ADA-C01 Question 281
Single answerUse Snowsight dashboards to monitor activityA Snowflake administrator is asked to quickly identify why business users are complaining about slow dashboard refreshes in a production account. The administrator wants to use Snowsight to determine whether warehouse queuing or long-running queries are the main cause, and to share the findings with team leads without writing custom SQL. Which Snowsight dashboard should the administrator use first to best meet this requirement?
- A
Use the Activity dashboard, because it provides account-level visibility into query activity, execution trends, and warehouse load indicators that help identify queueing and long-running queries.
- B
Use the Databases dashboard, because it shows storage growth and schema object counts, which directly identify whether dashboard latency is caused by warehouse queueing.
- C
Use the Marketplace dashboard, because consumer usage trends reveal whether external listings are slowing production BI dashboards.
- D
Use the Cost Management dashboard, because credit consumption alone is the most direct way to distinguish between queued queries and long-running queries.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is the Activity dashboard. In Snowsight, administrators commonly use Activity-related monitoring views to investigate account activity, including query behavior and warehouse performance indicators, before deciding whether to resize warehouses, adjust multi-cluster settings, tune SQL, or change workload scheduling. This is especially appropriate when the goal is to visually assess operational issues and communicate findings without writing custom SQL. By contrast, Databases focuses on data/storage context, Marketplace is unrelated to performance troubleshooting, and Cost Management is helpful for spend analysis but not as the primary tool for differentiating warehouse queueing from long-running query execution. This reflects Snowflake best practice: start with workload and query activity monitoring in Snowsight, then drill into specific warehouses or queries as needed.
- A. Correct.
Correct. In Snowsight, the Activity area/dashboard is the most appropriate starting point for monitoring operational activity such as query execution behavior and warehouse utilization patterns. It is designed to help administrators investigate workload characteristics, including whether queries are waiting for compute resources or taking a long time to execute. This aligns with the requirement to troubleshoot user-reported slowness and share findings visually without building custom SQL queries.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. The Databases dashboard is useful for monitoring database objects, storage usage, and related metadata, but it is not the primary dashboard for diagnosing query latency caused by warehouse contention or long-running SQL. Someone might choose this option if they confuse data growth issues with performance monitoring.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. The Marketplace dashboard is unrelated to diagnosing internal query performance for production dashboards. It focuses on data products and listings rather than warehouse activity or query execution. This distractor reflects a misunderstanding of Snowsight areas versus operational monitoring tools.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Cost Management can help identify spending patterns and warehouse credit usage, but credit usage by itself does not directly distinguish whether end-user latency is caused by queueing versus inefficient or long-running queries. An administrator may use cost views later for optimization, but it is not the best first dashboard for this troubleshooting task.