Edited for length, never for tone. We send these to people we worked with, ask them to be honest, and publish what comes back. The grumpy ones are usually our favourites.
Our pager volume went from forty-something pages a week to nine. The first time I slept through a Wednesday night without my phone buzzing, I thought we'd broken the alerting. We hadn't. That's the system working.
They told us up front they wouldn't build a feature we asked for. They said it was the wrong feature. They were right. I'm still mildly annoyed about it.
The collector is 3.4 megabytes. Our previous agent was 38. That number alone bought us six weeks of legal review back from procurement.
Their postmortem on a 19-second outage was longer and more honest than any of our own postmortems on multi-hour outages. We started copying their format.
Devon walked into our datacentre on a Saturday at 6 a.m. with two laptops and a thermos of coffee. Nine hours later we had telemetry from every site east of Thunder Bay. I am not sure I have seen that work ethic since.
Asked for a discount in year two. They said no, gave us a six-month roadmap instead, and shipped four of the six items early. Renewal was easy.
The console is almost suspiciously quiet. The first week I kept reloading it because I assumed something was broken. Then it caught a failing capacitor in a kiosk in Charlottetown and I stopped doubting.
We don't pay for reviews. We don't run a referral program. The strongest signal we get is when an engineer leaves a customer, joins a new fleet, and quietly emails us six months later asking if we'll deploy at the new place too.
We'll introduce you to whichever current customer most resembles your fleet — credit union, telematics, retail kiosks, regional ISP. They will tell you the unvarnished version. We'll buy the coffee.