Snowflake Alerting & Notifications Framework

Pipeline failures happen. The difference between a minor hiccup and a major incident is Time To Detection (TTD).

Snowflake now provides a robust, native framework for Alerts and Notifications. You don’t need Airflow or external monitoring tools for basic health checks. You can do it all in the database.

The Components#

1. Notification Integration: The bridge to the outside world (Email, Slack, MS Teams, PagerDuty).
2. Alert Object: A scheduled check that evaluates a condition.
3. System stored procedures: SYSTEM$SEND_EMAIL or SYSTEM$SEND_SNOWFLAKE_NOTIFICATION.

Step 1: Create Email Integration#

CREATE OR REPLACE NOTIFICATION INTETRATION email_int
    TYPE = EMAIL
    ENABLED = TRUE
    ALLOWED_RECIPIENTS = ('data-team@company.com');

Step 2: Define the Alert Logic#

Let’s alert if our critical table FACT_SALES hasn’t received data in the last hour.

CREATE OR REPLACE ALERT stale_data_alert
    WAREHOUSE = MONITORING_WH
    SCHEDULE = '15 MINUTE'
    IF(EXISTS(
        SELECT 1
        FROM monitoring_db.pipeline_logs
        WHERE table_name = 'FACT_SALES'
        AND last_load_ts < DATEADD(hour, -1, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
    ))
    THEN
        CALL SYSTEM$SEND_EMAIL(
            'email_int',
            'data-team@company.com',
            'CRITICAL: Stale Sales Data',
            'FACT_SALES has not updated in 1 hour. Check the Fivetran connector.'
        );

Step 3: Managing Alerts#

Alerts are objects. You can ALTER ALERT ... RESUME and SUSPEND.

Pro-tip: Create a dashboard in Snowsight that queries INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ALERT_HISTORY to show a log of all triggered alerts.

Advanced: Webhooks to Slack#

For Slack messages, you can use the WEBHOOK integration type (if enabled/available in your region) or use an External Function to call the Slack API. This allows for richer formatting (blocks, buttons) than standard email.

Conclusion#

Observability is key to trust. By baking alerts directly into the Data Cloud, we ensure that the data team detects issues before the business users do.