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Troubleshooting Snowflake collector issues

Collector runtime and troubleshooting

The catalog collector may run in several seconds to many minutes depending on the size and complexity of the system being crawled.

  • If the catalog collector runs without issues, you should see no output on the terminal, but a new file that matching *.dwec.ttl should be in the directory you specified for the output.

  • If there was an issue connecting or running the catalog collector, there will be either a stack trace or a *.log file. Both of those can be sent to support to investigate if the errors are not clear.

A list of common issues and problems encountered when running the collectors is available here.

Issue 1: Access denied error occurs

The following eror message is observed in the error logs: WARN: Access to the snowflake.account_usage database/schema is denied. To harvest Snowflake tag, policy, and/or table usage information into the catalog, use a role with adequate permissions (current role is X).

  • Cause: To harvest policies, tags, and table usage, the role that the collector uses must have READ access to the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema in the SNOWFLAKE database. The role the collector uses does not have permissions to the Snowflake database.

  • Solution: Run the recommended statement to grant permissions to the Snowflake database.

Issue 2: Some tables, views, or other database objects are not harvested

  • Description: The account and role used to run the collector does not have permissions to a specific table.

  • Solution: Run the following query to check that the account and its role used for the collector has permissions to the specific table.

    select PRIVILEGE_TYPE from <database name>.information_schema.table_privileges
WHERE table_name='<table name>';

Issue 3: Collector takes a long time to complete the run

  • Description: The collector takes a long time to complete the run.

  • Possible solutions:

    1. Increase the warehouse size in Snowflake.

    2. Reduce the target sample size (--target-sample-size parameter) for column statistics collection.

    3. Instead of running the collector for all schema, specify individual schemas (--schema parameter) to harvest from.

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