At a glance
Active Warehouses is the live count of Snowflake virtual warehouses currently in a STARTED (running) state. Each running warehouse is billing credits by the second, so this number is the single fastest read on “how much compute am I paying for right this moment?” A healthy steady-state count tracks your scheduled workload; a count that climbs unexpectedly is the earliest sign of a runaway job or a forgotten ad-hoc warehouse left on.
| What it tracks | The number of virtual warehouses in the STARTED state for the selected period, read from the warehouse state surfaced by SHOW WAREHOUSES and the WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY view. |
| Data source | detail: Active Warehouses for the selected period. Drawn from the account’s warehouse state, not from a query count. |
| Time window | RT (real-time, refreshed on the live polling cycle). |
| Alert trigger | None configured by default. Pair with credit-burn cards for spend alerting. |
| Roles | owner, platform, SRE |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Snowflake account state. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the reconcile pointer below for the native check.What it tracks
Active Warehouses counts the virtual warehouses that are powered on and able to execute queries. In Snowflake, compute is decoupled from storage: each warehouse is an independent cluster of compute that you start, suspend, and resize on its own. A warehouse only bills credits while it is in theSTARTED state, so the count of active warehouses is a direct proxy for live compute spend. A warehouse with auto-suspend configured will drop out of this count after its idle timeout; one left running without auto-suspend, or held open by a long query, keeps counting. Read this card alongside Credits Burned (24h) and Idle Warehouse Credits Wasted (24h) to turn the count into a cost picture, and with Warehouse Saturation % to confirm the running warehouses are actually busy.
Reconcile against the source: run SHOW WAREHOUSES; in a Snowflake worksheet (or snowsql) and count rows where state = 'STARTED', or open Snowsight under Admin to Warehouses and read the running list. The Vortex IQ count should match the live state at poll time.