Why engineering teams choose Last9 vs SigNoz
Both have an AI assistant and an MCP server. Last9 runs its agent on your model provider, with no charge per investigation, inside your own cloud account, on one licence, and Last9 runs the platform for you. SigNoz is open source and OpenTelemetry-native: your team runs it free on ClickHouse, or buys SigNoz Cloud.
100+ native integrations, OpenTelemetry-first. A Last9 engineer runs the move with your team.
Named a Gartner® Cool Vendor in AI for SRE and Observability, cited for its unified telemetry platform.
The Last9 agent runs on your model provider, with no per-investigation charge, in your own cloud account.
No meter per GB or per metric sample, and no ClickHouse for your team to run. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill.
At a glance
Last9 vs SigNoz at a glance
The questions engineering teams ask when they compare the two.
Does it have an MCP server for coding agents?
Yes, hosted, since March 2025, for any MCP client. An agent can act through it: add drop rules and edit dashboards
Yes, open source for self-hosted installs, and hosted on SigNoz Cloud since May 2026. An agent can edit alerts, dashboards, saved views, and notification channels through it
What does the AI cost?
No per-query or per-investigation charge
Noz, the AI teammate, is free while in beta, on SigNoz Cloud. SigNoz has not published its price after beta
Can the AI use our model provider, in our own cloud?
Yes. The Last9 agent runs on your model provider or inference endpoint, and Last9 runs in your own cloud account
No documented option. Noz runs on SigNoz Cloud, and SigNoz publishes no way to point it at your own model provider
Who runs the storage, upgrades, and scaling?
Last9 does, in your own cloud account: it sizes the cluster, tunes it, and runs the upgrades
Your team, if self-hosted: ClickHouse, the collectors, and the schema migrations each upgrade runs. SigNoz Cloud runs it in SigNoz's own cloud
Can it run in our own cloud account?
Yes. Last9 runs in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you
Yes. BYOC, on Enterprise, runs SigNoz in your account, managed by SigNoz. A self-hosted install runs anywhere, without Noz
How is it priced?
One licence. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates
SigNoz Cloud meters logs and traces per GB and metrics per million samples, and users and hosts are unlimited. The community edition has no licence fee, and your team runs it
How much metric cardinality can I keep?
No hard limit. 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name
No published series limit, but SigNoz Cloud bills each metric sample, so every new label value adds to the bill. Volume Control, which aggregates labels at storage, is a private preview
Can I filter telemetry before I pay to store it?
Yes, for all three signals, from the UI or Terraform. Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest
In the collector config your team runs. Logs Pipelines in the UI run after ingest, so they do not reduce billed volume. SigNoz Cloud adds ingestion limits
Can we self-host it with no licence fee?
No. Last9 runs it for you, in your own cloud account
Yes. The core is open source, and the community edition is free to run on your own servers
| Capability | Last9 | SigNoz |
|---|---|---|
| Does it have an MCP server for coding agents? | Yes, hosted, since March 2025, for any MCP client. An agent can act through it: add drop rules and edit dashboards | Yes, open source for self-hosted installs, and hosted on SigNoz Cloud since May 2026. An agent can edit alerts, dashboards, saved views, and notification channels through it |
| What does the AI cost? | No per-query or per-investigation charge | Noz, the AI teammate, is free while in beta, on SigNoz Cloud. SigNoz has not published its price after beta |
| Can the AI use our model provider, in our own cloud? | Yes. The Last9 agent runs on your model provider or inference endpoint, and Last9 runs in your own cloud account | No documented option. Noz runs on SigNoz Cloud, and SigNoz publishes no way to point it at your own model provider |
| Who runs the storage, upgrades, and scaling? | Last9 does, in your own cloud account: it sizes the cluster, tunes it, and runs the upgrades | Your team, if self-hosted: ClickHouse, the collectors, and the schema migrations each upgrade runs. SigNoz Cloud runs it in SigNoz's own cloud |
| Can it run in our own cloud account? | Yes. Last9 runs in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you | Yes. BYOC, on Enterprise, runs SigNoz in your account, managed by SigNoz. A self-hosted install runs anywhere, without Noz |
| How is it priced? | One licence. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates | SigNoz Cloud meters logs and traces per GB and metrics per million samples, and users and hosts are unlimited. The community edition has no licence fee, and your team runs it |
| How much metric cardinality can I keep? | No hard limit. 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name | No published series limit, but SigNoz Cloud bills each metric sample, so every new label value adds to the bill. Volume Control, which aggregates labels at storage, is a private preview |
| Can I filter telemetry before I pay to store it? | Yes, for all three signals, from the UI or Terraform. Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest | In the collector config your team runs. Logs Pipelines in the UI run after ingest, so they do not reduce billed volume. SigNoz Cloud adds ingestion limits |
| Can we self-host it with no licence fee? | No. Last9 runs it for you, in your own cloud account | Yes. The core is open source, and the community edition is free to run on your own servers |
Differences
Where Last9 and SigNoz differ
Three places the two platforms take a different approach, with the tradeoffs stated.
AI on your model, in your cloud
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One assistant in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE through MCP. It investigates, builds a diagnosis dashboard, and hands you the link.
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The production agent, Last9, responds to pages with context from Slack, Linear, and PagerDuty. It runs on your model provider or inference endpoint and picks the model for each step. Customer data is never used for training.
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Through MCP, an agent adds a drop rule and stops ingesting the noisy source it found.
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Click a point on a chart, a table row, an alert, or an exception, and choose Ask Last9 AI. The investigation starts from that value, in its service context.
SigNoz
Noz, SigNoz's AI teammate, is in beta on SigNoz Cloud and free while in beta. It answers questions across logs, traces, and metrics, and creates dashboards, alerts, and views. The SigNoz MCP server is open source for self-hosted installs, hosted on SigNoz Cloud since May 2026, and can edit alerts, dashboards, saved views, and notification channels.
Managed in your cloud, with no ClickHouse to run
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Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you. Last9 sizes the cluster, tunes it, and runs the upgrades.
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One licence covers distributed tracing, profiling, custom metrics, custom dashboards, alerting, RBAC, and forward deployed engineers. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates.
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Support is a shared channel in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat, with forward deployed engineers who know your setup.
SigNoz
Self-hosted SigNoz runs on ClickHouse, and your team operates the database, the collectors, and the schema migrations each upgrade runs. SigNoz Cloud runs it in SigNoz's own cloud, and BYOC, on Enterprise, runs it in your account, managed by SigNoz.
Matters most for
Teams whose engineers spend on-call hours on ClickHouse, collectors, and upgrades.
Every label, and control at ingest
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Labels like customer_id or tenant stay on the metric. No hard limit. 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name.
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Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest, from the UI or as code with the Terraform provider. Every rule is previewed against live data before you save it.
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PromQL and LogQL natively, with a builder and plain-English Ask Mode for anyone who does not write queries. Your own Grafana can also query Last9 metrics as a Prometheus data source.
SigNoz
SigNoz Cloud bills metrics per million samples and publishes no series limit. Volume Control aggregates metric labels at storage, in private preview. Logs Pipelines run after ingest, so they do not reduce billed volume, and the filters that do live in the collector config your team runs.
Matters most for
Teams whose per-customer or per-tenant labels grow faster than their budget.
Which fits you
Which one fits your team?
Choose Last9 if
- You want a generally available AI agent on your own model provider, with no charge per investigation
- Your team spends on-call hours on ClickHouse, collectors, and upgrades, and wants the backend managed in your own cloud account
- Your metrics carry per-customer or per-tenant labels, and per-sample billing is the complaint
- You want to drop, remap, and aggregate all three signals at ingest, from one place
- You want an MCP server an agent can use to change what is ingested
Choose SigNoz if
- You want open source, and to run everything yourself with no licence fee
- Your team has the time to run ClickHouse and the collectors
- Your team writes ClickHouse SQL against its telemetry
- You want an MCP server and LLM monitoring on a self-hosted install
Migration
Moving off SigNoz
What the switch involves, and what Last9 does for you.
Forward deployed engineers
A Last9 engineer runs the move with your team.
Talk to an engineerKeep your instrumentation
SigNoz is OpenTelemetry-native, so services already sending OTLP need only a new endpoint. Nothing is re-instrumented.
See the integrationsQueries without ClickHouse SQL
PromQL metric queries carry over. The Last9 agent moves your dashboards and alerts with your team, and rewrites ClickHouse SQL and SigNoz search queries in PromQL or LogQL. Anyone who does not write queries uses the builder or plain-English Ask Mode.
Run both
Keep self-hosted SigNoz where a free install fits, such as development and staging, and move production services to Last9. The OpenTelemetry Collector can send the same data to both while you compare them on your own incidents.
Objections
The objections we hear most
Each one is a fair reason to hesitate.
SigNoz already has Noz and an MCP server. Why switch for AI?
The difference is the price, the model, and where it runs. Noz is in beta on SigNoz Cloud, and SigNoz has not published its price after beta. The Last9 agent is generally available, runs on your model provider in your own cloud account, and has no per-investigation charge. Through MCP, an agent can also add drop rules and change what is ingested.
SigNoz is open source and free to self-host.
The community edition has no licence fee. The cost moves to the infrastructure and to the engineers who run ClickHouse, the collectors, and each upgrade. Last9 runs in your own cloud account, manages it for you, and bills one licence.
SigNoz has a bring-your-own-cloud plan too.
SigNoz BYOC is on Enterprise, managed by SigNoz, and Noz is documented on SigNoz Cloud. Last9 runs the whole platform in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, including the AI agent on your model provider.
SigNoz Cloud publishes its prices, with users and hosts unlimited.
Its meters stay: logs and traces bill per GB, and metrics per million samples, so each new label value adds to the bill. Last9 is one licence, with no charge per label or metric name, and the infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill.
Is Last9 proven at our scale?
Last9 regularly handles 500M+ events a minute and 60M+ concurrent users, and has monitored 12 of the world's 20 largest streaming events. It is SOC 2 Type II certified and PCI ready, with SSO and access controls. Teams across fintech, healthcare, gaming, media, and commerce run it in production, including Replit, Pine Labs, Tata 1mg, and Housing.com.
67%
Average reduction in observability costs
2.5x
More telemetry retained without sampling
100+
Native integrations, OpenTelemetry-first
24x7
Support from forward deployed engineers
Customers
What do Last9 customers say?
With Last9, we just eliminated the toil. No more worrying about failing dashboards or alerts — we can finally use our metrics. It just works.
Last9 allowed us to offload the operational overhead of scaling so we could focus on business alerting rather than infrastructure management.
Frequently asked questions
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