Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use Auvik for monitoring and alerting on customer environments.

We lacked visibility into specific aspects of our Local Area Network. Therefore, we required a solution capable of monitoring and alerting us about port activity and other relevant information at the switch level.

Although Auvik does require some experience and knowledge within IT, it is easy to use. Auvik works relatively well with a great intuitive interface.

Auvik's ease of use makes it easy to get to the root of the problem.

Auvik's network map provides a real-time picture of our network as long as the agent is up.

The only waiting time we faced was for the agent's installation and subsequent discovery process. This typically took around 24 hours to ensure it had enough time to identify all network devices.

Before implementing Auvik, we could not readily determine switch outages. This necessitated manual inquiry and on-site troubleshooting. Fortunately, Auvik has cut our mean time to resolution down by 50 percent.

Auvik's reliability is impressive. It effectively alerts us to switch outages and high port utilization, making it a perfect fit for our needs. We are extremely satisfied with Auvik and have no plans to switch to another solution.

While Auvik provides us with good network visibility, there are some features we'd like to see implemented in the future. Specifically, we're looking for an alert system that notifies us when new devices are added to the network. For example, one of our customers experiences recurring issues with an unidentified router appearing on their network. Unfortunately, Auvik doesn't currently alert us when this ghost router appears.

I would like Auvik to alert on IP conflicts. Although it doesn't happen often, we sometimes see duplicate entries for IP addresses.

I have been using Auvik for six years.

We have never had any stability issues with Auvik.

Auvik is highly scalable. We currently use it on networks ranging from small shops with around 40-50 workstations to larger locations with 500-600 endpoints. I am confident that it can easily scale to even larger networks.

I have contacted Auvik's support team a few times and they were consistently great. Their resolution time was super quick.

The initial deployment is extremely easy. If we have an understanding of the customer's environment, the deployment takes five minutes and one person to complete.

The implementation is completed in-house.

Auvik's pricing falls within an acceptable range for us. While management typically handles pricing negotiations, I haven't heard any concerns from them suggesting Auvik's cost is excessive.

I would rate Auvik ten out of ten.

Auvik does most of the maintenance and they advise us before they do it.

I recommend trying Auvik with a trial version if possible, followed by the available Auvik training. While the initial training is not mandatory, I highly encourage newcomers to try the software first to get hands-on experience. This will make the subsequent training, if available, much easier to grasp.

We use it for managing our inventory of assets and for receiving timely alerts from our servers.

Auvik's user interface, interactivity, and ease of use are at an average level.

Its network map and dashboard offer a real-time representation of our network. However, it tends to be quite cluttered.

It enables us to reduce the time spent on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution.

The most valuable features include the inventory management and alerting capabilities.

There is room for improvement in the reporting aspect. Specifically, we would like to receive notifications when individual drives reach full capacity. However, the current system aggregates information for all drives on a server, making it challenging for us. Obtaining comprehensive hardware information from both PCs and servers is also proving to be difficult.

I have been using it for a year and a half.

I would rate its stability capabilities eight out of ten

I would rate its scalability abilities seven out of ten.

Their technical support has been effective, with readily available assistance and help to address issues. Occasionally, the drawback lies in the response that certain features may not be available at the moment, with assurances that they are actively working on it. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

We used Datadog for reporting in the past. We transitioned to Auvik because it provides both functionalities we require at a cost-effective price, combining two essential features into one product. 

Configuring Datadog is more challenging, yet it yields superior reports. On the contrary, Auvik is easier to set up, but its reports are not as comprehensive.

The initial setup was fairly simple.

The deployment time was approximately three or four hours, with assistance from an Auvik representative during the process. Solely, I handled the responsibility from our end. It doesn't necessitate much maintenance.

We recognized its value almost immediately upon deploying it.

The pricing is favorable.

I recommend others have a clearer vision of their goals and assess how well it aligns with their intentions before opting for it. I've spent some time exploring the reporting features, and it falls short of providing all the necessary reports and alerts. Additionally, there are numerous configurations spread across various places, which can be challenging to manage. Overall, I would rate it five out of ten.

I use Auvik for managing my two most complex networks with multiple locations and diverse routing.

Initially, I implemented Auvik to address routing and switching issues. It helped pinpoint and solve those problems. Over time, its bigger value became evident in its ability to efficiently document and discover every device on the network. Auvik has significantly reduced my mean time to resolution. 

It provides crucial visibility into complex switching setups, allowing me to quickly identify which devices are connected to specific switch ports - a task that was challenging with other tools.

In terms of improvement, Auvik could include more customization options and the ability to efficiently manage additional features like printer monitoring.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

Auvik is fairly stable.

Auvik has been scalable in my experience with simple networks, I haven't encountered any limitations. My use cases haven't tested its full capabilities.

Before Auvik, I briefly used Kaseya's Network Glue, which I considered a less sophisticated option. However, Auvik stood out as the best-in-class solution when I compared alternatives. I had known about Auvik for several years before using it and recognized its value in network mapping and documentation, and later appreciating its real-time monitoring and discovery features.

While Auvik offers an intuitive interface, there is a slight learning curve during setup. Once you are familiar with the process, it becomes easier to navigate and manage network issues. Getting started with Auvik requires a fair amount of setup, especially in new environments. Setting up SNMP credentials for each device is time-consuming, particularly in networks with varied configurations. Auvik has a hybrid deployment model, utilizing an on-premise detector. I was involved in the initial deployment, and it was a gradual process over several weeks, addressing switches, routers, servers, printers, and other devices with SNMP.  Maintenance for Auvik is minimal. The main task involves adding new devices, like printers, and ensuring SNMP settings are configured correctly. It becomes more challenging in co-managed IT situations when changes are made independently by the customer.

It is hard to measure the return on investment for Auvik regarding direct revenue. However, it significantly benefits me by speeding up problem resolution and enhancing efficiency.

The pricing of Auvik seems reasonable, especially for setups with complex networks. In cases where networks are more straightforward, it may not be necessary. However, considering the growing importance of compliance standards like PCI and CMMC, having Auvik everywhere could become essential for comprehensive network discovery and cybersecurity.

Auvik provides a network map and dashboard for a real-time view of my network. However, due to the complexity of my setup, the map becomes cluttered and less useful. While it looks nice, the intelligent scaling makes it impractical for anything beyond simple networks. 

Auvik's network map and dashboard attempt full visibility, but they cram too much into a small space. It becomes impractical and buries useful information in the noise. It is unnecessary for simple setups. 

Auvik doesn't charge for monitoring critical devices like printers, servers, and access points. Its primary value lies in monitoring and managing switches and routers, the devices for which they charge. For other devices, redundant monitoring systems are already in place.

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

I have 21 different locations in different networks that I have to manage. It gives me the ability to see the devices on the network, to see any troubles, to diagnose and support end-users or get into the network devices that are having issues.

It provides a single integrated platform for everything that I need. I can go and monitor the device, and I can get into the configuration of the device. It's a very powerful tool to have. Having a single integrated platform is very important. I have many tools to use, and to me, the ability to integrate it all into one platform is essential.

Aside from having a unified dashboard, it provides the ability to pick a particular site or a group of sites and see how they are configured and what issue a particular device is having. We are able to drill into that device from this platform, and we don't have to go outside and use different tools to access and get into the device.

It's very intuitive. It's probably the best in terms of getting up and running in short order. I have a team of network professionals who work with me, and we brought them in, and within an hour or two, they had their own dashboard set the way they wanted. So overall, the whole product is intuitive and very easy. It's not difficult.

It has given us a greater amount of visibility that we didn't have before. This visibility is absolutely essential for us. Before that, we would have about four different ways to test. Having it all in one location and one platform is very essential.

The ability to have visibility on a network to see the traffic and the ability to see if devices are misconfigured and if something changes in that configuration, are most valuable.

It's very easy. It's very intuitive. They had me up and running in a matter of hours, so it wasn't a steep learning curve to learn the interface or to learn the controls.

I would like to be able to get a little bit more granularity in turning on and off alerts because I get flooded with alerts. It gives too much information at times.

I've been using it for almost a year.

I haven't had any issues in the year that we've been on it, so it's pretty good.

It's amazing. 

I have not contacted them. 

We used a SolarWinds product. We used some rather rudimentary, built-in network tools. Obviously, there is SNMP, and we would use that through other means, but having it all essentially integrated into Auvik makes a big difference for us in terms of time and ease of use. Switching to Auvik saved us probably 20 hours a week.

It was very straightforward. There was very little in there that did not make sense. I had a great trainer that came in, and we did maybe two or three sessions, and then we were off and running. 

The name of the contractor is Darrell Norton. He works for Sedona Technologies, so we're contracted with them. We met with Darrell and then we went around installing the agents. He assisted with that. We did a lot of that remotely, and then, once the agents were installed, we started building the networks. So, in terms of me getting into the backend and programming, I did none of that.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping started to populate
almost instantaneously. Each site took maybe 20 minutes at the most, and then it started giving us the information. It was amazing. I was pretty impressed. In terms of the full deployment, we were up and running in one or two days. We had 23 different geographic locations. They were not on one campus, so that was pretty impressive. 

I can't compare the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solutions. It was probably the easiest deployment I've seen. With the other solutions, I spent a lot of time. I had to spend an enormous amount of time doing the configurations and programming, whereas, with Auvik, it was almost a plug-and-play.

For the maintenance, including myself, there are three associates. We all spread those duties out. We don't have anybody designated as the network administrator, so it's me and two other people who spend the most time with it. It's a daily function. In the morning, I get in, and I look at it. If I don't see anything wrong, I move on. It has made our jobs a whole lot easier.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. Getting in there and being able to see what that network is up to at any given moment, what the issues are, and being able to address them right from that platform has been a huge time saver.

We have seen a good 15% reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). 

They're very competitive on the pricing front. They may not be the least expensive, but they're certainly not the most expensive. They're right in a sweet spot. For our organization, at least, it was right within the budget.

We were using the SolarWinds product, and I went through demos of probably a dozen or more. We had CrowdStrike and others. I sat through probably a year's worth. I spent a year evaluating different products before we settled on Auvik.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise making sure that they have full control of the network, they understand all the devices, and they have the administrative capability to get into managed devices. We discovered a few that we hadn't known about, which provided a challenge. They also should be aware that there may be privacy concerns for some people because the system does take over and look into things. They may need to put controls on before they deploy it. I know that it goes in and gathers the configuration data, but I'm not sure how much personal data that is. I don't watch that part of it, but that would just be my top-of-mind concern. It's so powerful and it can take so much control. What's it looking at?

I'm very impressed with the product. I don't have any complaints. I wish I had it several years earlier. It would've been a lot easier. We've been through a number of acquisitions. So, taking on new different networks was a chore before. If we had this at the onset, it would've been a piece of cake.

We haven't yet utilized the program to its full potential. The most automation I see is getting the alerts, but we haven't yet designated tasks in that automation. So, there's still some manual work. In other words, we get the alert, and then we have to go deal with it. We don't have an automated dispatch or anything to any particular person.

I am sure Auvik is helpful for keeping device inventories up-to-date, but we use something else. We're still getting our feet wet with the product. The more we use it, I'm sure it would be valuable for that. I can go in and see all the devices that are reporting on the network, so in a sense, it does help us to keep device inventory up to date, but I'm sure there's a better way we can use it.

In terms of comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, as long as I have network connectivity and I have internet, it's great, but if I'm in a situation where I don't have connectivity, it doesn't help me.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

I'm a technical team lead managing other engineers and specialists for several clients. I utilize Auvik for strategic discussions, escalations, and support tickets. I'm on the backend trying to coordinate responses to outages, feature requests, etc. 

We use multiple applications to manage our network. Auvik is our network mapping and discovery tool that creates alerts in our ticketing system. We use ConnectWise Automate and that suite of products for ticketing. It's not like Auvik is a ticketing help desk system with remote control, but it can do just about everything from a monitoring standpoint. We still use AppNeta for board mirroring or finding latency in network traffic.

Auvik is a total package for network discovery that completely meets our needs as a company. I don't see us leaving Auvik for some other network discovery tool. It's a one-stop shop where we can dive into each of our client's networks, and we have quite a few. I don't know precisely how many we have. It's fewer than a hundred, but it's too many to do LAN diagrams in Visio. 

The solution has reduced repetitive low-priority tasks because it collects the SNMP information for us and alerts us when servers go offline. We can see connectivity in the network from a bird's eye view without the need to dive into the firewalls and switches. Auvik saves us from having to create manual diagrams, and I can export all the data about a client's network, so I don't have to gather all of that myself.

Given our number of clients, we would probably need another full-time engineer if someone had to keep track of all of this on their own. It's roughly equivalent to a human working full-time for an entire year. That's one less person we need for all that, and Auvik reduces human error. 

The visibility Auvik provides is critical because it's part of our onboarding process, giving us a high-level overview so long as the client doesn't change the SNMP default values. We can immediately see what a new client is working with as soon as we get off again into their network.

Auvik has improved the team's availability by about 75 percent. Before Auvik, we used a different tool to scan, but it provided only a one-time snapshot of the network, whereas Auvik provides mapping in real-time. 

It's probably one of the first tools we introduce to new hires in our network operations center. Auvik is intuitive and offers hints. You can type a vendor name or an IP, and it's immediately accessible at a high level. Of course, there's depth to the product that takes time to develop. Junior engineers can quickly get a look at it, start learning how SNMP works, or configure it on devices and watch them appear in Auvik.

We use Auvik when we're doing strategic planning for clients. It helps us find servers, hosts switches, correct serial numbers, etc., so we can do warranty lookups and that sort of thing. It's important. We primarily use it for information gathering to see a visual network diagram mapping and get tickets.

It's hard to say that one feature is my favorite, but I like Auvik's ability to map networks using SNMP. It maps the network, so I can look at all the devices and set them to provide alerts or automatically create tickets when outages occur. If clients need it, I can export all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

The monitoring and management functions are easy to use. The network visualization is also intuitive. Ease of use is crucial because many of our help desk specialists and entry-level people need to navigate the solution, so it's vital to have simplicity in standard high-level searching. A single integrated platform is essential to stay in line with our best practices.

The search could be slightly more intelligent. If I type in "Dell" and put an extra "L," Auvik doesn't give a suggestion, "Did you mean 'Dell?'" I have to fix that. That's a minor thing.

Also, if I select a specific device and apply it as a search filter, it shows me the device, and I have to click on it to see it at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, it just stays on the discovery. When I close the device, it remains on the switch displaying the diagram. I have to click the home dashboard to get back to the way it was.

When I remove the filter, it should take me back to the home dashboard. After I add a filter, select a device, and apply it as a search filter, I think it should pop up if there's only one. When there's only one device in the filter, I find it somewhat annoying to need to click it to dive into that device. If I remove the filter, I would prefer it return to the home dashboard. It's a minor irritation at times.

I've used Auvik for more than five years, close to eight. 

Auvik is solid. I have never experienced an outage. Auvik has downtime, but they provide notice well in advance. The maintenance window tends to be at times that won't impact me. The most recent maintenance window was on Dec. 3 at 7:00 AM Eastern, which is 4:00 AM Pacific, so it didn't affect me at all.

I don't see a limitation to the scalability.

Before the company adopted Auvik, I used Visio to create my online diagrams by hand.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but deploying the collectors is easy. Another person handles the onboarding process, but the network maps are populated within a day or so. I've never heard anyone say, "Hey, it's taking a long time for Auvik to get going." They say Auvik is up, and I see the map is there. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10.

I was looking for a solution that we could use to catalog and keep track of our inventory. I thought about using Auvik in our lab environment to see how it would work for tracking inventory in a production setting.

Auvik's ease of use has bettered our operations by allowing us to add or remove platforms as they get added in or get deprecated, improving quality of life.

The solution was able to integrate with most of our platforms. There were a couple of vendors that were not added in yet, but it wasn't an issue.

It would be beneficial having a single integrated platform for our organization but no solution is able to fully integrate with every vendor. We work with what we have.

If I can deploy the solution into production, it would be beneficial because we can also upload documentation to the Auvik page so we can have quick access for our support team. If our organization leverages Auvik to pull down documentation on the specific vendors as well as just our internal processes, workflow, and troubleshooting approach, Auvik would improve our organization.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventory up to date. After adding all the necessary information, the quickest way I could see the code versions running was by querying the SNPs.

In the long run, the time Auvik would save us quickly pulling the information required to keep our inventory up to date would be a lifesaver. 

Using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik is easy. The solution is straightforward to set up. It communicates well with the SNP and some of the cloud platforms via API keys.

I like the view Auvik offers to help visualize the network mapping/topology for our organization. When we have a large deployment with tens or hundreds of devices, the view can get a little cluttered. The fact that the view is there and we can zoom in and zoom out still makes it valuable to see how things are interconnected and laid out.

I am sure that if we moved forward with the solution it would affect our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally, but for evaluation purposes, I was the only one using Auvik.

The fact that Auvik can be accessed anywhere is a good benefit. Not having to use a VPN to access the solution is advantageous. If I'm at a customer site or I'm on vacation, and I need to pull information up because I get an email or a phone call from somebody at work, having Auvik is beneficial because it is cloud-based compared to on-prem network monitoring solutions. 

Auvik mostly supports large vendors such as the Cisco Aruba networks, Meraki, and Extreme Networks. They have the ability to tie into Meraki's dashboard, which is a subsidiary of Cisco. We're using some of the Ruckus hardware. If Auvik can add in some of the smaller vendors to be able to work with their products or even Extreme Networks' cloud platform, that would be beneficial for our organization. 

I have been using Auvik for a couple of weeks.

It is stable and we have not encountered any problems.

I added a Meraki platform with 20,000 access points to test Auvik's scalability. The platform accepted the additional access points without issue and was able to handle the additional load.

The technical support was good. They responded quickly to my question and helped me resolve the issue.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. I had to set up a VM in our network that acted as the collector of the data. I didn't read the directions well enough myself and tried to install Auvik on a newer version of Ubuntu. Once I realized my error I moved the solution back down to the correct version and it was up and running within a few minutes. 

The deployment took around two hours. We deployed the solution in a single location for one of our departments to conduct initial testing and proof of concept.

The implementation was out-of-the-box and completed in-house.

It seems that the pricing is a little higher than some of the other solutions, but it also offers more value and data. The pricing shown on the website goes up to 40 devices and for anything higher, we are required to contact the vendor.

We also evaluated PRTG Network Monitor.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We need a better system for tracking inventory and assets in our production world. Currently, we have an Icinga instance that is not suited for this purpose.

The biggest challenge I faced with Auvik was configuring SNP for devices that did not have it pre-configured because some versions need to talk to the crawler or collector. Once configured, we can add as many devices as we can and view the data Auvik feeds back to us.

We mainly needed a tool for managing or monitoring our firewalls and switches. We do have other tools for general server environment monitoring and applications monitoring, but they are not as good for managing and monitoring firewalls and switches. We specifically needed monitoring and management of firewalls and switches for our data center environment.

It provided the ability to track down the changes in the firewall and the ability to have centralized visibility into our networking stack. We are able to compare and correlate functions from one environment with another environment, which is helpful when we upgrade the code or the framework in one location. We can compare how the stats were previously, and we get to know whether the new code is doing anything funky or if we are seeing any issues. It allows us to compare sizes that are running on the older code and sizes that are running on a newer code. We can see if there is any difference in the CPU usage, RAM usage, or the utilization of the firewalls themselves.

It's a single pane of view. There is a single dashboard, and you can add multiple sites and multiple users to it. You install collectors in different areas, but the management is from a single location. Everything is cloud-based. So, you can access and do monitoring from pretty much anywhere. The beauty of it is that if you have multiple physical locations across the continent, you can see the networking stack on one single page. This single integrated platform is very important for us. The most important factor for us was that this platform is cloud-based. If we were hosting it in a single physical location, it would have been hard to be accessible by other locations. Having it in the cloud and being able to see everything in a centralized location was super important for us because in the case of the old or other tools that we had in the past, or we still have, we need to log into a different tool or different console to see the information, and it's hard to correlate all of them in a single location. Auvik gives that ability. We can compare the states and the information from a firewall located in the east of the US and a firewall located in the west of the US, which is super helpful.

It is nice to be able to visualize the network mapping/topology for the organization. You don't have to do anything. You add the subnets and the VLANs you want to be scanned. As long as the collector can access those subnets, it is done fairly quickly. It depends on how complex your network is, but it can take less than 30 minutes to map everything and give you a visualization, which is pretty nice. Otherwise, it could take you hours to stay up-to-date with the charts of your networking topology because the topology changes from time to time. With Auvik, you can see every node, every switch, and every firewall. You can see how they are connected. You can visually see how your network is and what you have. The best part is that it adjusts on the fly. If I add a new switch, the topology would adjust, and the new switch will be there. If I take out a switch or create a new branch, it will automatically show that. It's really nice and easy for the day-to-day understanding of where you are, but it's also very important when you have a new network admin, and you need to get them up to the speed of your network. In the past, we had to pull out various diagrams and explain what we have and then figure out whether all the diagrams were up-to-date, whereas now, we can just show the dashboard, and they would understand that. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization. It's really intuitive. From what I was able to see, everything was correct. It's not that you get raw data and some visualization and then you need to work with it or adjust it. It connects everything. From what I was able to see, everything was pretty correct in the diagrams.

It has helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. Previously, we were doing daily backups of the firewalls, but now, we don't have to do that part. That has been a help. The automation of the backups was helpful. 

It has significantly improved the visibility into the networking topology. It can see the access points, and it can see pretty much everything on the network. It can detect servers and physical hardware as well. It has significantly improved our visibility. This visibility is not the most important aspect, but it's definitely important and significant to have this visibility and know what you have in the topology.

It keeps device inventories up-to-date. We can quickly search and find out the devices we have or check what we have. That part has been really helpful. Instead of tracking in an Excel spreadsheet, we can search the inventory in Auvik.

It has definitely saved time to do other tasks. Some of the daily tasks that we had to do are now done by Auvik. With Auvik, our team spends less time checking things, getting dashboards, and pulling up reports.

We have multiple applications and tools to manage and monitor various aspects of the networks. Auvik has saved us a few hours a week. When you have three or four different tools, you need to take information from each of those tools and then get some insights out. With Auvik, we log into a single location, and we get all the information. It has been time-saving for sure.

Few of the features are valuable. One feature that is the most valuable for me is that after we added all of our firewalls, every time we make any configuration change in the firewall, it creates a backup and retains the change history for months. We can see and find out when a change was done and what was the change. The best part is that if we want to compare the current config with the config from two weeks ago, the tool pulls up both config files and tells us what the difference is. If something is not working today, instead of asking around who made the change, what was changed, and how things were two weeks ago when everything was working, we can just pull both configs, check them out, and know what exactly the problem is and investigate.

Auvik is a cloud-based solution, and it definitely has advantages over on-prem network monitoring solutions. We don't have to manage anything on-prem, and we don't have to patch the backend. We don't have to allocate resources for the management console to work, and it's accessible from anywhere. We don't have to back up the virtual machine or the appliance because everything is managed by Auvik. We really like that part. You definitely need internet connectivity to send all the logs and data to Auvik. If your internet goes down, then technically, you don't have visibility at that time, but then, you likely have a bigger problem than being able to get the data.

It takes significantly less time and effort to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solutions. With the previous solutions, we needed to get somebody trained. Somebody had to go and watch tons of videos to understand how to deploy the solution and how to properly install and configure it. With Auvik, we just provide the executables to somebody, and they just install it. We then go to the console and the data starts to come there. It's way easier and faster to set it up.

They can improve its monitoring capabilities for the physical servers or operating systems. At the moment, they do have some visibility. Even though you don't buy Auvik for monitoring your servers, and it is more for network monitoring, it would be nice if they can do end-to-end monitoring so that you don't have to use a different tool for operating system monitoring. You can get all the information from Auvik.

I have been using Auvik for about three months.

It has been very stable so far. I don't see any issues. I'm not concerned about its stability.

It can scale. I don't see that as an issue.

We have various firewalls and switches in HA. We have various models and vendors. We have a three-layer topology. We have a core layer, a distribution layer, and an access layer. All that is visible and monitored from Auvik.

Their technical support has been good. They come up with solutions, and they are there to help. I'm happy with the experience so far. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

We used PRTG, and we used Nagios. We used these two recently. They were more for monitoring. They didn't have the capabilities of management. They weren't keeping backups, and they weren't alerting us where there was a new firmware update. They also did not have the topology visualization.

Both of them were on-prem solutions. So, we had to have a system or VM to install them. We installed PRTG on Windows. We needed a dedicated box to run it. They weren't cloud-based, and they weren't highly available.

I deployed it, and I worked with my network engineers to set it up properly. I started the initial deployment or initial installation of the collectors, and then my team took over. I worked with them to deploy it in multiple locations. It was straightforward and pretty easy to deploy. You need to do some configurations to add everything, but the initial configuration is straightforward.

We just downloaded the out-of-the-box solution and just clicked on next, next, and next. We haven't done any customization. It took about 30 minutes initially because I added a few subnets. It took 20 to 30 minutes to get the diagram. Initially, you get some data depending on your network. We have a fairly large network, so it took about 30 minutes. It is awesome to get that information in 30 minutes.

It was pretty straightforward and easy to use for firewalls. You set up a connection to the firewall, and then everything pretty much works on its own. Some tools require you to learn for weeks before you figure out how to deploy. Auvik, in that regard, is pretty easy. We had a little bit of a challenge adding the switches just because we have specific switches, and they communicate with the firewall on a specific protocol. There was an API or a way to add them up, but we just didn't know how to add them up out of the box. Auvik's support was able to help us out fairly quickly, and overall, it was an easy and smooth deployment.

We did it ourselves. I don't see a need for an integrator to do it because it's straightforward.

It doesn't require any day-to-day maintenance from our side. Everything is managed by Auvik. They run the updates and the patches. The only thing that you need to do is that when you add a new device, you need to provide a new password, or if you change the password, you need to update that in Auvik. Other than that, there is no maintenance.

I would like it to be more cost-effective or affordable. It's not the most expensive one, but it's also not the cheapest solution out there. You pay month to month. It is what it is. It is not for everyone, but it depends on what you're looking for in your budget.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that Auvik is not the cheapest solution out there. You pay per device you monitor, but there is value in it. If you monitor the key systems and components, then you can make it cost-effective. If you want to monitor every single switch in your environment, it certainly won't be a cheap solution. You need to evaluate what you need to monitor. Do you need to have every switch? You can have maybe the top-tier switches and get all the information from those. You don't necessarily need to have every switch monitored because it doesn't really distinguish. You pay the same price whether you are monitoring your core switch or your access switch. To make it more cost-effective, you need to pick and choose what you want to monitor.

We've evaluated FortiMonitor from Fortinet, but it wasn't a good fit for us. We also evaluated LiveAction. That was also not a good fit for us.

I would advise giving it a try in the trial period, adding all the devices you have on the network, and seeing what value you are getting. I would also advise assessing what you need to monitor and what you don't need to monitor because you pay per monitored device.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We are demoing Auvik to see if it makes sense for us to implement. As a managed service provider, we are utilizing it to monitor our clients' networks, perform inventory of devices, and diagnose and troubleshoot network issues.

I wouldn't say that we couldn't do business without Auvik, but it's a way for us to be more profitable because it cuts down on the total hours it takes to service our clients. We gain efficiency in areas that, otherwise, would have been manual tasks. We're no longer spending a lot of time manually digging into each network device when there is an issue. We can easily track down where something is happening.

We've benefited from better efficiency as well as from better clarity into issues, sometimes even before they happen. Before a client is calling or beating down our doors saying things are down, we usually have an alert from Auvik saying there's a problem. When I'm able to pick up the phone and say, "Oh yeah, I'm already aware that you have a network outage," that is very helpful.

We have a more accurate view of everything going on within our clients' networks. Our clients are located across the United States and being able to easily view what's going on in their networks, and have alerting on top of that, is very helpful. That visibility is very important because of the way we are leveraging Auvik, which is for detecting and alerting us about issues before a client contacts us about them. Auvik is how we're being notified when there's an issue, ideally in a proactive manner. We can remediate the issue before any downtime is noticed by a customer. It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution.

It also keeps device inventories up to date. Ensuring an accurate inventory is one of the key components of our service to customers. Our business model is focused on consumption, so we need to have an accurate count of our customers' devices so that we can give them an accurate bill. Knowing that we have 100 percent accuracy on what devices are stuck to their networks is critical. The fact that Auvik does it automatically cuts down on the time we spend managing that aspect. It saves us a couple of hours per month per engineer. The customer is happy, our billing team is happy, and we don't have to spend cycles doing it. It's just a triple-win situation.

Also, because Auvik is in the cloud, we can troubleshoot with it from anywhere. Whereas, when dealing with an on-prem solution, if something's wrong with the internet coming in and I'm remote, I can't troubleshoot it or fix it. It's a different methodology and I feel that it is Auvik's special sauce. Because it's built around the cloud, it allows for a better, holistic view of what's going on and helps identify where the problems are. If you're on a broken network and you're trying to work on that network, it's very difficult.

The inventory and audit features are the most valuable. We are able to get a good map of everything in a network. Some clients don't know what they have or own, and having a tool that can compile all of that is a beneficial aspect of the solution. It cuts down on the number of hours required to search for things, because if you don't know what you don't know, you can miss things. Auvik is truly going to discover everything that is connected to the network. It gives us peace of mind and cuts down on the number of hours it takes to onboard a client.

We usually devote approximately an hour of time to onboarding a client environment. What that entails is gathering some basic information about passwords, SNMP credentials, et cetera. Being able to spend just an hour to get everything captured is pretty effective.

It is incredibly easy to use when it comes to its monitoring and management functions.

And it's incredibly important, given our work as a managed service provider, to have a single pane of glass environment. That is very crucial to being able to identify and diagnose issues with a network and fix them promptly. We don't have to log in to 15 different devices to track down how things are connected.

We've used different tools in the past for mapping network topology and we've also done it manually. The fact that Auvik is able to create a network map that is accurate and to do it automatically with its collector is supremely helpful. 

Since I last used the product about eight months ago, all of the things that I had complaints about have been fixed by Auvik.

One thing I would like to see is more functionality designed for managed services, such as multi-tenancy, to better manage things from an MSP perspective.

I have used Auvik for three different employers. I began using it four to five years ago.

I have never seen an outage with it. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to be on all the time.

It scales very well. You just install collectors on the different segments of your network where you need them, and it pieces everything else together in the background. It's really as scalable as you need it to be.

I have only had to deal with tech support once and they were able to identify what my issue was and referred me to their documentation platform for the resolution. If I had bothered to just read the documentation first, I wouldn't have needed to even have opened a ticket because they already had my issue fully documented. 

It was excellent support because not only did they know the answer, but they had proactively documented it and had it available even before I needed to ask the question. It was a good experience.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks before Auvik. Having switched, we are saving a lot of time, at least 10 hours per client-onboarding.

At my previous employer, we were using SolarWinds. The main and direct reason we made the switch is that SolarWinds had a gigantic breach. We've tested and talked through the security of Auvik's backend and we feel that it meets the various security controls that we needed to have implemented.

SolarWinds was, if I recall correctly, double the cost of Auvik. We gained cost savings and security by switching to Auvik. Also, when we were using SolarWinds, we had to have a dedicated SolarWinds server, whereas with Auvik, we do not need to have a server, we just have to have a collector device. And that device can be a "potato computer." We don't need a lot of resources or compute available to run the collector. We don't have to maintain a server or licensing or any of that other nonsense for the collector.

The initial setup was incredibly easy and easy to follow. They have a guide with very detailed and in-depth instructions for how to proceed. They also have detailed, in-depth instructions for every device on my network and how to get it talking to the Auvik collector. They provide very verbose, detailed instructions for how to make the tool work with a multitude of products.

For example, we had a WatchGuard device that was not communicating properly. I was able to go to the Auvik knowledge base, read through their troubleshooting article, and resolve it with some simple steps that they had documented.

For our implementation, it took maybe three minutes, after the collector code was implemented, until the network started to populate.

We have it deployed for multiple departments and multiple teams with a single location and a site-for-site VPN to another location. We have the collector installed on a VM in a Windows Server environment. It's connected to our switches and pulls through all the data.

With my previous company, we saw time to value within six months. With my current company, we're looking at closer to a year or a year and a half to break even with an investment in Auvik, but that's because of the clients we're working with.

Auvik is probably one of the more expensive options on the market for what it does. But if, as a managed services provider, you are working with clients that have large networks with large numbers of network devices, you can find efficiency to be gained that will make that value up.

It's been a harder sell for my current company because we are a very small MSP, and I don't know if we're going to be able to afford it overall. I know that the value is there, but when you have smaller clients that can't afford an extra few dollars a month, maybe it's not the right tool for them.

I think that Auvik is perfectly suited for a mid-range business model where there are many network devices or many networks that are segmented and connected in different locations. There is a ton of value in that scenario. Or, if you don't have a good inventory tool, the fact that Auvik builds that inventory has been really huge for our team. It cuts down on what tasks need to be done and allows for true transparency and knowing, 100 percent, that we have everything inventoried. We don't ever have to question what we see on Auvik, we know it's accurate every time. And that has helped us increase our billables because, before, we would have network devices that weren't being detected, but we were supporting them and not billing for them. Depending on your model for your managed services, there might be some ways to increase your billings.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing Auvik. That was mostly because Auvik was already in that magic quadrant. We just picked the tool and ran with it because we needed to be fast. We didn't have the luxury of time, we had to make a decision promptly.

Auvik's network visualization is intuitive to somebody whose job it is to work in that environment. It is not intuitive to someone who is a C-level executive. I would not want them to be looking at the tool. It's highly technical data. When you are a technical person you get the information you need. But if you're not technical, it's too much data. Don't use it as what you're going to present to a C-level. Use it to fix the problems and then make a different diagram to hand out to C-levels.

We have not leveraged a lot of the automation functionality within Auvik. We have not been able to use the tool to its fullest extent. We're gaining in that we can easily get the information we need, but we haven't leveraged the automation.

We use it to onboard new clients to get a baseline idea of what their network looks like and a picture of what we potentially need to upgrade or replace or get rid of entirely. And for existing clients, we use it for network troubleshooting to figure out if there are any loops in the network or, if we're seeing high packet spikes on specific interfaces, to track down the lags in the network.

We use it for small business networks, mainly SonicWall firewalls and HPE networking gear.

Auvik has helped us diagnose a lot of really painful network issues. We left it because it was a little too pricey for us at the time, but over time we realized the amount of labor involved in diagnosing even the smallest of network loops or broadcast storms is impossible without a tool like Auvik. It has taken some of our network problem-solving tickets from 10 to 15 hours down to two or three hours. We eat the cost of Auvik and, frankly, it's worth every penny in that regard.

We are also now delegating tickets for the network, moving more tickets to our tier-two engineers from our tier-three engineers.

Something Auvik does really well is provide a single integrated platform. That's very important for us as a managed service provider. We really need single-pane-of-glass for all of our programs. Auvik makes it super simple to have sub-tenants and you can then view high-level details from the "parent" tenant, which is our MSP interface, while also diving deep into the client-side and having full access there for assigning client-level permissions. For our co-managed clients, we can get their engineers in alongside our engineers to both view and manage the data.

Another great part of the platform is that it helps keep device inventories up to date. That's where we get an initial map of the network during client onboarding. We can then use that over time and say, "Okay, this switch is hitting the warranty." Auvik can detect the serial number and check the warranty status. We can prompt ourselves to call the client and say, "Hey, we should replace this before you run out of service." To an extent, this feature has created more work for us, but it's work that we need to do. It's notifying us that these things are expiring when, previously, we just didn't know. It's saving us the time of manually checking, but we weren't necessarily doing that consistently before Auvik.

The visualization of network mapping and topology is good, but it's not as customizable as I would like. I'd like to be able to adjust the images that are used for different vendors, for example. There are some improvements that could definitely be made, but it's definitely better than a lot of other programs in the market.

Also, the general feature set could use some work. For network mapping and network alerting, it's great for what it does. But it could provide more monitoring, such as jitter monitoring, which it doesn't have, and round-trip time for packets. I would like to see more network detail on the actual traffic that's flowing through the network. Maybe they could also provide some additional flow support.

It has some room for improvement, but especially since we first used it in 2015, it's come a long way. I'm really excited to see where they go next with it.

We started using Auvik in 2015 for about a year. We then left it and just started using it again about six months ago.

There haven't been any outages that have affected us. I've seen some status alerts from them saying, "Hey, we're conducting maintenance," or, "Hey, we had an emergency outage," but they have never been at a time when they affected us.

The scalability is fine. It's just a matter of adding new clients. It takes some time for each client, but that's true with every solution. It scales well because, especially once you get the setup down for one client, it's pretty easy for future clients.

Their support is quick to respond. I haven't had to reach out to them for a while now, but when I was reaching out to them during and shortly after onboarding, they were prompt, with same-day or next-business-day response times.

Positive

Between Auvik in 2015 and now, we were just using the built-in network device mapping of ConnectWise Automate and we just found that wasn't enough. It wasn't efficient and it just missed too much.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just followed the documentation. I had also done it in 2015. Although I didn't remember doing it back then, doing it again was really quick. I got one of our other network engineers involved to help at one point and he picked it up really fast. It's super easy to set up for high-level engineers, but I wouldn't necessarily trust a level-one tech with setting it up to the standard necessary to get it set for future use.

There is definitely some technical knowledge necessary. I couldn't task our tier-one techs, necessarily, with setting it up super quickly, but the documentation is good enough that, as long as you can follow documents, you can get through it. Speed is an issue there. A higher-level network engineer can speed through it really quickly.

The overall intuitiveness of Auvik's network visualization is fairly good, but that's where the configuration side comes in. If you don't configure it well from the beginning, it can be a mess to understand. So you need to have that higher level of knowledge to take care of that. But as long as you set it up right from the beginning, a tier-one tech can go in and look at that network map and see how things in the network are all connected together.

Once the Auvik collector was implemented, it said it would take about 10 minutes to populate the network mapping. I waited about 12 minutes and it wasn't done. I came back about 20 minutes later and it was done, so it took about 30 minutes, at most.

There is much less work in setting up Auvik versus previous solutions we have used. Maintenance consists of periodic checking to make sure all the credentials are still right. It uses usernames and passwords, so if you change your password and you don't update it in Auvik, things will stop working. So we check on that. Also, when you install new devices, they need additional setup in Auvik. It's not a tremendous amount of work, but there is some.

Auvik pays for itself. Network monitoring tools are all expensive. They take in a lot of data and they do a lot of processing. If you're hosting it yourself, it's going to be an expensive license. If they're hosting it for you, it's going to be expensive hosting. At the end of the day, unless you're paying employees minimum wage, which you shouldn't be doing, the network monitoring tool is going to save more hours of employee labor than the cost of the software.

We saw value from Auvik within five business days. We were really pushed when we set it up, and we pushed Auvik saying, "Hey, we need this now. We've got a client issue that we need to solve." They got our instance to us quickly, we got in there and got it set up in two or three days and we got that issue solved within five business days of contacting Auvik to get the solution. It was insanely quick.

The pricing is kind of steep, but it's worth the price. There's no beating around the bush. It's an expensive solution, but it's really the best solution there is for us.

We did some superficial looking at SolarWinds products and PRTG, and Kaseya has some products, but Auvik, at least in the MSP industry, is our standard. We did the demo and we were sold instantly.

It's fairly easy to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. I wouldn't say ease of use is one of our highest priorities. As an MSP, we need to cater to the lowest common denominator in our staff. We need to be able to tell our tier-one techs to at least get into this software to review the data—maybe not configure it—but at least review and understand it. Other tools, like PRTG or Nmap, just give you that data, but you need to be a network engineer to even read through it properly and understand it. Auvik really brings that down so that a junior can review things. Configuration, not as much, but that's not a limitation of Auvik, that's a limitation of network devices in general.

As a cloud-based solution, Auvik works well. The probe sends us a lot of data, but it's all tech-space data. There is constant traffic from your network to the Auvik servers, but it's not gigabytes of traffic data. We haven't had any issues with it. I definitely think that there's value in having an on-prem network solution, both for the sake of security and for being able to have a bit more access to the network than just a probe and then the cloud server architecture, but it works well for what we do.

Auvik helps us manage all our devices on the network.

Because we can do different things in one place, like investigate network issues, it has definitely saved us time; something like 20 percent. It gives us all the necessary data to make a decision in an instant. In addition to saving us time, it saves us work.

It also helps keep device inventories up to date. We are a small team but it helps us delegate low-level tasks to junior staff. And the fact that it tracks inventory gives us visibility into all devices and that obviously helps us keep everything up to date. It saves us about 20 percent of the time we would spend on that otherwise.

We've got visibility into all our devices, starting with routers and switches—networking devices—through to printers and user stations as well. It gives us an account of what is currently connected to our network.

And with the TrafficInsights option, I have information and statistics regarding our traffic and what is currently being utilized in terms of bandwidth. I use it quite often to establish if our bandwidth is fully utilized or not and whether there is any slowness on the network.

Another helpful feature is that you can remotely connect to a device directly from Auvik.

Apart from that, it's monitoring software. Obviously, you get alerts and you can configure them, which is a useful feature as well. You don't need to look at the dashboard all the time. Instead, you can rely on the alerting feature. If something goes wrong, you simply get an alert via email.

It provides us with a single, integrated platform. We can do quite a few things from Auvik. We can connect to different devices and we have visibility into what's connected to the network. There is a lot of useful information, like IP address, network address, as well as insight into traffic, time, date, what protocol is being used, and how much bandwidth is being used. It definitely gives us one platform where we can investigate quite a lot of stuff.

Another good feature is the network mapping and topology. It's clearly depicted on the dashboard, so you can see what's connected to what. It's designed well.

I would like to see improvement in terms of its integration with other applications and systems. I know that they are adding new systems. However, there is still work to be done there, such as integration with MS Teams. That is not working great for us. And integration with ticketing systems would be helpful. There is an integration module for the big systems, like ServiceNow, but we're using something else and it's not integrated.

I have been using Auvik for around two years.

It is stable. We haven't had any problems from the Auvik side. Updates haven't broken anything. There has been no Auvik downtime. It's all working pretty well.

It's definitely scalable. I don't know what the maximum is but we are adding new devices all the time. It depends on how many devices your license covers, but apart from that, there are no real restrictions.

We have one main site with up to 1,000 users at the moment. We also have about 15 external locations, which are like shops, but the majority of our users are working at the main site. We also have some remote solutions, VPN, for the users. It's a hybrid environment with Microsoft Office 365. Most of our stuff is in the cloud along with some on-premises solutions.

The solution's technical support is really good. There are different ways to contact them, including phone, chat, and email. You can easily contact them. They also have a really good knowledge base system where you can actually find resolutions yourself.

Positive

We still use multiple applications for managing our network, but nothing specifically like Auvik. Auvik gives us one place to do different things. It's easier to see the information because it is displayed on the dashboard in a nice way.

I was involved in the deployment of Auvik to some degree. It was quite straightforward. They gave us good guidelines and we just followed what was requested of us. If we were in doubt, we could always go back to them, and they would guide us through the process. Overall, the process was quite straightforward.

I don't remember how long the onboarding process took. I think it was about one month. It involved two people from our side. One was our senior infrastructure engineer, who is my colleague, and me, as IT infrastructure engineer.

It doesn't require any maintenance. Everything is in the cloud. Apart from updates from Auvik, we don't really have to touch it or maintain anything.

I'm not involved on the cost side of our solutions, but the price must be good enough because we have renewed the license.

I wasn't involved in the decision-making process, but I would guess that cost was really important, as we are a charity. If not the most important, the cost of the system would be one of the deciding factors.

I've used SolarWinds in the past, and Auvik is definitely a good system to have on your network. It helps with your work and saves time. I would definitely recommend it. 

It's not too difficult to use Auvik's monitoring and management functions. There are quite a few settings and a lot of information. In the beginning, it can be a bit overwhelming. There are a lot of tabs on the left-hand side. But, the longer you use it, the easier it becomes. Ease of use is definitely not the first thing we look at. It's a bonus feature. The primary purpose of Auvik is to monitor our network. As long as that's being done, that's our priority. If it's easy to use, of course, that's more convenient. It is a big plus. But it's not our first priority.

I would advise going to the Auvik Training Portal where you can go through a lot of videos and short modules. You can learn more advanced techniques for using Auvik, and maybe a little bit about the more advanced settings you can use. The solution has many options and settings, so it's good to do some reading and a bit of study to use it to its full potential.

It's a very good solution to have, with loads of information in one place. It helps us in our investigations and saves us a lot of time.