During the last two weeks I have had the opportunity to communicate with tech support for the Hostmonitor software. Keep in mind we have had this software testing our network infrastructure for 23 years in a row now. Most years, I have no reason to speak with Alex and the team, as the program just runs and runs and runs without any issues.
In the last two weeks, I had an issue with an SSH test to some older equipment in our organization. I sent the detailed info to Alex, and he had the software patch in place within a week. Keep in mind this was an issue on our side, not on the Hostmonitor side. But they still supported us in this aspect with new code that allows connection to this gear.
A second issue at our workplace had me running packet analyzers on the snmp output/input for Hostmonitor to/from our routers. I asked Alex (and the team) some questions about what I saw in the captures and discussed a possible opportunity to make the snmp polling more efficient (on snmpv3). Alex said he would put this on the ‘To Do’ list. Two weeks later he emailed to say he had the new code modification for this and asked us to try it out to see the results. We installed it over the weekend and saw excellent results from this new code regarding the snmpv3 testing we are performing.
This goes to show the level of commitment the Hostmonitor team has in making sure they provide excellent customer service to their clients. This is a large contrast to some of the other well-known network management vendors we have installed here (that other team members use). We have two unresolved software bugs in this other vendor software for several years now with no completion date. To say the Hostmonitor team is ahead of the other vendors in customer service is as understatement. The are not even in the same league.
I would highly recommend Hostmonitor to anyone who wants a high uptime, reliable, scalable, and functional monitoring solution. How is the uptime you ask? One of our production routers has an ACL counter with the number of snmp calls made from Hostmonitor since the last snmp engine reboot, and this counter is currently sitting at 1,036,778,858 snmp calls from the Hostmonitor server. That is over one billion (with a B) snmp calls. That speaks volumes to the stability and long term reliability of this system.