New Relic Snowflake Integration

A New Relic integration with Snowflake to monitor query performance, logins, potential security incidents, optimise warehouse and cloud credit costs, capture any data stored in Snowflake for real-time alerting and reporting.

Breaking changes!

Version 1.0 introduces a number of breaking changes over previous versions.

• Configuration (config.yaml) is completely changed to directly utilize Snowflake connection parameters
• Obfuscation of connection parameters is no longer supported
• The command line (run: ) now uses flagged parameters rather than positional parameters

Installation

1. Install the New Relic Infrastructure agent for your platform
2. Clone the repository to your machine git clone https://github.com/newrelic/newrelic-snowflake-integration.git
3. Download the relevant binary for your platform from releases and place it in the cloned repo from step 2.
4. Make sure the binary is executable chmod +x snowflakeintegration-linux
5. Open config.yaml file and fill it appropriately
6. If running the New Relic infrastructure agent as a systemd service, follow these steps to set the environment variable
   1. To determine if you are on a system using systemd as the init service, run [[ `\systemctl` =~ -\.mount ]] && echo yes || echo no
7. Set the NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME environment variable as documented in the Setting NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME section. (Skip this step if you are running the New Relic infrastructure agent as a systemd service and followed the alternative steps for this).
8. Copy the relevant flex config for your platform from flexConfigs to the agent's integrations.d folder.
   • for Linux, it is found at /etc/newrelic-infra/integrations.d/
   • for Windows, it is found at C:\Program Files\New Relic\newrelic-infra\integrations.d\.

Setting NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME

• NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME - REQUIRED the directory where you installed this integration i.e. /home/user/newrelic-snowflake-integration
• NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_CONFIG_PATH - OPTIONAL the fully qualified path to the config file i.e. /home/user/config.yaml or C:\User\config.yaml

For example on Mac OS/Linux do export NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME=/home/myuser/newrelic-snowflake-integration On Windows, set System Environment variables via the Control Panel or from an Administrator command prompt (setx /m NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME C:\newrelic-snowflake-integration\). If you are running on a Linux system that uses Systemd, see below.

When the agent is running as a systemd service

The integration relies on NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME environment variable to connect to Snowflake. When the infrastructure agent runs as a systemd service, it doesn't have access to the environment variables of the user. To pass the environment variables correctly, you need to create a .env file.

1. Copy the snowflake.env file to a location on your server.
2. Replace the values in snowflake.env
3. Edit the newrelic-infra.service service definition - sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/newrelic-infra.service
4. Add a line EnvironmentFile=/path/to/env/file in the [Service] section
5. Edit the newrelic-infra.yml - sudo nano /etc/newrelic-infra.yml
6. Add these lines in newrelic-infra.yml

passthrough_environment:
  - NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME
  - SNOWSQL_ACCOUNT

7. Perform a daemon-reload and restart the newrelic-infra service - sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl restart newrelic-infra

The newrelic-infra.service file should look similar to below

...

[Service]
RuntimeDirectory=newrelic-infra
Type=simple
EnvironmentFile=/home/ec2-user/snowflake.env
ExecStart=/usr/bin/newrelic-infra-service
MemoryLimit=1G
# MemoryMax is only supported in systemd > 230 and replaces MemoryLimit. Some cloud dists do not have that version
# MemoryMax=1G
Restart=always
RestartSec=20
StartLimitInterval=0
StartLimitBurst=5
PIDFile=/var/run/newrelic-infra/newrelic-infra.pid

...

Configuration

Configuration is driven by the config.yaml in the root directory of the integration.

# loglevel: Optional. error | warn | info | verbose | debug .Default value is 'info'.
logLevel:
# connection: Snowflake connection values. See https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/node-js/nodejs-driver-options
connection:
  # account: Snowflake Organization-Account. Use SELECT DISTINCT ORGANIZATION_NAME,ACCOUNT_NAME FROM SNOWFLAKE.ORGANIZATION_USAGE.RATE_SHEET_DAILY; for help
  account: <organization-account>
  # username: Snowflake username
  username: <username>
  # role: Snowflake Role
  role: <role>
  # warehouse: Snowflake warehouse
  warehouse: <warehouse>
  # authenticator: SNOWFLAKE (userid/passord) | OAUTH | SNOWFLAKE_JWT (key-pair)
  authenticator: <Snowflake_Authenticator>

  # password: Required for SNOWFLAKE authenticator
  password: <password>

  # token: Required for OAUTH. See https://yaml-multiline.info/ for help with yaml multiline strings
  token: <token>

  # Params for SNOWFLAKE_JWT (key-pair) authentication. See important note below.
  privateKey: |
    -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
    ...
    -----END PRIVATE KEY-----
  privateKeyPath: <path_to_private_key>
  # privateKeyPass: See important note below!
  privateKeyPass: <private_key_password>

For more information on the connection options, refer to the snowflake Node.js driver documentation. In particular, see the "Authenticate" section for help setting the authentication options as well as links to the relevant sections of the Snowflake authentication documentation.

Key-Pair authentication

1. Either privateKey or privateKeyPath is REQUIRED
2. DO NOT GENERATE A KEY-PAIR WITH AN EMPTY PASSWORD! Either use a password or -nocrypt, an empty password WILL NOT WORK.

Usage

This integration comes out of the box with queries to capture a good range of performance related data from the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema. If you want to extend the integration to run custom queries, see the instructions below

Command line parameters

Long flag	Short flag	Values	Default
-logLevel	-l	error | warn | info | verbose | debug	info
-nriConfig	-c		./config.yaml
-queryFile	-q
-interval	-i	See Interval below	30s

Queries

First off, and most importantly, the provided queries are SAMPLES. The provided queries have broad applicability but may not satisfy everyone. That's why the code allows for custom queries.

Secondly, the pre version 1.0 queries queried by day rather than the last run of this application. This created an issue with duplicate data in NR1 which lead to the values being generally too large. The modified queries now use an interval which if set properly should alleviate this issue. There is one notable exception, the table storage usage view has no date component and cannot be fixed.

Lastly, be aware of how much data your query returns. It is easy for a query like longest queries to return enough data to break JSON.stringify and then the application. JSON.stringify has a maximum string length that varies depending on

1. The underlying version of Node.js
2. The flags with which V8 is compiled

Test your queries in the Snowflake UI!

Interval

Queries now use a WHERE START_TIME >= DATEADD('ms', -$interval, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()) logic, any custom queries should use this same pattern.

The interval is set on the run: line and defaults to the default Flex interval of 30s. IF YOU CHANGE THE FLEX INTERVAL BE CERTAIN TO SET THE COMMAND LINE INTERVAL TO THE SAME VALUE.

Parsed intervals are normalized to ms and this is what DATEADD should use. $interval in a query is replaced with the normalized interval value.

Adding custom queries

To add your own custom query, you need to follow a few steps

1. When creating your query, use the existing query files for guidance. The FROM clause needs to be fully qualified, for example you need to specify the Database, Schema and Table. For example, "DATABASE"."SCHEMA"."TABLE/VIEW"
2. Add your custom query SQL file to the queries subdirectory
3. Add a new section to the flex-snowflake.yml file to execute the query, for example

- name: someSnowflakeCustomQuery
  entity: snowflake
  event_type: SnowflakeAccount
  custom_attributes:
    metric_type: snowflake.my_custom_query
  commands:
    - run: $$NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME/snowflakeintegration-<platform> -c $$NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME/config.yaml -q $$NEWRELIC_SNOWFLAKE_HOME/queries/<your_custom_query>.sql -i 60s

Building

The snowflake integration is a Node.js app and can be run directly from the command line using node and therefore requires no "building". However, the integration is released as a set of platform-specific binaries. These binaries are created using pkg as part of the GitHub workflow when a new tag is provisioned. Creating the binaries is a two step process.

1. First esbuild is used to transpile the integration into one single Javascript file. This helps avoid issues when allowing pkg to do that as it doesn't quite support ES6 style modules.
2. Second pkg is run using the generated output from esbuild and the the pkg.config.json to generate the set of platform-specific binaries.

Note that this is essentially the same process as creating a single executable application in Node 20+. However, pkg provides some niceties that aren't yet part of the SEA solution such as automatically downloading the node base binaries and copying source files and assets.

This process can be run locally by executing npm run build. The resulting transpiled Javascript file and binary files are created in the dist directory. See the scripts section of the package.json file for the commands that are executed for performing this process.

Support

New Relic hosts and moderates an online forum where customers can interact with New Relic employees as well as other customers to get help and share best practices. Like all official New Relic open source projects, there's a related Community topic in the New Relic Explorers Hub. You can find this project's topic/threads here:

Contribute

We encourage your contributions to improve New Relic Snowflake Integration! Keep in mind that when you submit your pull request, you'll need to sign the CLA via the click-through using CLA-Assistant. You only have to sign the CLA one time per project.

If you have any questions, or to execute our corporate CLA (which is required if your contribution is on behalf of a company), drop us an email at [email protected].

A note about vulnerabilities

As noted in our security policy, New Relic is committed to the privacy and security of our customers and their data. We believe that providing coordinated disclosure by security researchers and engaging with the security community are important means to achieve our security goals.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability in this project or any of New Relic's products or websites, we welcome and greatly appreciate you reporting it to New Relic through HackerOne.

If you would like to contribute to this project, review these guidelines.

License

New Relic Snowflake Integration is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.