In this short and concise article I will explain how to create your DevOps/DevSecOps dashboards using the infamous Snowflake
Before going through the needed steps, I’d like to point out that Sigma Computing and Metabase are meant to be used in different visualization fields.
Metabase is more of business intelligence analytics and data visualization dashboards, while Sigma Computing dashboards are more focused on cloud compatibility (supports multiple vendors), however we can use any of them for the job but that will be a bit time consuming (like building a dashboard from scratch).
1. Sigma
1.1 First you need to create connection to your snowflake instance from your sigma dashboard by clicking your profile -> add connection, and then configure settings needed
1.2 Choose any template for now (we’ll change it later), try to choose what best suits your organization needs.
1.3 Let’s say we chose “Performance Monitoring” dashboard and proceed to configure this dashboard .you can click on “Edit” button at the top right or right click on any of the panels to edit it.
1.4 Editing one of the panels is fairly easy as it follows most spreadsheets formatting and editing, it supports most of the spreadsheets features like (avg of column, sum, .. etc).
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2. Metabase
2.1 You can specify which schemas you want to sync and scan. Options are:
- All
- Only these…
- All except…
I know these are tedious type of choices but we usually choose the “all” option since we might need other schemas in the future, but for more advanced users we will specify “only these” option and input a comma-separated list of values to tell Metabase which schemas you want to include [ex. “(sch1 , sch2)”].
2.2 The Account field requires the alphanumeric account ID with the region that your Snowflake cluster is running on. Role and Schema fields are optional. Specifying a role will override the database user’s default role.
Refer to the following pic to be more familiar of how authentication works.
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3. Conclusion
Most of the Ops teams I’ve dealt with prefer Metabase than Sigma, but maybe this is because Metabase was there first, or it is easier to deal with (i doubt), but from my point of view as we move more to cloud solutions we need faster, easier, and more secure solution which is Sigma in that case (till this moment at least).
