Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

When I started working with Auvik, I was working for a managed service provider helping several clients manage their network environments. We tried Auvik and decided to stick with it. It is used for network monitoring and different troubleshooting issues.

Previously, we were logging into a client's firewall to see what was going on for troubleshooting or trying to get some data out of that. When our clients were using Ubiquiti, we logged into their network in a tenant network environment and navigated through different panels and settings to sort things out. Gathering all that data was laborious and time-consuming. 

We saved on labor costs by making our client tech support more efficient. Auvik enables us to narrow down network issues and address them even faster because we aren't sifting through data and logs on multiple solutions or dashboards. Everything's on Auvik. From an MSP perspective, clients get a much better service, quicker response, and lower time to resolution. It saves me at least a couple of hours a day. Our entire team of network administrators is saving us dozens of hours per day.

New devices are automatically added to the network. You input the network credentials, and we get the metrics almost instantly when a new device or endpoint appears without changing the configuration because the settings are already in Auvik. We use another solution for asset inventory, but Auvik keeps track of assets.

It frees up time for your team to work on other tasks. It might even free up an entire technician. The permissions are granular. We have a multitenancy setup where you can assign members of your tech team different permissions. 

You can get junior techs monitoring or troubleshooting without affecting the principles of these privileges. Auvik thought of everything from a security perspective, and the junior techs don't need much training. It only takes a couple of hours to show the junior techs how to navigate. The rest is intuitive.
Because of the granular controls for filtering, notifications, and alerts, you don't necessarily need dedicated technicians to sift through logs. You can respond when you get an alter. 

I like Auvik's SNMP capabilities. Seeing all the metrics and analytics in one dashboard is a game-changer. The topology is excellent. I give the network visualization 10 out of 10 for intuitiveness. The UI and user interface are top-tier. None of the other network monitoring solutions I've tried has more features than Auvik. Nothing compares. 

I deployed NetFlow monitoring for one of our clients, which was great. I wasn't a cybersecurity analyst then, but Auvik helped me get into that field. The data captured and displayed and that real-time monitoring and alerting are critical for any network environment.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions aren't tricky to use. It takes no time to configure the notifications, and the dashboard is nice. The topology is impressive. I remember setting up a TV for some of our client environments to monitor. 

You don't need to interact with it much because you get those alerts and reports sent to your email when there are issues. You can customize the triggers, so you're not bogged down with notification fatigue. It isn't a complicated solution, and Auvik's training is excellent. 

Everything is a single pane of glass, and Auvik is compatible with many different network hardware vendors. We had clients with SonicWall and Fortinet appliances. We primarily use Ubiquiti devices, but it doesn't matter. When a device isn't compatible, Auvik helps us integrate it quickly using various workarounds. We can easily do a bit of programming in Linux or set up specific SNMP triggers. Auvik is the solution regardless of the environment.

Auvik is also a Canadian company, and it means a lot to us to support another Canadian company. They've grown phenomenally over the years. They're not as big as Shopify, but all the Big Tech heavy hitters are all Americans, so it's nice to see Auvik reach for the stars.

I have used Auvik off and on for five years.

I have never had issues with Auvik. It isn't a resource hog. I've never seen it crash. I don't think I've ever used a tech platform or tool that doesn't crash. The stability is phenomenal. They have their maintenance windows, but those are scheduled.

You can scale from a tiny little network to a massive network with VPLS, MPLS, and multiple branch locations. It reads site-to-site VPN tunnels. Scalability is not an issue. 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. Auvik support is phenomenal, and they're Canadians. That was a huge plus because we are Canadians. I'm a French and English speaker. I remember speaking to one of the tech support teams in French, and I was impressed with that. 

They're based out of Waterloo, Ontario. I've been there, and I'm also in Ontario myself. The French community out there isn't big, so I was impressed with that. They're friendly and knowledgeable, and you never feel like a number to them.

We used SolarWinds for a while, but the UI was not great. It did the job, but SolarWinds' feature set left something to be desired. Switching to Auvik was night and day. It was the Cadillac of solutions, and everything was on one dashboard. You have the topology on the screen and click on a device in the map to connect or send command line scripts and commands to it. We used a few different solutions, but nothing compared to its features. Auvik's UI and the UX sold me on it.

I deployed Auvik for my last company and another company I worked with. I tried to switch everybody over to Auvik. I don't get paid for that. I believe in the product. The setup is straightforward if you have fundamental network knowledge and Linux skills. A level-one tech might take a little time, but you could probably teach a high schooler to do this. It isn't rocket science.

I deployed Auvik out of the box. After configuring the collector, it takes five to 15 minutes for the network map to populate. The last time I configured it out of the box, I set it up and left it because I trusted the solution. The first time I set it up, it took around 10 or 15 minutes tops to see things show up on the topology.

They offer training for it, but it was like, "Here's the KB article. Go at it." We didn't need any support. After deployment, Auvik is pretty lightweight, maintenance-wise. It updates periodically, but we've never had issues. 

The price shouldn't be an issue for a larger organization, but a smaller organization or an MSP might struggle because the billing is per device. You're paying for your firewalls and devices that appear on the network. If you have a smaller organization with an extensive network, your revenue won't be able to support that cost. That's probably the biggest downside for me.

However, you should go with Auvik if you can squeeze it into your budget because the time savings and ease of use are worth it. In the long run, you'll end up paying for the other solutions in labor costs and other expenses. You can use PRTG, but it's a pain to configure and resource-heavy. Auvik never causes issues on the networks because it's lightweight. The upfront costs may be higher, but it will save you time and money in the long run. Your tech team will appreciate it as well because of the user experience, in my opinion.

I've tested Pulseway, ManageEngine, SolarWinds, PRTG, and Domos. Auvik blasts the other ones out of the water. In addition to the topology and the user interfaces, there is nothing like Auvik from a display or user experience perspective. 

Auvik's dashboard is clean and not too busy. It's easy to use, interpret and drill down into a device if necessary. It rapidly detects changes in the network environment and responds quickly with alerts.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. Auvik is a powerful tool, and security is critical for my clients and me. I recommend following all the steps and securing your environment. Auvik has made MFA mandatory, which is essential. It is a powerful tool, so you wouldn't want that to fall into the wrong hands. Access to the company's network map is a hacker's jackpot. Follow the steps and reach out to support if you're unsure. There's also a pretty big community now. I've seen that grow over the years, which has been great. 

The solution helps us get a granular understanding of our environment, all the way down to the endpoints, to Azure, the networking, and all of the networking equipment, whether it's the access points, the firewall, or the switch. We can identify any latency or drops by keeping an eye on the network.

Auvik offers a single integrated platform for our organization simplifying our network monitoring.

Before Auvik we had to log into FortiGate followed by the internet service provider before we could log into Azure. We would then use an RMM for the endpoints, whether it was a Mac device or a Windows device.

Auvik has saved us approximately 20 hours per week of work that was previously completed by our support personnel.

Auvik allowed us to pinpoint root causes quicker, which saved us time investigating different environments. We can now focus on projects and progress further along. Additionally, we've been able to hold the ISP accountable.

Auvik helps us visualize the network mapping/topology for our organization which is required for our security audits regarding HIPPA.

It is pretty intuitive. I give the solution an eight out of ten for intuitiveness but the dashboard requires some getting used to.

The solution has affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks by allowing us to pull up a single window pane and get a quick snapshot of all our locations, including our data center, which is in Azure.

Keeping the network up is critical for us. We have a voiceover IP phone solution that rides on this network, as well as our electronic medical records. Without visibility to help our IT teams focus on our network, we would have a lot of trouble finding needles in haystacks.

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date. I ran a comparative analysis against our RMM and other RMMs, and then against our vulnerability assessment tool, and Auvik is spot on.

Its ability to keep our device inventories up to date has helped save us time. Deploying devices to users takes up a lot of our time. We have around 400 devices in use, and we have to replace broken devices often. Auvik saves us around five hours per week when it comes to documentation and keeping our inventory up to date.

Auvik helps our team focus on high-value tasks and delegate low-level tasks to junior staff by allowing us to focus on resolving network issues reported by end users and get a clear understanding of what's going on. This allows us to focus on our projects at hand.

We are able to identify issues on the server and address them quicker, rather than having to conduct an additional investigation and eliminate possibilities. We can identify issues within 15 minutes, as opposed to the two hours it used to take. On average, we now save 45 to 90 minutes per issue per day.

Auvik is a cloud-based solution, versus on-prem network monitoring solutions that require less maintenance. There is no on-prem server or license to worry about. The cloud solution is more convenient and efficient. We pride ourselves on being a leader in cloud adoption.

The most valuable feature is the notification that alerts us to an offline server, whether the server is rebooting, resetting, or if we have network issues with the internet service provider. We were running into problems trying to hold our ISP accountable because they were telling us it was not an issue on their end. We've done a lot of research and wasted man-hours investigating the Azure environment and the local network, which is set up as a hub and spoke-type configuration. Auvik has really given us granular information that we needed to address issues within the ISP environment.

The monitoring and management function of Auvik is fine once we get the hang of it.

The solution's ease of use for our operations is good once we adapt to the visual side.

Auvik does not require any maintenance.

The dashboard needs to be more intuitive.

I would like more training information on the dashboard and the different functionalities under the various modules.

I have been using the solution for over one month.

The solution's stability is great and we have not had any issues.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The technical support is great. I was out of town and missed a couple of the calls, and Auvik's tech support reached out to reschedule. We haven't had a problem with them whatsoever. The technical support team has been right on target.

Positive

Deploying the agent was easy and there were no issues. I oversaw the deployment with our IT director. I'm the director of IS, and familiar with how Auvik was set up. The probes were placed at each location to get the information we needed for our IT scheme. 

We deployed the solution out of the box.

Auvik started to collect data in real time and map the network without any issues.

Compared to the numerous other agents we have deployed, whether it's 2R, JAM for Ninja, Addigy, or CyberCNS; Auvik is very easy. The most time-consuming piece is setting up the probe.

The implementation was completed in-house with a team of three people consisting of two system admins to set up the probes on the server, and a network admin for the network side.

We evaluated FortiGate, and we considered consolidating one of the RMMs that we're using. However, we required a solution that would allow us to remote into an end user's device to address the issue on the ticket. Auvik is a lot easier to use, and it costs less for us. Auvik also has more bells and whistles than the FortiGate solution.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We are a healthcare company with 16 locations, including our central billing office. We also have a data center in Azure that hosts 400 endpoints and around 300 users.

We've primarily used Auvik for:

• network monitoring,
• mapping out client networks,
• and being able to get remote access to networking equipment.

Being able to get documentation through ConnectWise Manage and IT Glue is one of the biggest ways we're able to reduce our response time. Auvik provides relevant documentation and information from endpoints that we would normally have to manually collect. If we need to open a case with Dell, HP, FortiClient, or FortiGate, Auvik does a fantastic job collecting and providing the information required to our team so they know exactly what we're dealing with.

Auvik helps visualize the network mapping/topology reorganization but we can't always export the information and have that be the best network map when we're presenting to a client. However, with the exported information the solution provides us and a few touch-ups in Visio, we can clean the information up and make it very presentable.

Auvik has improved our IT team's visibility into our remote and distribution networks globally by providing us with a single pane of glass that most of our teams can access. This allows our escalation team and project team to quickly identify and fix network problems, or set alerts so we are notified of any issues. This is a fantastic feature.

Having visibility is very important for our IT teams because being able to see and communicate with everyone quickly and easily is a huge component of transparency and making sure everyone is in the right place.

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date. We found that without Auvik, we were not able to get all of our network equipment into ConnectWise Manage, and it was difficult to keep track of all the relevant data. With Auvik, we were able to get everything set up efficiently and have all the information we need at our fingertips.

Auvik's ability to keep our device inventory updated has saved us time. 
We spent 10 to 20 hours a year updating and validating information before Auvik. Auvik has dramatically cut that down.

Since we've been using Auvik, communicating with our escalation team has been a lot more concise. We can focus on issues easier when it's a client that has Auvik because we can pinpoint exactly what's going on with their network. This dramatically increases our time to troubleshoot and reduces how long it takes to identify an issue and resolve it.

We have a client that has two different locations with at least one location using Auvik. The solution has been fantastic in helping pinpoint their networking equipment and firewalls and validating and providing data to the client on the performance of their network equipment. Auvik has been fantastic at providing our medical institutions with real-time data on their network and monitoring. We work with medical billing companies and it's very important for them to keep their networks up and running. It gives everyone peace of mind knowing that Auvik will notify all of us when there's a problem. Most of our clients are in medium size business areas, with a lot of them being singular locations. We have some clients in the manufacturing space where we use Auvik for monitoring temperatures in the environment.

The network discovery feature allows us to put in a subnet and have the software automatically detect all devices connected to that subnet. Once the SMP is set up correctly, we can then go to our clients and tell them which devices are connected to each other. Being an MSP, it's beneficial to be able to go to our clients and require as little documentation from them as possible, as long as we have access to help them discover their own network. We've had a few clients that we've taken over from departing IT people who didn't leave us with much information. Auvik has helped us become successful with those clients.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions are easy to use.

It is easy to use but it's not intuitive until we familiarize ourselves with the solution. Once we are familiar with the solution it is easy to set up.

The solution provides a single integrated platform for a number of our clients.

We have integrated our RMM which has multiple components with Auvik because from a network monitoring and management perspective, having a single integrated platform is very important. 

Auvik helps our team to focus on high-value tasks and delegating. One of the great advantages of Auvik is its ability to automate the collection of information. This is an immensely important part of our operation, and it makes automating the process very efficient.

I haven't used many on-prem network monitoring solutions, but the fact that Auvik's in the cloud and we can switch between different clients very quickly is a huge win. It may take a little bit longer to connect to a device when we're doing it through the Auvik portal in the cloud, but we don't have to VPN in or do anything else to connect.

The training is not intuitive. The little bit I've done with the training is fantastic but I would like to have a bit more intuitiveness. 

I have been using Auvik for two years.

We've never had any problems with the tool itself, but sometimes we have issues with equipment or lack of documentation. Auvik has never been at fault though. The only time Auvik had a problem was during the AWS outage that impacted 75 percent of our tools.

The Auvik probe is designed for businesses of all sizes. Once it's deployed, it automatically starts pulling in data and scanning our network. Even interns can use it, and it's easy to hand off to other team members.

Auvik's tech support is the best I've ever used. I only opened one case with them, and within five minutes the support person called me and we resolved everything within an hour. He even went above and beyond to resolve the issue. I've been working in tech support for over a decade now and that was one of the best people I've ever worked with. We found out that no one had updated Auvik's API integration with ConnectWise Manage. The support person walked me through the process and shared everything that was reported. The fact that he called and walked me through the steps, especially as I was a new person to Auvik, left a big impression. I compare all of our other vendor support to Auvik's support, with Auvik being the gold standard.

Positive

We previously used LogicMonitor but we didn't leverage it because it was absolutely atrocious, painful to use, and did not compare to Auvik in the slightest.

The initial setup is straightforward and I look forward to deploying the solution each time because of its ease.

I've deployed the solution to at least three or four of our clients. I've been the one to clean up the subnets and get everything mapped out with credentials or find missing credentials. The biggest aspect that slowed anything down was our lack of documentation or having to confirm exactly what we need to do in order to fully deploy.

We've mostly installed Auvik on preexisting servers and the first thing we do is set up a probe. We find the server we're going to use as our deployment server and install it there. It takes five minutes to get everything set up. Auvik then starts scanning to find the information. From there the solution tells us what credentials are missing, and if we have them we start entering the credentials. Within a day we have a full network map. It takes some time for Auvik to fully discover and do everything it requires.

Deploying Auvik is one of my main responsibilities as part of the onboarding team.

We started having information populate within half an hour of doing its initial discovery. The one client we had the most documentation on had most of the environment mapped out within an hour. Some had 10 different subnets we had to go through. It was a lot of discovery, but the solution was also validating credentials on our side. Auvik was fantastic to use and provided too much data at times.

The implementation is completed in-house and only requires one person.

I have seen time-to-value with Auvik. I use the solution frequently when we do onboarding or when we are trying to assess a situation in a client's environment.

We can't put a price tag on the efficiency and reliability of Auvik.

The pricing model makes a lot of sense and it's pretty reasonable considering it's based on the Managed Network devices that we have out there. We've been able to wrap that efficiently into a lot of our contracts when we're selling a full IT solution.

Compared to other solutions Auvik is streamlined so even if we're paying more for Auvik, it reduces the overall amount of time that I have to put in one place, which means I can bill for other items and take on other billable tasks.

We evaluated two other security providers, but they weren't direct competitors. Lionguard is more focused on event security, while the other provider is more focused on guarding property. There are some overlaps, but they provide different tasks.

I give the solution a 10 out of 10.

We're not using a lot of the automation and so, we're not as familiar with it as we could be. We've been dabbling with the alerts, and that's where we're looking to expand. But I'm not familiar with the automation side of Auvik.

Once we know what we're doing Auvik is a very efficient tool. It's very different from a lot of other tools. That's just the nature of it being a network management tool. Auvik is excellent at what it does.

There is very minimal maintenance required and Auvik is not usually the cause of this problem. Maintenance usually occurs when someone is working on a project and does not update Auvik or the project's documentation so that the rest of the team can update it.

When deploying Auvik for the first time we must make sure we have our documentation ready to go when doing a mass deployment to new sites or replacing our current existing one. The lack of documentation from the company using the solution is the only aspect that slows Auvik down.

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.

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.

I am an MSP and I use Auvik to monitor my client's networks.

When we experienced network issues, we simply lacked the visibility to understand the underlying causes. Auvik provided us with much-needed visibility into our network, enabling us to effectively diagnose and resolve problems.

We are using Auvik's SaaS platform with an on-premises connector.

Auvik provides an intuitive interface that is easy to use. The user-friendly interface is helpful when troubleshooting network issues. Auvik alerts me if something being monitored goes offline, allowing me to track it down. Additionally, there are various locations where I can access different pieces of information, enabling me to review audit logs or alerts. This feature is quite helpful.

Auvik's network map and dashboard give us real-time visibility into our network.

Utilizing the network map and dashboard provides a straightforward approach to gaining real-time visibility into our network. While the network map may contain a wealth of information that necessitates further exploration, the ability to visualize the network in real time without the need for Visio development is helpful. With the proper configuration, the network map dashboard provides full network visibility.

Auvik helps minimize blind spots and provides an additional resource for monitoring and tracking network performance. Proactive alerting is crucial, as it's often preferable to have a system notify me of issues before users do. While not always possible, Auvik enables me to be proactive in addressing network problems.

Auvik has helped reduce our mean time to resolution by 50 percent.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on resolution.

The most advantageous feature is the ability to back up the configuration settings on switches and routers. This has been immensely helpful, and I am proficient in utilizing Auvik's premium network monitoring service, Traffic Insight. It provides comprehensive network visibility. Furthermore, I appreciate its integration with my ticketing system, Autotask.

I'd like to see some enhancements to Auvik's network map, including the ability to focus on specific areas without viewing the entire map. This would allow for more granular analysis and troubleshooting. Additionally, introducing security-related features would be beneficial. For instance, implementing abnormal traffic detection would alert us to unusual network activity, potentially indicating a security breach. Furthermore, incorporating baseline snapshots would enable us to compare current network behavior against a standard reference point, facilitating the identification of anomalies. This could be achieved through simple checkbox controls.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

I would rate the stability of Auvik nine out of ten.

I use Auvik for small businesses, and it scales to meet my needs.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We had been using ConnectWise, but it did not meet our needs. When we informed ConnectWise support that we were switching to Auvik, they acknowledged that Auvik was a more suitable solution.

The deployment wasn't as straightforward as I had anticipated, but it wasn't overly difficult either. It required careful attention to the instructions and a thorough understanding of the installation process, making it somewhat more complex than initially envisioned. I would rate the complexity of the deployment five out of ten. I completed the deployment myself and it took a few days.

Auvik's pricing is generally reasonable. However, I have occasionally encountered discrepancies between my expected and actual billing amounts. I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact cause of these variations, but I'm unsure whether they stem from additional service inclusions or unexpected price increases. The lack of clarity regarding my consumption compared to the pricing structure has been an issue. Despite not making any perceived changes, my pricing has fluctuated, and the company has denied any alterations. This has left me perplexed about the underlying factors.

I would rate Auvik ten out of ten.

I have Auvik deployed for multiple of my small to medium clients.

Occasionally, Auvik's automated agent upgrades malfunction, requiring my assistance. Maintenance is minimal.

I recommend Auvik.

We utilize Auvik for monitoring our clients' environments. 

It plays a highly critical part in our operations. A part of the product that we sell to our clients involves a service level agreement that we will respond to within X amount of time, and we'll monitor their environment for them. Because of that, this plays an absolutely critical function.

The collectors that they use are constantly connecting to Auvik to make sure that you're aware that it's active, it's running. You would think all of the other monitoring solutions out there do the same thing, and many do claim that, but most can't deliver that, whereas Auvik can. There have been many times when some of our other tools that are also monitoring things should be reporting that there's an outage at a location or a server is down or something like that, but that's just not the case. With those other tools, it doesn't even blip on their radar that the system is completely hard down and it's a big issue, whereas, with Auvik, the moment a collector disconnects, and it has been disconnected for the amount of time that we defined, it immediately alerts us and says, "We can't communicate with this machine." It's really handy. You can sell the feature all day long, but if that feature doesn't work, it's not a real feature. Auvik works. It's very reliable, at least from our experiences so far.

I enjoy it when it comes to visualizing the network mapping/topology for the organization. It doesn't just provide a network map. It gives us a global view, an actual Earth view, and it allows us to see where the devices are physically located, which is very handy. Especially if we need to dispatch something or if we need to compare a power outage to maybe a storm that's passing by, it gives us the map and visual of where a device is located. When you drill down into it, you can click on the actual nodes that are on the map and go down as granular as you want. You can see the actual network topology of the environment. It does a pretty good job of figuring out how it's all laid out. You've got a collector from Auvik that's sitting there, and it explores and discovers the devices. So far, I haven't seen an instance where it couldn't figure out the exact network topology. There's always this rare case where something gets kind of wonky in regard to how your server is set up. You might have multiple connections coming in or whatever, but so far, it has been able to define all that. That's something that a lot of people don't realize is normally a manual task. You have to break out Visio and start dragging and dropping a lot of icons, name it yourself, define the IPs, etc. Auvik does it automatically, which is just cool.

Our client environments are not a single vendor product. There are multiple vendors coming in from different directions. We deal in data systems, which is the industrial automation type of stuff that deals with wastewater treatment plants, water treatment plants, etc. Due to the nature of our business, being able to have an accurate inventory of what's at what site, what's the IP address, or what are the specs on a server is super important.

It provides an integrated platform for a few brands. It doesn't provide a fully integrated platform for all the brands and manufacturers out there. It's probably a little bit more skewed toward Cisco products, which we don't use a lot. It would be nice if they had full integration into Dell's tools, as well as VMware for Hypervisor and things like that. Having a single integrated platform would save us a lot of time across the board. Currently, we have to use Auvik for monitoring. It's probably the most reliable one that we have so far. We've used quite a few in the past, including Ninja, some Microsoft options, and several others. Everyone promises it, but far and few can truly deliver a single pane of glass experience. The Auvik tool gives us a single pane of glass for all of the monitoring needs, and then, if we need to drill into on a system-by-system basis and remotely manage the system and remote into a machine, we have to use other tools for that.

My favorite feature so far is the alerts section. We've got our main company at the top, and then all of our customers are underneath that. We can either filter by a single customer or one of their sites specifically, or look at it from the top down and see the whole picture. It's an easy way for me to be able to have a high-level overview. I can see the status of all of our sites simultaneously without having to really dig in and get super granular unless I want to. It gives that ability too, which is cool.

The functionality on a PC is definitely better than in a mobile environment. If you are logging in to Auvik on your phone or on a tablet, it's a little janky at times, but on a PC, it's fantastic.

If I could make a wish list of things that I would like to see from Auvik, I would definitely love to see more vendor integration with specific manufacturers. They've got that integration with Cisco, but it would be awesome to also have that with other major brands, such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. It should have integration with more vendors, and in general, being able to quickly and easily access vendor-specific tools from the portal would be amazing. A real-life case scenario would be that we know that Dell servers have iDRAC cards on them, which allows for remote control and a remote KVM keyboard, video, and mouse functionality. It would be nice to be able to have the direct link baked in and be able to quickly just say, "I need to remotely manage this machine," and then you can just click, and you're in. In regards to VMware, VMware is one of the top three hypervisors for virtualization. It would be awesome to be able to quickly and easily identify that this is the VMware cluster, this is the ESXi server, and this is a vCenter. We should be able to quickly and easily log into consoles and remotely manage things as needed from there. This kind of functionality for the Cisco products is baked into Auvik right now, but it doesn't exist for other manufacturers. It's one of those things that will happen as time goes by. They need to make sure that it's embedded and done properly and that they're working with the manufacturers directly, instead of trying to duct tape a solution.

The other improvement would be more on the software side of things in terms of understanding that patch management happens and vulnerabilities are security patched all the time. There should be more direct integration with Microsoft updates. Pretty much everyone uses Windows, and being able to easily identify that there's a patch pending, and maybe even be able to push it, would be awesome.

My direct experience with Auvik has been since August.

In terms of full stability, which also includes their response to security issues, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

The sky's the limit. There don't seem to be any actual limits on the number of collectors that you're able to deploy. We started out at 40, and we're at 63 right now. It scales easily and effortlessly. So, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

It's decent. It's a little difficult to get a hold of them sometimes, but, overall, it's not bad. Comparing it to the big three computer manufacturers, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, they fall in Dell's mid-tier level support. It's pretty decent.

Positive

We use multiple tools. We went for Auvik because of its dependability. We have to have a reliable report as to what's up and what's down. Ninja is great on a surface level, but it doesn't update live. It has a periodic updating process. You don't really know when it's going to update next. You would expect it to be live, but it's not. Having accurate, live information was the reason why we started with Auvik.

This isn't just a one-application show for us. We've got Auvik. We've got Ninja, and we've got several other tools that we use for monitoring to cover redundancy and any spillover situation. By far, Auvik is the cleanest. It's the most up-to-date. It's the most accurate. Ninja, for example, is a decent competitor against Auvik's platform. Ninja reports things, but the information is very clustered up and very hard to read and discern. Once you get used to it, you're okay, but on your first experience with Ninja, it's horrible. Auvik is very clean. It has that modern look and feel to it. Anybody who uses modern apps and web apps is going to be able to quickly and easily figure out his or her way through it.

The most important thing when comparing Auvik versus other competitors is that we have found Auvik to be the most reliable. It will report when things are out. It will report everything based on how we have it set up and defined. This reliability is very important. Ninja is great, and as a team, when we were using only Ninja, and we weren't utilizing Auvik at all, Ninja would report things, but it wouldn't always report that live, up-to-date view of what's going on. You might have alerts saying, "Oh, it's out." You're like, "No. No, we cleared that alert. Why is it still showing that?" There's no real easy way to discern how to clear the alerts if it just doesn't detect it automatically, whereas Auvik is always up to date. It's always communicating, and if it ever drops that communication, it immediately notifies you, which is awesome.

The alerts that are provided to us correspond and correlate directly to the SLAs that we are selling and promising to our clients. So, in the event of a full outage or whatever, it gives us the ability to quickly and easily identify that there is an outage at this site, and it's this device that is currently causing the problem, or we haven't had any communication for X amount of time to this IP address. We are then able to say, "Okay, this is a high priority because it's affecting outage, and it's affecting the service for our client," whereas, something like when disk-based utilization is 80% has a high priority, but it's not a major issue. Auvik allows us to quickly and easily prioritize types of incidents, for example, outage versus 80% storage. It allows us to clarify whether something is an incident or not.

I was not involved with the setup, but I was involved in the sourcing and options. That was me working with the company, before I actually worked with the company directly, and looking at all the different options that were out there. Auvik seems to be the one that made the most sense. In regards to the setup process, I can see that the general setup itself as an administrator is not difficult. It takes 15 to 30 minutes on average. You can add in some videos to watch if you want to figure out how to do something or whatever, and you're probably going to be up and running within about two hours.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It does that itself. It updates its own collectors. You have to just install the collector. Once that's installed, it'll update itself. Outside of that, it's a web or cloud tool. It's software as a service. So, they handle all the maintenance and things like that on the backend from there.

Being a cloud solution, the always-on communication between Auvik and its collectors gives you that real-time status, and it's amazing. With an on-prem solution, if something goes wrong with your equipment, that's going to cause issues. If you're doing it even in your own private spot or even public cloud or whatever, you're having to control that kind of infrastructure, environment, and things like that. It's one of those things that annoys people when they see that there's going to be an outage for a tool because of updates, maintenance, and things like that, but Auvik has been always on the spot making sure that we're aware, "Hey, heads up on this date at this time, maintenance on these machines is going to be happening. These are the things that will either function or non-function. These are things that are going to be changing and so on, so forth." I've also seen several instances where they responded to a security threat, and they did that really quickly. Our outage time on that from Auvik was measured in minutes. If we were doing that and hosting it ourselves, even though we have a decently-sized team, we don't have the time to do all that kind of work. Monitoring and maintaining all that is amazing with the whole cloud option.

It's hard to measure what it's providing. However, considering the cost that we are paying in regards to what we're getting out of it, it has easily paid for itself within the first few months just based on our current deployment environment. We have to have accurate information. We have to know when something is up and down, and if it's not, we break SLA, our service level agreement, with our clients. If we do that, we have to pay money to our clients because we broke contracts. One broken contract is going to cost us five grand, and this prevents us from losing that, so it's awesome.

There is a reduction in our mean time to resolution. When we were using just Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware that there was an issue until Ninja just had an update. Now, we're aware within the timeframe that we assigned, which is 15 minutes, that communication has been lost. We give it a couple of minutes to make sure that it's not just an internet blip or whatever, and then we're able to quickly attack it. With Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware until a customer calls us to say something is broken. It's time lost in regards to the fact that we should have been aware of it before the customer even had a chance to pick up the phone and do that.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about price, I would say that it's the cost of doing business. It's just the fact that it's going to cost something. The amount of money that you're spending on these tools is a fraction of what you would be paying for an individual to be doing the same thing live as a person. I believe that our bill is somewhere around the $600 range per month. We're monitoring about 63 machines. Most of them are servers. So, $10 to monitor it for an entire month is amazing. You couldn't get somebody in India for that cheap.

We definitely evaluated other options. We use Ninja in-house, so it was one of the first things that we originally evaluated. We also evaluated ConnectWise and a few others. It was not very difficult to pull up a list of the competitors and look at them all. We originally had decided on Ninja because it was something that most people knew about, but then we're like, "Yeah, it's great when it works, but it doesn't always work." That's when we started looking at the other options, and we landed on Auvik.

It's a newer company on the horizon. They're still developing features. You can tell that. So, if a feature that you are wanting isn't available, give it time. It'll probably come.

It takes a little bit of time to get used to. When I first started, back in August of this year, I was getting my feet wet with Auvik as a tool. I had heard of it, but I never really personally used it and experienced it. I've been in my IT field for well over 16 years, so it's not like I'm not capable of understanding how to use something. One of the things that come into play is understanding that the default view that you see is like a zoomed-out version. Being able to traverse that, being able to go back and forward, and understanding where you're at in the tree takes a little bit of time to get used to and follow.

On top of that, there's the reporting functionality below it, where it's reporting alerts and things like that. At first glance, you're like, "Oh, everything's fine. There are no alerts," but then you realize that you are only looking at the last 15 minutes or the last three hours or whatever. You need to understand that there's that little date field midway on the right side and of purple color that you choose to select the date range that you're looking at. It will automatically redraw and redo things based on the selected range, and you can drill down into whatever system you're connected to, which is really cool.

We haven't experienced much automation so far. Right now, we're using it just as a reporting tool, but it's something that we're looking at doing. Outside of that, it's just reporting and doing the network discovery and watching for outages and any types of alerts. The process of doing that is kind of pseudo automation just in the fact that that's what Auvik sells as their core option or whatever. As a reporting tool, it's great, but so far, we haven't really dug into many of the integrations or functionalities past that.

It hasn't helped our team focus on high-value tasks while delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because, in our environment, we're all equal peers. We all have our own specialties, per se, such as networking versus storage or VMware versus Hyper-V, but, in general, we're all of the equal stances.

As a solution for monitoring and things like that, it's awesome, and I would rate it a 10 out of 10.