically alert if checks fail going forward.

A screenshot of a query taken from the Advisor tool that showcases Snowflake credit usage in a visual way.

Each check in the report can be drilled into to find a clear description of the check, including any recommended actions that should be taken based on the result. Additionally, for checks that are more informational in nature or contain multiple rows, a customizable graph is included in the check details page to help quickly visualize and understand the presented results.

Who Can Use The Advisor Tool?

The Advisor tool will be invaluable for any Snowflake user looking to get the most out of their data platform. This tool is accessible for everyone to try and demo and is available to all phData customers for free without limitations.

Learn more about this powerful today and see the difference it can make for your organization!

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