Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We needed SNMP monitoring for several clients and network devices. Auvik is for availability monitoring of network devices, like switches and routers. We also use it for monitoring CPU and a few other functions, but it's mainly just for the availability of our high-priority clients that require 24/7 alerts.

Our entire company uses Auvik, and it's deployed to customers willing to pay for it or customers of a certain size. The environments vary. Some of our clients are in education, government, and the private sector. Some clients have one massive site, but it's also used in companies with multiple branches around Australia. They range in size from 20 network devices to 2,000. We deploy it to any client who will buy it. Otherwise, we can't guarantee that we can monitor the network. Nearly 75 percent of our large customers have adopted it. Internally, about 90 staff members have access to Auvik. 

Auvik has enabled us to stay competitive with similarly sized managed service providers by allowing us to sell the latest products and services. Some customers have asked for Auvik by name, so it's great to be able to offer that. 

It has centralized and standardized our monitoring, making it much easier to deploy. Because of the cloud-based nature of the solution, we're more confident that we can receive alerts for critical network infrastructure 24/7 without constantly checking that systems are running. We're monitoring about 800 different points, so we need to have the ability to manage all our customers from one portal. The deployment method is consistent too, which is also vital.

Some of our customers had their own systems when they started doing business with us. SolarWinds was heavily used, but they weren't integrated into one management console before Auvik. It's hard to measure, but it reduced the time we spend on monitoring tasks by about 50 percent. It cuts down on network monitoring, setup, and adding devices. Overall, it has reduced that time by at least half. 

Auvik reduces a lot of repetitive, low-priority tasks. We can filter out alerts we don't want to see or customers who don't require 24/7 monitoring. It has made management much more straightforward. We have one team who manages the whole environment and people who receive the alerts at the end of that process and take action on the issue. It has dramatically reduced the workload of our 24/7 NOC team that manages network monitoring. It's almost like a set-and-forget solution where you have to do very little work once it's deployed.

I work remotely, so Auvik has been a game-changer. When combined with, say, a photograph of a rack, that network diagram makes it feel like we're there, and we have a much better understanding of how everything is laid out. It has helped us and integrates perfectly with our ticketing system; the alerting itself is just fantastic. Auvik has revolutionized how we do business because we can achieve much more remotely than before. In the past, we had to do site visits more often. It has dramatically reduced our on-site requirements.

Visibility is everything. We need to see what's up and down. It's critical for our business. It reduced the amount of time employees have to spend on tasks, so it allowed them to focus on other areas to improve the business or the customer's environment. It's made a considerable improvement in our availability. 

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date automatically, and the reporting is excellent. You can rely on Auvik as your asset management tool for the network. It can grab serial numbers, IP addresses, model numbers, and firmware. Auvik functions as an asset management tool for any equipment that can be managed by an SNMP.

Instead of doing a physical audit and collating multiple systems from various clients or one client across numerous sites, it's an instant automatic system that provides a device inventory 24/7. You don't need to gather all the data and create a report. You click a button, and it's there. Auvik has reduced our asset management tasks by at least 70 percent. It might be closer to 90 percent. Auvik has sped up our resolution time by reducing the time it takes for the ticket to get into the system and delivering all the details the engineer needs to resolve it. It has decreased the resolution time by at least 50 percent.

Auvik's cloud-based solution and past on-prem solutions we've used are almost incomparable. After you put the credentials into Auvik, it practically does the job for you. You're only dealing with a few network nodes, whereas you would have to consider VLAN, various network subnets, and several other factors when deploying an on-premise solution. You also required a server to run it and a server to do the reporting, so you save a lot of money from not having to deploy all those physical components.

Auvik seamlessly integrates with our ticketing system ConnectWise, which provides a basic alert via email. I also like how it automatically draws the network map and how you can easily filter by the alerts. If you click on the type of alert, it'll show you all the other alerts of that same type. 

I love the visualization. It makes it so much easier to feel like you're there on-site. Everything is remote these days, and I'm 100 percent remote, so I'm never on-site at the national clients. It's nice to see everything; I like how you can drill down. For example, if a switch or a router is down, you can see what other items are going to be affected. They change color to tell you if they're up or down, so I spend a lot of my time inside the map and searching for items. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for ease of monitoring and management. The interface is highly intuitive. I've seen a few other network mapping tools, and they never seem to work out well. It's miles ahead of its competitors.

I want to be able to customize the layout more in terms of showing the alert timeframes. For example, I would like to customize it to show all the alerts in the last three hours, six hours, etc. You should be able to customize it so that it shows you the most critical information. We don't need to see CPU usage. We only want to see the up and down time. It would be nice to filter out many of those metrics we don't use. 

We have been using Auvik for about 12 months.

Auvik's availability is as close to a hundred percent as you can get. I don't think I've seen an outage in 12 months.

Auvik is highly scalable. Our clients vary in size, ranging from small to medium-sized companies. 

I rate Auvik support 10 out of 10. I rarely contact support, but they're excellent when I need them. 

Positive

SolarWinds is another solution we've used. Switching to Auvik was about centralizing everything into one cloud-based tool. It wasn't a cost issue. Instead, it was more about getting a cloud-based solution. We try to use only cloud-based tools to work anywhere without a bunch of tools installed on a particular device. 

I wasn't involved in the deployment. The network operations center is responsible for Auvik. I'm not on that team. I'm on the proactive team who receives the alerts. 

As far as I know, Auvik requires practically no maintenance. The NOC team cross-references a customer's infrastructure with Auvik's reporting, and they periodically extract a report on devices that are uptime or devices that are used. I'm not involved with any daily maintenance apart from using it to investigate network issues.

The return is almost immeasurable. The most significant benefit is probably the reduction in the time it takes to deploy for a new customer versus installing another product or trying to use a customer's existing solution. One engineer dedicated to monitoring in a month is 160 hours, so you could probably say it's equivalent to saving the cost of one full-time engineer per month. 

You get what you pay for, and it's worth paying a little bit more for quality, a robust feature set, and high availability.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. Once you compare it to other products you've used in the past, it's an easy decision. If you want to simplify, centralize, and automate your monitoring alerts, Auvik is definitely worth the investment.

I work for an MSP, and what we do is work with different companies. We monitor all the networks. We have an integration with ConnectWise. We get to receive alerts directly to our ticketing system, and that is awesome. It saves us a lot of work. We don't have to have someone monitoring the networks 24/7. We receive the alerts in our queue and that expedites a lot of work.

The integration is the most important aspect of the solution. If it wasn't for the integration, we would have to have someone monitoring all those maps, all those locations, 24/7. However, with the integration, we see notifications directly to our ticket system, and that helps us a lot to streamline the workflow process. 

The fact that we get to see the whole network on a single pane of glass is great.  We have a map on our main screen, and we can see all the network devices and the end devices as well. It's very useful. 

It's easy to use. You can collapse things via buttons if you have too many devices visible on-screen. When you do that, it helps you see the bigger picture.

The interface is intuitive. I don't find it that difficult. 

We gain a real-time image of the network. 

Our team was able to realize the benefits of the solution pretty much right away. As soon as I was provided access, I was able to see if there were any failure points, and I could deal with them immediately. It's been a game-changer. 

The product has helped decrease our mean time to resolution. I have the option to access any network device if we have the credentials. It saves us a lot of time. I also do not have to have someone on-site. It helps expedite things.

We're able to spend less time on maintenance, setup, and issue resolution. 

It's not 100% user-friendly. However, it does offer a good balance. Still, if I wanted to add or change something, I'd have to think about how to do that.

It should be easier to see Mac addresses. I'd like to be able to see every Mac address of every device by just one-clicking on it.

I've been using the solution for seven months. 

The solution is generally stable. I've never experienced any crashes. 

The scalability is good. If you need to monitor more locations, it's pretty simple. 

I've never reached out to technical support in the past. 

I haven't previously used any other solution. 

The initial deployment is very easy. There's a step-by-step process that pretty much guides you through. We did have to do a few integrations before going fully operational. It took around 30 minutes to create a site integrated with ConnectWise and have the other connector up and running. 

We don't need maintenancevv on our end. The only maintenance happens when a device becomes disconnected. Then we would need to go and see what's going on. 

For this deployment, or whenever we are building up a new location, either myself or one of my co-workers, and someone on-site can handle the implementation. 

We had documentation in regards to integration with ConnectWise. I don't know if we had any other outside help. 

I don't have any visibility on the pricing. 

We're an MSP.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

There is a lot of documentation on the website, from my understanding, and it is very useful to navigate all that documentation before getting started. I'd advise new users to just try to get as informed as possible before starting to use the product.

Auvik's time-saving features allow us to focus more on critical projects and business initiatives, particularly during our company's renewal phase. Instead of spending time on setup, maintenance, or issue resolution, we can now dedicate our efforts to developing new solutions for managing our next-generation infrastructure, which is crucial in the telecommunications industry.

In terms of improvement, while the network map and dashboards are generally easy to use, the NetFlow app can be a bit compressed and difficult to customize for better readability.

I have been using Auvik for a couple of weeks now. We initially tried out their trial and found their network management features promising, so we decided to subscribe for a month. Since our network infrastructure has grown organically over time, we need a clearer picture before implementing any updates. Auvik is helping us understand our network better.

Auvik's support has been excellent right from the trial phase. Even though we were only at tier one, they were very prompt and helpful. They even helped us solve some tricky configuration issues by granting them access to our dashboard. Their support team is top-notch and very capable. I would rate the support as a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before using Auvik, we tried Zabbix and PRTG for network monitoring, but they didn't provide the topology insights we needed. They focused more on receiving SNMP traps. Auvik stood out for its ability to give us a clear view of our network topology, which was our key requirement.

Setting up Auvik initially was a breeze and it took less than an hour. Whether you are installing it on a physical or virtual machine, the process is straightforward. I used a Docker release on my old Mac desktop and it ran smoothly right out of the box with just a few clicks.

I find Auvik's pricing to be a good value for the features offered. With the professional plan costing around $15.30 per month per device, it is affordable, considering you only pay for active devices like routers and switches. For us, considering our network costs around $400 per month, which we see as a worthwhile investment for the benefits it provides.

I find the Auvik user interface easy to use overall. However, one drawback is that once the network topology map is generated, it is a static view and you can't remove or rearrange devices. This makes it a bit cumbersome to navigate, especially for networks with multiple devices. Exporting the map as a PDF also maintains this static view, which isn't ideal. To work around this, we export the data to Excel and use other tools like draw.io or Visio to redesign the topology for better understanding.

I use Auvik's dashboards, and they generally provide a real-time picture of our network, which is quite accurate. However, there can be some false positives, especially with older devices. The dashboards help understand overall network health. 

Auvik offers free monitoring for all devices except routers and firewalls. This includes devices like network-attached devices, PCs, and printers, making it cost-effective for monitoring a wide range of assets. Additionally, Auvik provides monitoring alerts for device issues, such as low printer paper, adding value beyond just network monitoring.

Overall, I would rate Auvik as a ten out of ten.

We use Auvik for monitoring networks across all of our sites for alerts, reporting, configuration backups, and troubleshooting. Auvik does a little bit of everything when it comes to networking.

I'm not the only person that utilizes Auvik, but I'm the only network engineer. The infrastructure team uses it for server monitoring. Security guys can also access it, but I'm the primary caretaker.

I monitor 34 sites with 200 managed devices, and about another hundred are unmanaged. Altogether, I have over 2,600 devices that are not networked. If you subtract the network from that, it's about 2,300 devices that aren't network devices, including printers, servers, and computers. Auvik crawls and finds those kinds of things on the network. That's what I mean by total picture.

I previously used SolarWinds, which I call a Swiss Army knife of network monitoring systems. SolarWinds is great. It does many things, but it's gotten too bloated and slow. It's not as intuitive as Auvik. SolarWinds didn't do mapping on its own, and the mapping provided was kind of clunky to get running because you have to manage the licensing and everything. Even after tweaking SolarWinds, I couldn't get the mapping capabilities Auvik gives me. 

Also, SolarWinds wasn't a one-stop shop. Auvik is the closest I've gotten to a single pane of glass. It's hard to judge whether Auvik has saved time over SolarWinds after two months because I'm still doing some slight tweaks. It took me months to get SolarWinds the way we need it here. Auvik is still a pretty new product for us. Though it's meeting our basic needs, I'm the kind of guy who likes to squeeze every bit of juice out of my fruit.

The out-of-the-box alerts were pretty on-point, so I've only had to create two alerts on my own. The reporting is easy to access, so pulling reports is more straightforward. That saves time. 

Also, I don't need to add devices to Auvik. It automatically crawls, finds them, and puts them in the inventory. I don't have to go back and draw maps. Auvik does that. Mapping in SolarWinds requires their map tool, a separate product you must install on the server itself. Drawing maps on that was painful. Discovery isn't something I need to do anymore. When I added five new devices to a site, it found them all and brought them into inventory. I didn't have to do that.

Auvik automatically keeps the device inventories updated. I'm shutting down SolarWinds this week. On Friday, I did my final inventory comparing SolarWinds and Auvik. I have not been updating SolarWinds, and Auvik has about 20 more devices on the network side alone because I don't have to go back through and update the inventory. It'll pull it in itself. When something is added, I get an alert saying the new device has been added to the network.

Auvik has sped up my resolution time because you can drill down in Auvik and look at the net flow information faster. The alerts also help, but if this is a data-driven event, I need to look at the net flow, which is much quicker. 

The monitoring and alerts are easy to use and set up. Discovery is the first step in monitoring, and that's a piece of cake with Auvik. It'll scan your networks once you get the credentials set up and automatically find newly added equipment as long as the same credentials are already on that gear. Auvik makes my job a lot easier. I don't have to keep going back to a monitoring system to add devices each time we bring something new. That part alone saves me time.

It's all intuitive and straightforward. The out-of-the-box alerts provided everything I needed, but I've made a couple of additional alerts. You can schedule maintenance windows in Auvik, and the solution won't send any alerts during that time. With other products, you have to turn off the alerts on each device if you don't set it up correctly. Ease of use is crucial because I'm the only network engineer at a company of 900, so I have many things to do. 

I have a single pane of glass. It's easier to go into one system where everything is easy to find. It's a one-stop-shop with everything you need instead of going into multiple products to get it done. I don't consider Auvik entirely cloud-based because you have collectors onsite. The portal for viewing your infrastructure is cloud-based. You don't need to get into a VPN or anything like that to get to it. It's two-factor authentication, so it's a little harder for bad actors to get to your data.

The ability to log in and run commands from the cloud is helpful. You can access a full command line on the device, so I don't need to VPN into the infrastructure, which helps when troubleshooting. It's also beneficial that it's not on-prem. If my leading site, where the on-prem solution is located, goes down, no place is being monitored. As long as the internet connection is up and the collector is running, all my sites are being monitored.

The mapping automatically finds all the interfaces but tags some of them incorrectly. For instance, if it can't find how a CPU interface is connected, it will use the MAC address last seen on the router and sometimes attribute cloud-connected devices to the route, but it's not actually there. That's not a true connection.

It isn't going to the cloud. It's going directly back to the router. I've talked to Auvik support about that already. They're looking into it. Overall, mapping could be a little better. Though they do a great job, there's still room for improvement. It's 100% accurate for some sites but only 90% for others. It gives you a complete view of how things are connected for the most part. Auvik still struggles with wireless bridges and things of that nature. However, Auvik isn't the only product missing that, and there is a simple way to make those connections myself.

I did a couple of trials with Auvik, but we've officially been using the solution for about three months now.

I'm through my testing phase, and now that I'm in my third month using Auvik, I can say it's pretty stable. I had one issue with Syslog, but they fixed it. They made a change that caused an unforeseen issue in Syslog. They resolved the problem in the next release.

Auvik's scalability is pretty good. I'm monitoring 30-plus sites. I was running 30 of them off one collector, so the scalability is pretty good.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. 

Positive

SolarWinds does many of the same things, but Auvik has a different approach. If we have some networking event, we can find the problem machine in Auvik and see what it has been talking to a lot faster. 

Auvik is a little more agile. We can find things a little faster with Auvik than in SolarWinds. We don't need to dig as much. The graphical nature of the product makes it easier to navigate.

Deploying Auvik is very straightforward. I implemented it pretty much out of the box. When I had my customer success meetings with Auvik support, I had already done everything they told me to do. I'm experienced in setting up things, so I had it up and running by the time we met to review our technical onboarding.

I can onboard a small site in 10 minutes. Once you input credentials at the top level, it's only a matter of putting in subnets that you want scanned, waiting for them to be scanned, and verifying everything is there. It's about 10 minutes per site once your credentials are squared away.

Once that is ready, it takes Auvik an hour or so per site to stitch everything together. Much of it is on the backend because it makes all those maps and everything like that, which takes time. It has to pull in the data from SNMP and CDP. It looks at all the interfaces and stitches together maps, so it depends on how many collectors you have. It takes longer if you're running a couple of collectors for an entire enterprise because a few collectors are doing a lot of work.

It's much faster if you have a collector at every site. It's probably 15 to 20 minutes per site. I only used one collector when I started because I wanted to see how hard I could push it. It took much less time to set up than SolarWinds. The discovery is pretty simple for what you have to do from my end. As long as you have your credentials at the top level, you add a new site, throw in your subnets, and it finds them for you. 

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance after deployment. I wanted to stress test the collector to see what might break it. I had 30 sites on one collector at one time, but I decided to go back to the suggested implementation.

With a single collector on 30-plus sites, the daily tasks were completed, and we weren't close to using up the CPU or memory on this device—this wasn't a beefy server. It was built to their specs but not overly powerful. Once your collector runs, you don't need to do much with this product because the brains are in the cloud. If your collector goes down, bringing up a new one is a piece of cake.

It's apparent off the bat how much time I'm saving by doing tasks because of the ease of use. Once I got everything discovered, it was evident that I would save time by automatically drawing maps and keeping them updated. I immediately noticed that I would save time, and time is money. I always have several projects and no longer worry about my inventory because Auvik does this for me.

Once the devices are configured, and the collectors are installed, I don't need to add anything to the monitoring system or make sure the backups are there. Auvik grabs it for me.

It's worth the price, depending on how you use the product. Price is a significant component of any purchase; for me, it all goes back to visibility. I have more visibility into everything now than I had before. SolarWinds was on every node, and every interface had to be licensed. With Auvik, the cost could be the same or more depending on the level of visibility you want. The price and value vary according to your network infrastructure and the information you want.

If you want a complete picture of your entire network, then Auvik is a better choice. SolarWinds is a better option if you're only looking at network devices. I think Auvik's price per node is a tad high. That's probably my only knock against Auvik. Your network nodes are billable, including servers, printers, or other devices. You have visibility into those things as well. In other products, each one of those devices is a billable node, so Auvik gives us a little bit more visibility than we had before because now we have more devices in the system.

We looked at Entuity and Datadog. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I deduct a point for the mapping and reporting. I like everything else that Auvik does. The only aspect I don't like 100% is the mapping. Also, they have canned reports instead of a built-in report builder. You have to extract the data in Power BI or some other way. They have great pieces, but I can't customize them and create my own within their system.

We're an MSP, and we use it to manage our customers' networks.

The industries of our customers vary. They are from healthcare, manufacturing, finance, education, etc. It's mainly used to monitor switches, firewalls, ISP connections, and Wi-Fi, such as controllers, etc. It does do some additional monitoring on workstations and servers, but we don't rely on it for that. It's just not what their bread and butter is. So, even though it does that, we don't really focus on that.

We have an MSP portal for accessing all of the different customers. Auvik has an integration with ConnectWise which we never used. We just log in directly to the Auvik portal whenever we need something with Auvik, but they do offer an integration with ConnectWise that we don't take much advantage of.

Switching to Auvik has helped with two main parts. One of them is with time, but we also had difficulty accomplishing what we're now able to accomplish with Auvik. We had several applications that have been replaced by Auvik and several different panes of glass that are all now just in one place. Previously, sometimes, one of those panes of glass had an issue that we didn't find out about until we realized that we missed an alert that should have alerted us. With Auvik, there's the ease of deployment, the reliability, and the consolidation of everything together. That has been huge. It has saved hundreds of hours over six years.

It provides clear visibility into our customers' networks and reliability. I can't stress this enough, but reliability is so key for an MSP. If you're in-house, you have a lot of eyes and involvement in all the different systems, but when you're an MSP, there are many times when you're not going to touch or look at a system unless there's an issue. It may go months like that. For example, we had a switch that died at a customer. I had a level-one tech take down a replacement switch. I logged into Auvik, pulled the configs that were running on the machine, and sent them over to him. He terminaled into the new switch, pasted in the full config, and the customer was back up and running. My tech was on-site for about an hour or less, which included taking out the old switch, moving everything over to the new switch, and programming the new switch. That's incredible. We saved our customer's downtime. We saved ourselves working time on this issue. It was also easy. It was a breeze.

Planning new projects is a breeze now because we have one place we go to. We see all the current network configs. If we're doing a switch upgrade, we see every port that's used on the switch. We see exactly which VLANs are assigned on each port. We see all the configs very easily on all different switches. We can filter on the network map by device type. If there's an issue where one machine is not connecting, we can easily trace which switch it's plugged into. We can trace which uplink it's supposed to go to. We can trace it all the way back to the data center, and very easily, we can track down where the issue is. I rave about Auvik.

It has absolutely helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. We had to install several different platforms and configure several different platforms for each customer. Now, it's one software that we have to install. We do some basic configuration and enter unique credentials. We just configure it once, and it applies to every single customer. It has significantly helped in that regard.

We're not a global company. We're just a national company, but it has helped with the visibility into every one of our customers' networks. It's a total game-changer. It was something that was a significant struggle, which we had ironed out. We had a system that was functional, but it wasn't the best system in place. Auvik has been a game-changer.

Its automation had an effect on our IT team’s availability. They're not as busy with it. They don't need to check up on it as much. When there is an alert, it's very quick and easy to verify, remediate, and check if it is a false positive. We get to know:

• What exactly was the issue?
• Do we have a real issue on our hands?
• What are we going to do about it?
• What's the plan of action?

It has cut our time dealing with a network issue. Now, we probably spend between 20% to 30% of our time, or even less than that, dealing with any network issues. Similarly, it has cut the time by 20% to 30% when it comes to checking on the alerts to see what's going on. Previously, we would've spent a lot more time on that, but now, it's so much easier to remediate an issue that we spend 20% less time on it. Something that would've taken a whole day now literally takes an hour and a half. The whole thing is remediated.

We've been able to significantly cut down on the amount of network expertise required because we don't need every level-two tech to be able to understand the networks, configure the tools, and troubleshoot if something didn't quite work. We cut that down significantly. We just have a couple of people who are network experts, and they are able to handle the full load of what's going on because of the access and the visibility that they get.

It helps us to keep track of the devices that each customer has. There is an incredible export feature using which you can export all the information into a spreadsheet. It does a very nice job on that.

The network map is fantastic. The backup of configs is also valuable. It does SSH into each network device and retains a copy of the configs on the machines as well as the change logs. So, when something suddenly stops, you can compare the configs to see what happened. You can do a side-by-side comparison of the configs to see exactly what changed. That's fantastic. The alerting is great. We get email alerts from them. Those are my favorite features.

It's incredibly easy considering the power and the capabilities that it has. For a tool that can do this much, it's crazy how easy it's to set up and manage. There are some very powerful tools out there, but they also take a lot of configuration, tweaking, and setup. Auvik is quick. It's a breeze. I can have level-one techs setting up a lot of things. I can script out the deployments, and it's done with a few clicks. We can get it up and running, go into the customer's tenant, and just have whoever's setting up the different devices enter the credentials into the portal, and it runs. It's great. This is one of the best MSP tools that I've used. When I factor in the ease of use, the power and capabilities that it has, and just how useful it is, it wouldn't be an exaggeration at all to say this is the best overall MSP tool that I've used. Its ease of use is critical. One of the biggest things with running an MSP team is to make sure that your team can easily use the tool without needing to have a ton of training. That's what MSPs are all about. We can occasionally have a complex tool, but then there's going to be a limited number of people who are familiar with it, which is going to limit our ability to manage it. It's huge for an MSP to be able to have a tool that a tech can use with minimal training.

I didn't find the UI, especially for the network maps, to be so intuitive. Navigating the network map was not so intuitive. It has been awesome for visualizing the network mapping/topology, but it took me a little bit of time to get a hang of how to use their network filter interface. It's not complex. It's just a user interface issue where you realize, "Oh, okay. That's where that button is." It took me a little bit of time to get the hang of that, but that was years ago. It's not complicated. It's just that I wasn't expecting a couple of UI items to be there, but once I realized where they were, it worked great. So, once you know where what you're looking for is, it's just amazing. It's user-friendly. It doesn't have a steep learning curve. Its learning curve is similar to or smaller than any new software that you're adopting. There is a little bit of a learning curve, not super steep. 

We use a lot of Aruba networking products. I know that over the year and a half or two years, they've significantly improved their integration with Aruba products. They can just improve it a little bit more. 

For the last year and a half or so, I've had other people doing a lot of R&D. So, I know that they've come up with a lot of improvements. I felt that for a while, a lot of the improvements weren't things that we cared about. It was good to see that the company is continually trying to grow, expand, and improve its product, but we didn't really feel a lot of improvement. 

We have a few other networking tools. Some of them are specifically for managing Wi-Fi. They have some great features where they give specific recommendations based on the network traffic they're seeing and based on other customers that have had similar issues, or even just by looking at your own data that they're gathering. They give AI-based recommendations on how to improve the network. Auvik could have something like that. It gives us excellent visibility into the network, but if there is a way to include some remediation tips that are digestible by level-one and level-two techs, that would be great. That would be a huge benefit because we still need our level-three network engineers to look into any real network issue. A lot of times, it does feel like this is something that could have been understood by an AI. It could have been an alert such as:

• There's a network loop here.
• We are detecting this device has a mismatched VLAN or something like that. Do you want to look into this?
• Can you confirm that this is the appropriate config, or should it be changed? 

Some sort of remediation-based focus would be awesome. They could just expand the feature set to things that would help us further. These are the things that we would care about.

I have been using Auvik for about six years.

It has been great. I have zero complaints about it. They notify you if there are upgrades that are taking place. The notification is very good. It has been very smooth and very good.

It has been so easy. Once we have the software configured, it's more or less copy-paste for every additional customer that we add. Of course, there are some things, such as credentials, that are unique to each environment, but that's it.

The number of end users that are affected by Auvik could be up to 7,000.

Their support is very good. They also have pretty good documentation. They're easily available by chat and pretty knowledgeable. Every time I've had to reach out to them, it was a pretty smooth experience. I hope it stays that way. I feel that so many companies start off like that, but then a couple of years later, you can barely get through to anyone. It has been great so far, and I hope it stays that way. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. I have no complaints at all. 

Positive

We previously used different solutions, but they weren't direct competitors to this. It was more like we had to cobble things together and through ConnectWise or some other tool, set up our own ping service that would run and then alert us if it doesn't check in for X amount of time to see if the network is down. We had a different solution that would take backups of the configs, but it wasn't a live solution. It wasn't that we had a direct network monitoring competitor that we used. We had to use several other solutions out there to make up for all the different functionalities that Auvik now provides.

It was straightforward. It did take some time, as you would expect for a tool with such power and capabilities. It took some time, like every such tool would take, but overall, it was probably less than what you would expect considering what the capabilities are. So, it was straightforward and simple. It wasn't complicated. It didn't take a lot. You spend an hour on the phone with them. They'll walk you through all the different places where you'll configure everything. If you compare it to ConnectWise's RMM, ConnectWise's RMM is probably five times or even more complicated than this. You need an expert for that, whereas you don't need to hire an expert to handle Auvik. You can handle it all on your own.

We implemented it on our own. We had just one person for deployment. It started to be implemented several months before I took over, and there was just one person. When he left, I took over the full management and handling of the configuration of the tool. Since then, I've delegated it to another person, and he just handles it himself. He checks with me occasionally if there's something he is unsure about, but that's been almost nonexistent. One person should be enough to configure it for a bunch of places.

In terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight. It rarely needs tweaking.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. We have also seen a significant reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). It's one of my favorite tools. When I go to trade shows and talk to people, I feel that it's just the easiest sell because it's so easy. There's no, "Oh, well, you have to choose which features you want, and we like this." I literally have so little to quibble about with this.

It was worth every penny that we paid for it. It's not necessarily the cheapest. I don't know what its current price is. I haven't been involved in the pricing part of it for a couple of years. I know that a couple of years ago, it was a bit pricey, but it saved us many times over the cost that we were paying for it.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that I understand the initial concern, but just look into it and do the math on how much money this can save you. It's a drop in the bucket.

I wasn't the one who researched it originally. The director of IT started implementing Auvik about six months before he left, and then I took over. I did look into a bunch of other ones because I always keep an eye on the market and what the vendors are offering. Occasionally, we have to change our solutions. So, we're always looking to see what fits our needs the best. In six years, I haven't found anything that has made me seriously think twice about swapping it out for Auvik.

To someone who is just starting out with Auvik, I would advise having a plan of what you want to accomplish with Auvik so that you can configure it properly right off the bat. You should know what you want to accomplish, what type of alerts you want, and what type of things you care about. It'll make your life so much easier because you can then just go and configure it very easily, instead of trying to figure out what you're trying to do while configuring it, which was some of what we did. We didn't quite know what it was capable of, how reliable it was, and how much we wanted to move the functionality over to Auvik versus using the current system. Once we did get past that point of having a clear idea of what we wanted from Auvik, everything was a breeze.

It has been such a game-changer in our network management. I can go on and on. It's one of the most awesome, incredible tools that I recommend to everybody. I have not seen any other competitor tool that even comes close to what they do. To me, it's just a no-brainer. Especially if you're an MSP, or if you have a complex network to manage, just get Auvik. It's going to make your life so much easier.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It's one of my favorite MSP tools to use and talk about. It's incredible.

As an MSP, we monitor all of our clients with Auvik, specifically to monitor their network devices and connectivity, and to generate tickets. We also use it to back up configs for network devices, and it's where we get warranty information since we deal with life cycle management.

We can even push changes to devices through the terminal. Anytime there's a disaster, it's the first thing that we'll go to, to see what may be down or what may be inoperable. It's a really quick way of seeing what may be broken in a network. That's really handy. It's our network monitoring management go-to.

The configuration management has been a godsend. Every time something goes down, we don't have to worry about how it was configured. We're also getting alerts a lot faster. We have an RMM platform that's monitoring things, but it's a little slower to give us alerts and to give us data. Auvik is a lot faster and that's been really valuable. Both the configuration management and alerts are aspects of automation that result in less manual, repetitive effort.

If we're not wasting time checking configs and pushing documentation or mapping devices in a topology, that's time that we get back to do other things. The whole time I've worked here, we've had Auvik, so I don't really know this world without Auvik. But at my last MSP, those things took up a considerable amount of time, five to seven hours a week for me, at least, and probably the same for others. So it would be a considerable amount of time savings.

It also builds topologies automatically, so we don't have to go through Visio and hand-sketch something for every client. That would take a tremendous amount of time. Auvik does that for us and keeps it up to date every day.

And for what it does, Auvik gives us a single, integrated platform. Auvik is our source of truth for all network devices. We don't have anything else that overlaps with it. The amount of time it saves us is incalculable. If we were having to do this on different tools, or if we were having to manage things manually, it would take up a significant amount of our time. Not that managing things with Auvik doesn't take up a lot of time already, but it would take a lot more.

It is unified, automated and it's pretty concise. You don't have to dig around a lot to get to what you need, and that's really important. I was listening to one of the TruMethods guys and he was just talking about how many clicks it takes to get from your question to your answer. Auvik has a pretty concise depth to it.

Also, because we can drill into any one of our clients or any one site and get a very quick overview of what's going on, our team has good visibility into our networks. When a disaster happens, that visibility is crucial because it gives us a fast response time and faster mediation, which our clients love. Day-to-day, it can be important or not, but certainly, when everything's on fire, Auvik can be a real lifesaver.

We have virtual CIOs on our team who work with our clients and the fact that Auvik keeps device inventories up to date is invaluable for them. They can pull up warranty information and start plotting life cycle changes and let the client know, "Hey, we've got to replace all these devices over the next number of years." Having that data in a nice easy report saves a tremendous amount of time. And all of that information gets put into IT Glue, so we can easily search it or run reports from there on it.

As a result, we can communicate better with our clients. You don't want to just go to your client and say, "Hey, we need $50,000 so we can upgrade your equipment." What you want to do is say, "Hey, look at this report. Look at how old your stuff is. This is our plan for the next four quarters and how we're going to spend $50,000." That is gold. And delegating tasks to junior technicians is usually around procurement and projects to replace that equipment. That also wouldn't happen without that reporting.

In addition, having the device inventories up to date definitely saves us time. We don't have to wonder if something is still onsite or in the environment. It has a green check beside it so we know Auvik is checking in and we know it's online.

Another benefit is that it has helped us in reducing our resolution time by something like 15 percent.

The configuration management is the most valuable feature. I worked at an MSP before where they didn't have something collecting network device configurations. It was basically up to the technician who did it last, and you never knew if they saved a copy or not. Auvik makes that a lot more automated so we don't have to worry, if a device dies, that we don't know how it was configured. That's my favorite feature.

Ease of use is paramount for our organization. We have 15 technicians and everybody has to be able to get in there and work consistently. If it's not easy and we have to come up with all these rules on how to use it, there is a lot of room for people to make mistakes.

Auvik's network visualization is pretty intuitive. There's a legend right there and you can hover over any of those lines and it will give you the breakdown of the information. You can even click on any part of it and it takes you right to the device.

We have some clients that are rather large and the topology display can be a little bit of a mess. For smaller organizations, Auvik is perfect. You have your firewall, it connects to your switch, it connects to your LAN, it connects to your clients, and you're done. But for some of our larger clients, the topology view is almost unusable. I don't really know how to solve that. I don't know if you can.

I would like to see a better IT Glue integration in Auvik. With most platforms, when they dump something into IT Glue, it just shows up as a configuration. That is somewhat helpful, but it's not as robust as it would be if it filled in a flex asset for network details, or if it took that topology view and somehow pushed that into IT Glue as an image, for example. We try to treat IT Glue as our source of truth for documentation, and the better integration we can get from Auvik into IT Glue, the more we don't have to go logging in to everything to check everything.

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

I get emails frequently about service interruptions, et cetera, but I don't experience them very often. I think a few weeks ago we had some collectors that started flaking out, but I'd seen the email, so I knew it wasn't a big deal. I do get those emails regularly, so it seems that they have problems frequently, but I don't experience them very often. Are they shooting themselves in the foot by letting me know? Probably. But at least they're being transparent.

The amount of effort it takes to set up one client, when you have one client, is the exact amount of work it's going to take to set up one client when you have 100 clients. In that sense, it doesn't scale with the number of clients, but it's certainly much more scalable than doing it all manually.

We deploy it to every one of our 50 clients and about 2,200 endpoints, and that includes computers. We have configured every switch and firewall and WAP that we possibly can in Auvik for management. 

All of our technicians have access to it. Support uses it to troubleshoot network problems and our technical alignment team uses it to review standardizations. Our centralized services team uses it to make sure that we're backing up configs and that the devices are working correctly. BCIO will use it for life cycle management and phasing devices in and out. We deploy it to all of our clients because the value makes it worth it.

I haven't had to use tech support very much. It's a pretty intuitive application. But the times I have had to contact them, I have usually done so with the chat so I can do other stuff. They always send me a knowledge base article and stick with me to make sure everything's working correctly. I have no complaints. It's been smooth.

Positive

The only "solution" I used previously was "sweat equity." You can rely on Auvik a lot more. It takes some of the human error out of the equation. I can be forgetful, so I assume most people are. You can't be 100 percent all of the time, but Auvik can get a lot closer. It's a lot more reliable.

If you have a lot of clients already, there can be a lot of work to get everything into Auvik and fully turning. That being said, you can drop a collector and start discovering network devices really fast. When we onboard a client, I'll drop a collector and let it start scanning and then I'll go do something else. I'll come back 10 minutes later and it has a fully populated network scan. So you can get up and running pretty quickly with just the bare bones.

But to really get a lot of the benefit out of it could take some work to get all your clients in there and get everything integrated. You do have to touch every device and configure it to point to the collector or put in the right community string. There can be a little ramp-up time, but it's worth it.

We have a lot of problems with licensing in many other solutions, but I've never run into a problem with Auvik licensing. That's a pretty good vote of confidence.

When comparing network monitoring solutions, if the concern is pricing, you need to factor in how much time the different solutions could potentially provide. If you can save 10 percent with this one and 40 percent with that one, but the last one costs a lot more, your time is valuable. You have to assess just how much easier it will be knowing you don't have to worry about something and how much more you can focus on other things. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis. 

Some of our clients are co-managed. They have technicians onsite who work for them and they work with us. One thing we do is give them access to Auvik and they just go crazy. They say, "Man, look at all these cool tools. You mean we get to have access to this?" Just being able to tunnel straight into a device within the Auvik portal saves a lot of time. I don't know if every network monitoring tool in that class can do that. There are a lot of features within Auvik that may not be present in others.

It is about as easy as any other SNMP monitor when it comes to monitoring and management functions. Sometimes, it can get a little tricky to get stuff logged in and connected to the collector, but that's not on Auvik. That's just authentication and networks.

We've used Auvik to generate tickets to alert technicians to go and set up SNMP or to look at a particular alert. That's not really what we use it for, but we've gotten some benefit from that in the past. It's not crucial, but we've saved some time with it.

Every solution requires maintenance, even if it's just checking in and making sure things are working. But I don't think there are a lot of things that break that we have to fix, unless it's something that we've broken, like changing a password or changing a community string. The agents that we deploy are usually pretty solid. I don't recall having to reinstall an agent recently. So it doesn't require a lot of maintenance. It's mostly just the setup time to get everything integrated and get everything working.

We use Auvik to monitor configurations, devices, and discovery.

Our staff has a much easier time managing devices, networks, and configurations. We're in the middle of a project involving a full-blown switch replacement. There are about 80 switches, and we can grab configurations quickly and easily. Our staff doesn't have to worry about configuration backups or look in 10 different places for logins to hit a switch or firewall. Auvik discovers rogue devices that happen to be on the network, which saves us time and stress. It makes our lives easier.

Auvik saves us a lot of time. For example, for configuration backups, we used RANCID. It's been around forever, it's free, and it's open-source, but there's no support. It would take a lot of time to stand up to the three to ten different solutions, which would be required to get what Auvik gives us out-of-the-box. The amount of time it would take, the number of sites, the networks, and the cloud or on-premises environment would vary from company to company. If it's a 10-person company, standing up those solutions would be a little bit easier. If it's a 3,000-person company, it could take months to get everything correctly stood up. Auvik is a click-and-go solution. It has easily saved us hundreds of hours.

The solution affects our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally. If there's a network problem, it's normally given to a network engineer or somebody who at least knows what they're doing. With Auvik, each of our staff members has access to it. They can make changes according to their best judgment. It helps a lot of our staff understand basic networking, VLANs, trunks, and how networks are laid out. If somebody says, "Port 12 on Switch 2," they can find it.

The automation has a positive impact on our IT team's availability. It saves us time, and our team is more available to help with other tasks.

Tasks that would take hours now take minutes, especially if somebody doesn't have a lot of knowledge or skill set. Auvik doesn't turn someone into a full-blown network architect or engineer, but for people who wouldn't necessarily know how to crawl around on the command line or do discovery, everything is in front of them and they're able to set it up.

We've been able to delegate low-level tasks to our junior staff. Right now, someone is manually doing around 50 switches, four core switches, and a firewall deployment by leveraging Auvik. He's had very minimal network experience prior to this, but he's learning about the network, port, and VLAN through Auvik.

We have seen a reduction in our meantime to resolution. Between the alerting and the ability to leverage Auvik to find it, fix it, and roll it back, we've cut down our response time by at least half, if not more. We haven't needed to keep track of that metric because we hit the ground running with Auvik. At my last company, the amount of time we spent on issues was insane. There were meetings on an almost daily basis about why people were spending so much time on network-related issues.

For example, we had a major customer that was down for over a week and a half due to a network issue, and they weren't pleased about it. It happened again after we started using Auvik, and I was able to identify the issues with Auvik within five minutes and resolve it within ten. The amount of time it took to resolve the issue went down from a week and a half to 15 minutes.

All of the features are valuable, but the ability to remote into anything, whether it's a terminal or a browser, is really big for us. It makes things a lot easier day-to-day. It keeps track of all the firewall or switch configurations, so if anybody makes changes, we can roll back and have an alert on it. Discovery has been useful.

It's easy to use Auvik's monitoring and management function. We can roll out a site in under 15 minutes, so it's up and working right away.

The solution's ease of use has been very important to our operations.
We have a lot of tool sets, so we don't want to spend a lot of time deploying and tinkering with it. Auvik is a click-and-done solution, so there's minimal effort involved.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform, which is pretty important to our organization. Everything is one pane of glass. We don't want to have 20 different portals for 20 different customers because managing each one individually would be a nightmare scenario. It's a lot of overhead. It's pretty useful in general, but it's also incredibly important because the more time we spend managing those tasks, the less time we have for everything else.

Auvik helps to visualize the network mapping and topology for our organization. It's just there, so we don't really think about it. It makes it very easy. As it discovers, it draws out the map. We can see where things flow and what they're connected to. We can answer all kinds of questions like, "What happens if I unplug this," or "Where is this machine, generally speaking?" We've used it to hunt down everything from rogue devices to a missing laptop. Thanks to the topology view, we were able to see which AP it was connected to.

Customers like to see what their network looks like. They may think they have a tiny network, but they actually have 500 devices that are just sitting on their network in a 20-person company. It helps them understand that we're actually doing something and not just saying that the network has a problem. It's good for visualization and for keeping track of where offices are located so we don't need to commit it fully to memory.

It's very important to us that visibility helps our IT team focus on our networks. We want our staff to be aware of the network, what's on it, and how to manage it. We've used it as a learning tool. It discovers everything. One of our guys wants to get more into networking, and we said, "All right, go into here, go to this switch, get all of the port configurations, and figure out how to apply it to the new stuff," because they're not the same. It's a manual process, so he's learned more about networks and networking in the past week than he has ever been exposed to before.

Auvik helps us keep device inventories up to date. It's helpful to know when the software ends and what the last support dates are.

The higher-level and more experienced guys on our team have been able to delegate simpler tasks to our help desk and people who don't have 10 years of experience with network engineering. It frees up our team, and it helps our less-skilled employees get a hands-on education, which is usually the best way.

Sometimes it's a little bit slow to load, but I can't think of anything else that could be improved.

I have used this solution for two years, in my previous company and now in my current organization. 

We have never needed to use technical support.

We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks. We used Device42 for asset management, discovery, and collection. We also used an RMM and SolarWinds.

There are no other solutions that do what Auvik does. Other solutions can get very convoluted. You could have a monitoring solution, a configuration backup solution, a Syslog server, a SIM, and a Device42 or something similar to track hardware life cycles.

Auvik has packaged everything into one solution. I remember thinking, "No one really does everything the right way." The more you see a solution smash different facets into one product, the more you think, "There's no way they can do everything really well." Auvik does what it says it will do. It meets all expectations. The monitoring is just as good, if not better than a dedicated monitoring solution. Cisco is happy to charge you boatloads of money to do Syslog and configuration backup, but Auvik does it out-of-the-box.

The icing on the cake is all the integrations. You can throw it into Teams or into a ticketing system. We've used other solutions, but for the rest of my career, Auvik will be the default solution that we use.

I deployed Auvik myself. It only took 15 minutes to set up. After giving some credentials and installing a collector, it started up immediately. We had usable information within half an hour and fully discovered networks within a couple of hours. It was insanely easy.

We're a little bit different from most organizations because we include what Auvik does in our monthly fee for our customers. Technically, we're definitely making money. We don't actually break it down and say, "We made $500 on Auvik this month," but as soon as we have a customer, we're making money, and part of that is thanks to Auvik.

Auvik's pricing isn't astronomical. Auvik is extremely fair in how they break down a billable device versus something that isn't, especially compared to PRTG, which charges for a number of sensors. Auvik makes it really easy to understand that you aren't going to get billed for certain things. They're cutting themselves short, in my opinion, but I've never had to worry about pricing from Auvik. It's always been very affordable.

We evaluated five other direct competitors of Auvik. Essentially, we did our due diligence and put it through the paces. We did a demo and a trial.

I would rate Auvik as 10 out of 10. 

I see absolutely no point in an on-prem monitoring solution anymore. If the collector goes offline and something is down at the site, you know that you're looking at a very minimal amount of issues: either the firewall just burst into flames or the ISP is down. Because everything is in the cloud and we're able to see it 24/7/365, I wouldn't deploy an on-premises monitoring solution anywhere.

Auvik is the best piece of software we have used across the board because of the value it offers, especially compared to what it costs and the value it adds to the organization. I've worked for major companies like ESG, Abiomed, and Akamai. I wish I knew about Auvik earlier in my career because it would've made my life a million times easier as a systems administrator, systems engineer, and architect.

We use it to monitor the network infrastructure and assets of our clients. We are a managed service provider and it fits neatly into our role. We also use it to keep configuration change records, which is something we didn't have before. It's nice to have that in one platform.

When we are onboarding a new client with network infrastructure for monitoring, Auvik makes it very straightforward and simplified. It can map out and easily visualize the customer's network so that we don't have to manually do it. It definitely has increased automation.

We used PRTG but it lacked the mapping function to visualize the network with an interactive map. It also lacked the configuration backup tool, the hardware life cycle, and good NetFlow insights. Moving to Auvik has saved a good 30 to 50 percent of our time.

Another thing that I love that Auvik does and that PRTG doesn't do is the integration with a lot of our MSP tools like ConnectWise and Teams. PRTG would open tickets via an alert, but it would never close them if the alert cleared. All those tickets from PRTG would go to me and I would have to manually close them. I would get inundated with tickets. Auvik will also open a ticket but, once the alert clears, it will automatically close the ticket, saving me from having to close a lot of tickets. That too has reduced repetitive work for me by 30 to 50 percent.

Our MTTR has almost been automated because of the tickets. About 90 percent of our tickets have been automated. I still have to manually look at the rest and maybe do a little work against them, but it's not crazy. It has unquestionably helped out with resolving issues.

It has also helped tremendously with quarterly business reviews because, with just a click of a button, we can get the hardware life cycle and export all the data to an Excel spreadsheet. That helps our management.

And because most of our clients are remote from us, that visibility that Auvik gives into their environments is in a better overall layout than our previous platform. The UI of PRTG was very '90s-esque, like a poorly designed website. It had the functionality but the UI was lacking tremendously when it comes to ease of use and organization.

The visibility Auvik provides almost makes it so that we don't have to be actively monitoring things. We don't need a NOC or a SOC to get alerts. We're more confident now in the network management solution that we have. Before, we were getting alert upon alert and my phone would be blowing up and then I would get all the tickets. Auvik has put that kind of stress on the back burner.

Overall, it has freed up about 25 to 30 percent of the time I used to have to put into things.

Another advantage is that I didn't want to show a junior tech our previous platform because they wouldn't know what to do with it. Auvik, on the other hand, is more geared toward all levels, rather than just the high-level engineers. It will tell you what might be the cause of a problem rather than just alerting on something that it sees. While we don't have it geared toward our lower-level team yet, it's very easy to use and they should be able to pick it up.

Among the most valuable features are the hardware life cycle and configuration backups, when applicable, since that's not applicable for all vendors, platforms, and networking types. When it does show you the hardware life cycle for, say, a Cisco device and the configuration backup, that's the most useful aspect for me as a network engineer.

Once it's set up properly with the SNMP strings or credentials, it's very straightforward to use. It has a small learning curve, which is nice for a network monitoring tool. Ease of use is very high on our list of requirements, not just for me as a network engineer, but when I want the help desk or the level-ones to be able to look at something. It needs to be easy to use.

It's also very much a single pane of glass, which is especially helpful for our business model as an MSP.

In addition, I greatly appreciate Auvik's ability to visualize network mapping. It's very good for visualizing how the network is formed and the interconnections. Since it's interactive, it's more helpful than a static map or static video diagram. It's a very helpful feature.

I like how you can request features, and one feature that I think they're working on is the ability to export the topology map as a video.

Something else I would like to see would be additional vendors for the hardware life cycle. Right now, they mainly focus on Cisco stuff, which is fine, but not every customer we have uses Cisco. I'm not looking for them to add every networking vendor, and these just might be legacy devices, but Fortinet is a big one that we've used and I don't think Auvik has the hardware life cycle for that. I don't know how it does on Aruba, but we have some legacy HPE as well. I do like the Meraki integration, although it would be nice to see a Juniper Mist and Aruba Central integration.

Another improvement that would be nice, one that should be at the top of their list, is the ability to properly identify vulnerabilities, based on a vendor's security alerts. If it could recognize, "You're on this version of firmware and you're hitting these types of vulnerabilities," that would definitely check off a big security feature for this tool.

We demoed Auvik early in the year and we fully signed up sometime in the summer, so we have been using it for several months.

Overall, it is very stable. 

Every platform or NMS has its own quirks or kinks that have to be worked out, but it's nice that Auvik will update on the backend. I don't have to worry about updating a server platform.

Its scalability is very high. It gets a 10 out of 10.

We have Auvik across multiple organizations. We monitor, administer, and maintain, network monitoring for dozens of clients. It's deployed across all their different environments and in organizations with multiple branch offices. Our clients include the smallest, one-branch organizations up to medium-to-large enterprises. It definitely fits all those use cases.

The technical support that Auvik provides is very good. They're very quick to respond. They have a live chat feature, which is very nice. They're pretty knowledgeable since it's their product. There's no comparison between the support from Auvik and the support we received from our previous vendor.

Positive

We used PRTG before and we're still using it now. We're trying to slowly migrate from it. We put all our eggs in that basket, even though it was a very flimsy basket. We used it for networking servers, mainly.

We didn't use it for endpoint and computer assets. That was handled by ConnectWise Automate. We wouldn't want Auvik to do that.

The deployment was very straightforward because of the user interface. This is where it's more straightforward than Domotz. Sometimes, when you have too many choices, it can be a burden. With Auvik you decide: Do you want the OVA? Do you want to install a .exe? It's very simple. I could probably have someone on our level-one team actually set it up.

It took less than 10 to 15 minutes after the collector was implemented before the network mapping started to populate with basic devices. Then it was a matter of fine-tuning. It was up to me to categorize devices as I saw fit and tune the SNMP so that it got the data that I wanted.

Overall, our implementation of Auvik took a few weeks because of the number of sites and devices and the fine-tuning. Also, an NMS is always being worked on. You're rarely perfectly happy with how it looks. It's constantly being fine-tuned so that alerts generate correctly without over-alerting.

That's one thing I have liked compared to PRTG. Auvik's out-of-the-box alerting is very straightforward and handles the alerts you are likely to see. But that's also where it could do a little bit better, in the customization of alerts. With PRTG, we could alert on almost anything, whereas with Auvik, you're somewhat zoned in.

We have definitely saved a good amount of time on the setup of Auvik, compared to PRTG. PRTG was significantly cheaper, but there was no onboarding help. It was a matter of, "Here you go, do it yourself." Auvik had a customer success team to walk us through and help iron out any kinks, which was greatly appreciated. That was part of what we're paying for. The pricing helps with support. PRTG's support, while it was okay, wasn't as straightforward and easy to get a hold of someone compared to Auvik.

The maintenance involved with Auvik is around fine-tuning for data collection, but it does not involve updating the agent or the backend. It's nice that I don't have to worry about updating the platform itself. I just have to worry about the data getting collected and making sure SNMP strings are updated.

I was the only one involved in the initial deployment, from our side.

I didn't set up PRTG but compared to my brief time with PRTG, Auvik has been night and day and the value has been very quick. For some of our customers, we never had a solution in place to back up configurations. Auvik now provides that. There's definitely peace of mind knowing a config backed up. It is definitely proving its value.

I don't think Auvik's pricing should be based on device, which it is right now. I don't know what their market share is or how they compete with Domotz, but if they want to stay competitive, Auvik should have simpler pricing. Domotz is $21 per month per site, whereas Auvik is per device, so it definitely adds up very quickly.

In addition to the other issues I mentioned, Auvik and our previous platform are night and day in the following way as well. We would almost be scared to put in a subnet for PRTG to scan because we wouldn't know what we got. Now, it's easy to see what we're getting in terms of the devices and prune it from there. 

It's also helpful that it's not onsite because we're trying to move servers and services off-prem. Auvik is definitely a step in the right direction. It's one less piece of infrastructure to worry about. You don't have to open up your environment to collect monitoring information. It just needs outbound traffic, which makes things easier. That's where it shines compared to an on-prem solution. Also, you don't have to maintain or update software or the agent. It does that automatically. I don't have to worry about updating firmware.

With an on-prem solution, everything is hub and spoke and everything has to go back to our data center. Auvik, as a cloud solution, eases up on that usage of our circuits and internet.

While Auvik is geared toward network infrastructure for an MSP, it could probably do a little bit better on the server side. PRTG definitely had that as an advantage over Auvik. It could monitor servers and that type of infrastructure better than Auvik can. 

Auvik also doesn't have some customizable automations for a specific use case that might need an if-then-that statement to run a script or commands. That might be very niche, but one of our clients is using PRTG like that. 

It is nice to see that Auvik has an expanding roadmap. I don't know what PRTG has on its roadmap for new features, but it's nice to see that Auvik is not getting stale.

I did evaluate Domotz and the pricing worked out in favor of Domotz, but we ended up going with Auvik. We're only in Auvik for a year and we'll see how it goes, but unless the pricing becomes too high, I don't see us moving away from it. Domotz was the only other one that was within reach and more geared toward MSPs.

An MSP business can almost flip a coin between Domotz and Auvik. Auvik is priced per device, whereas Domotz is priced per location or site. It works out in Domotz's favor, although I can't speak for its feature sets. Domotz does have a leg up in terms of deployability. It has a hardware appliance, almost like a Raspberry Pi, so it's easy to deploy on anyone's network, whereas you have to run Auvik as a virtual appliance. It can't run on ARM, which is not a deal-breaker, but it is nice to have options when deploying. You're somewhat locked in with Auvik for deployment because you need to run it on a server or in someone's vCenter. It's not that customizable, whereas Domotz can run on ARM as well, I believe.

Auvik has two versions, Essentials and Performance, which is similar to Domotz's model. With Performance you get NetFlow visibility and another feature and that increases the price per device. But the device types they charge for are only those that are part of network infrastructure. Overall, it's probably cheaper via Domotz, but if you have a lot of sites with just one device, it might be cheaper to go with Auvik. Auvik doesn't charge for access points, but they do charge for switches, routers, and firewalls.

Auvik definitely helps keep device inventories up to date. If I have the scan running, it does a really good job of finding devices on the network when the subnets are put in. However, the network infrastructure shouldn't change that much, so I don't typically have it running scans all the time. We're mainly using it for network infrastructure and not as much for endpoint devices. It primarily shines when it comes to network infrastructure, but it did do a pretty good job of doing the initial inventory of the networks.

My advice would be to do a proof of concept if you are in an MSP role or organization, because the costs can quickly add up.