Understanding Capital One Slingshot’s Value Report

Visibility into cloud costs is essential to effective cost management and cloud cost optimization. Capital One Slingshot’s Value Report provides a breakdown of the cost savings and performance gains that an organization has experienced using Slingshot to optimize Snowflake. It highlights areas like overall cost savings, query costs and optimization recommendations. Taken together, these reports help companies to quantify the value of their investment in Slingshot and how they are making the most of Snowflake.

Because of Snowflake’s incredible flexibility and elasticity, it is important to have a clear line of sight into cost and resource allocations to minimize unexpected cost spikes and operational inefficiencies. This is even more critical as organizations scale. 

Capital One Slingshot is a data management tool that helps companies maximize their investment in Snowflake through cost optimization and performance management. Slingshot’s Value Report helps provide greater transparency into an organization’s costs, performance and usage of Snowflake, including savings as a result of using the tool.

Businesses can drill down into the following metrics:

• Savings from using Slingshot: The section shows an organization’s lifetime savings across all accounts since connecting Snowflake to Slingshot. Additionally, users can compare the monthly or weekly cost savings in a period, helping businesses understand their savings versus what they would have spent on running their warehouses without Slingshot.

• Warehouse management: This report breaks down the number of warehouses managed in Slingshot versus the number of warehouses in Snowflake, as well as the percentage of managed compute spend in a chosen period, providing insights into the breadth of Slingshot usage.

• Costs per query: Monthly or weekly views of the average credits spent per query help organizations understand at the query level the savings they have experienced before and after Slingshot.

• Actual vs. target spend: Comparing the actual spending during a chosen period against targets helps businesses with budgeting and control over costs.

• Recommendations snapshot: A summary of Slingshot warehouse recommendations highlights the number of recommendations that have been applied versus unapplied, the percentage of recommendations applied versus generated and potential savings from unapplied recommendations. Slingshot’s recommendations engine continuously monitors warehouse performance and generates new recommendations for optimized warehouse schedules on a monthly basis, according to historical usage data. Slingshot’s Value Report shows businesses at a high level how much they are saving after applying the recommendations.

• Unapplied recommendations: This report highlights potentially missed savings by not applying warehouse recommendations at the individual warehouse level, and let's the user click through to view the recommendation as a next step.

There are many ways Slingshot’s Value Report enhances an organization’s Snowflake cost visibility and cost optimization efforts.

Slingshot makes it easy to report on and understand cost savings within the product, both over the entire course of Slingshot use and specific periods by weeks or months. For example, a new customer who has just onboarded onto Slingshot can use the Value Report on a monthly basis during the first six months to put numbers to the value of their investment. This is all made possible without the need for third-party tools or the time-intensive work of building reports manually.

The Value Report can be shared easily with stakeholders who are invested in the return and value of a tool like Slingshot, such as a Chief Financial Officer or Director of IT. Using the export functionality, the reports can be downloaded as a CSV or PDF, streamlining workflows and simplifying socialization—without the need to go through an identity management system and granting permissions to certain roles.

Slingshot’s Value Report can add to an organization’s regular cost management practices by including it as part of ongoing financial reporting. This brings important insights into the state of their company’s cloud spending, allowing leaders to forecast more confidently and allocate resources more efficiently.

Slingshot helps companies to balance cost and performance in Snowflake by continuously monitoring usage and generating recommendations for well-tuned warehouses. The Value Report shows top unapplied recommendations, identifying potential areas for optimization and savings, like adjustments to warehouse size or the maximum cluster count. Slingshot also tracks how many recommendations have been applied versus not applied, helping companies to get an idea of future savings.

Through the “actual vs. target spend” metrics, Value Report helps businesses track how closely their Snowflake usage is aligning with their goals. The trend report gives companies a starting point to identify patterns of overspending and drill deeper into the cause, which helps avoid unnecessary expenses.

Capital One Slingshot’s Value Report helps businesses prove the value of the product while bringing greater transparency to Snowflake usage and costs. With detailed reports on cost savings using Slingshot, alignment with cost targets and optimization opportunities, Slingshot enables customers to demonstrate ROI and confidently manage their Snowflake warehouses. Request a demo to learn how Slingshot brings transparency, efficiency and control into data management and cost optimization for Snowflake customers.