How it runs
Monday to Friday. Report on the desk by 3pm Friday.
The five days below describe a Starter sprint. Growth (two weeks) and Scale (three weeks) scale the depth — more scans, more accounts, more workshop time — not the shape. Enterprise is scoped separately.
Pre-work
Read-access, provisioned
You provision a Snowflake monitoring role — we help. No production access, no row-level data ever leaves your account.
Day 1
Full-environment scan
Every axis runs. Findings surface. The consultant reads the raw output and starts the triage.
Day 2–3
Dollar-modelling and prioritisation
Each finding gets a monthly recoverable figure, an effort estimate, and a suggested owner. The story of the environment starts to write itself.
Day 4
Board-ready report
One-click generation, consultant review, narrative context added. What you hand to the client the next morning.
Day 5
Readout and roadmap
Ninety-minute workshop. Walk the findings. Assign owners. Agree the next thirty, sixty and ninety days. Book the follow-up if there is one.
Optional retainer discussed here — you don't have to decide on the call.
The scan
Every axis, in one pass.
Aperture runs each of these against your account's metadata and query history. No production data is read; nothing leaves your account beyond the aggregated findings the consultant compiles into the report.
Cost & usage
Warehouse map, credit consumption, spend anomalies, storage cost, time-travel bloat, per-team attribution. Every finding carries a dollar figure.
Security posture
MFA coverage, over-privileged roles, network policies, PII exposure, access anomalies, dormant users. Evidence in the shape a compliance auditor expects.
Data freshness
Table-level freshness signals, pipelines with broken cadence, stale dependencies, and the downstream reports that quietly went wrong.
Data usefulness
Bytes read per table over 30, 60 and 90 days. Which tables have zero consumers. Which storage cost is paying for data nobody looks at.
Findings synthesis
All four axes rolled up into a prioritised, dollar-attached, owner-assignable action list. Delta view across scans. A grade per axis.
Friday afternoon
What you have when the sprint closes.
Environment scorecard
A single page with a letter grade per axis, the year-to-date dollars recovered, and the trend arrows. What a CFO reads in ninety seconds.
Board-ready audit report
Twenty pages, branded, editable, ready to hand to your board without translation. Nothing on it is a screenshot of a dashboard.
Prioritised findings list
Every finding has a dollar figure, an effort estimate, and a slot for an owner. It is an action list, not a diagnosis.
Ninety-day remediation roadmap
Sequenced by dollar impact and dependency. Written so somebody who wasn't in the workshop can still act on it.
What you do
About four hours across the week.
We do the work; you do the parts only you can. Roughly:
- Provision a Snowflake monitoring role — we send the SQL, your DBA runs it. About 30 minutes.
- One kick-off call, 30 minutes, on Monday morning.
- Review the draft report on Day 4 — usually 60 minutes with the data lead.
- The 90-minute readout workshop on Friday.
- Optional: introductions to any team members whose input we need for a specific finding.
See a sample
A redacted sample report is available on request.
We don't publish sample PDFs — clients' environments are identifiable even in redacted form. Ask on the discovery call and we'll walk you through a real one on-screen, then share a fully-anonymised PDF the same day.