Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use it mostly for monitoring. Also, we're pretty big on getting device configs from it, but I don't know if we have used any of those configurations to roll anything back. For a lot of our network equipment, whenever you update the firmware, part of the feature of updating it is that it backs that up automatically for us. 

There are around 20 or more clients in Auvik that we monitor. Mostly, it's just for alerts if things go down, but with firewalls, we specifically have alerts that monitor memory because we have a problem with a couple of firewalls that go into the conserve mode if their memory hits a certain percentage. It's a huge part of our monitoring. Half or more of the alerts that come in, come in through Auvik.

It has made monitoring a lot easier. It has made finding devices and charting network maps for onboarding companies easier. If you are a tech and looking at a company for the first time, you can just look at the network map and quickly get an understanding of how big it is, how complicated it is, how many network tunnels there are, and what's the main firewall or the center of the network stack. It's super easy to quickly acclimate to a new network and troubleshoot up or down a network stack. I find that fantastic.

Being able to visualize the network mapping/topology for the organization is its best feature. It's very reliable. It'll more likely add a device that's not important than it will miss an important device. It does it so quickly and automatically, and not a lot of time is spent managing the network map. Every once in a while, once or twice a year, there'll be an alert, and we investigate it and we find out that it's just an obsolete device that was never removed from the map. So, you just delete the device. Other than that, it takes care of itself. It's fantastic. I don't have a lot of criticisms of it other than just keeping it up.

It's very intuitive when it comes to network visualizations. It is very easy to pick up, and it's great that there's a little key there that always tells you exactly how it's connected. It was probably the easiest thing to learn. If you aren't accustomed to Auvik, you can just look at it for 5 or 10 minutes, and you can absorb it. You're then good to go. You can very quickly and easily understand what you're looking at.

It has helped reduce repetitive and low-priority tasks through automation. It takes a lot of tweaking to get the alerts just right, but a lot of the repetitive tasks that we do have been automated. They've been automated for a long time, and they exist in very niche parts of our business that aren't really related to Auvik. The reduction is hard to measure, but it's a good percentage. In terms of the after-hours calls, with the emergency issues coming in, after two or three guys who set up Auvik went through the alerts and optimized it, with the number of things that took care of themselves and alerts that took care of themselves, we started getting fewer calls. Percentage-wise, there is a 20% or 30% reduction. It wasn't a huge chunk at the beginning, but it was noticeable once they got everything ironed out with Auvik.

It has affected our IT team's visibility into remote and distributed networks globally. We're a service provider. We manage a lot of networks. They range from a single network stack to multiple locations with multiple distribution frames that are all tunneled into each other. Before Auvik, it was pretty difficult to get an idea of how something was set up because we were just looking at configurations and talking to other people. It took a lot of experience to get used to a single client. Now, when everything is set up, if we want to understand the network, we just go into Auvik, and we can see the whole network.

It's a big part of our networking and monitoring. I'm in Auvik a couple of times a week. I don't specialize in networking, but I still end up looking at Auvik a couple of times a week to solve something, or I have to work on an alert that came specifically from Auvik, and I have to investigate. Aside from the UPS battery alert issue, which is obnoxious, most alerts are pretty easy to understand, easy to follow up on, and easy to resolve.

It has had an effect on our IT team’s availability. It makes the work of the IT team easier. We spend less time troubleshooting, and we are more available to work on other things. It has saved a considerable amount of time. We only have one network engineer, but everyone else is capable of working on networks. Auvik has made it easy enough to point to the issue. So, the network engineer can just focus on the really important and really intensive things, and everyone else can work on the intermediate things by using Auvik. Previously, it would take twice as much time for somebody like me to figure out a network problem.

It's very easy to delegate low-level tasks to junior staff. The API is integrated with ConnectWise. So, the alert comes in, and the dispatcher lets everybody know, and then any of the techs here can work on the alerts. With the information that we have in Auvik, we're able to very quickly assess the first thing that we need to do. We almost always get it resolved in time unless it's an ISP issue.

I really like the network map. It's probably the most useful feature because we have monitoring set up in other systems too, but seeing what's connected to what and where it is makes a lot of things a lot easier to troubleshoot.

The uptime and downtime information is valuable. It is pretty reliable to know when something goes down.

I find it pretty easy to use the monitoring and management function of Auvik. I passed the test on the first try, and it's all very intuitive. I like the menus, and it's pretty easy to get through things. There are some things that are a little bit more complicated, but there was nothing I wasn't able to figure out. Rarely, I would have to reach out and ask somebody to show me how to find something in Auvik or how it works. In terms of accessibility or how easy it is to get into it, it's pretty easy. Even setting up devices for configuration polling and SNMP is pretty easy.

When it comes to monitoring, Auvik provides a single integrated platform, but I feel it could do more things. If it could facilitate device upgrades, that would be great. 

It also has a feature where it passes alerts along. So, a device will have an alert, and then Auvik will pick it up, and then the API will create a ticket through Auvik, but the alert will be very vague. The one with which I had the biggest problem, more than anything else, is the alert specific to a UPS. There is a specific alert when a UPS's battery hits five years old, which means it needs to be replaced regardless of whether it's alerting or not, but the way the Auvik finds the UPS and gets the alert makes it almost impossible to tell which UPS it is. If the UPS has a web portal or a web GUI that I could go into and take a look at the battery, life is great, but we had one tenant where all the UPSs didn't have that. It took forever to figure out which one had a battery that we had to replace. Its monitoring is great, but the integrations could be better.

Overall, it hasn't provided a single integrated platform for us. We still have to use other tools to shore up where Auvik is lacking. For the most part, Auvik helps keep device inventories up to date, but it's not perfect. One of my least favorite things is that people bring in devices, their devices get retired, and then they just go off. A lot of times, we wouldn't know if it is something that we need to get back online as soon as possible, or if it's something that just went down. There were times when little switches that are under people's desks would be mislabeled with critical network infrastructure. Someone kicked a switch or something like that, and it went offline. We got the alert, and we wondered where it is and how could we get it back online. We called the company, and they were just like, "Oh! It's this little thing in here. Just plug it back in." It was just used for the printer. There would also be devices that were being retired, but the service desk or other teams wouldn't know about it. They would spend half an hour trying to figure out what was going on. So, even though it takes care of the inventory, there is a small amount of auditing that we still have to do. That's normally done because we're getting a lot of false positives, which probably is a good thing. It's better to get a false positive than for it to not alert when something important has gone down.

It's as good as anything else out there. It isn't better or worse than the systems that we already have in place. We don't use it for device inventory because we have other systems that keep track of devices and configurations. When I think of device inventory and Auvik, it is to know whether something that's currently online needs to be online. I would never look at Auvik to determine how many computers are currently at a location. I have two other systems that already do that for me, and they do a better job than Auvik. For the systems that we use, we have agents on computers. So, they give us an enormous amount of information about computers and things that are available at a location, or just an asset list for a client. Things that we can do remotely through them are pretty incredible. If Auvik wanted to be competitive, they would have to get into an area their competitors or the other companies do in terms of putting agents on things. That's a whole different thing than just SNMP polling.

We started Auvik at the beginning of 2020 because I remember taking the Auvik test while working remotely during COVID.

Their support is fantastic. If I have a problem with Auvik, I just open up a chat to interact with somebody, and they get to me in a minute or two. They almost always get it resolved just through chat. I don't remember ever having to call Auvik.

The central services people tell me that Auvik has quarterly reviews with our company. So, they follow up with us all the time. 

I would rate their customer service a 10 out of 10. They get to me immediately, and they always help me solve the problem, and they're always nice. I've probably talked to the same three guys every time.

We were using Audit API, which was pretty useful, but they were mostly Windows machines that had our agent servers and workstations. So, a server workstation would go down, but all you would know is that the server is down, or the whole site is down. We would have to do a lot of digging on our own to piece together:

• Which devices are there?
• What does the stack look like?
• What's the first thing that we need to troubleshoot?

We definitely tried to make the Audit API work, but the consensus was we needed something better to get these things done faster so that we weren't spending so much time during discovery especially, or we weren't spending so much time chasing alerts after hours.

Once we got Auvik, that became way easier. Instead of having to dig to figure out how it's set up, we could immediately look at Auvik and determine what the first step needs to be. It has cut off a huge amount of discovery. We have so many clients, and you have to be here for a long time before you know everybody, and even then, some clients don't really have problems. You're only looking at them a couple of times a year. So, if you have a great memory, good on you, but Auvik really made it a lot easier for service desk techs. We're not in the network all the time, but we troubleshoot networks frequently enough, and it's important that we are able to do this quickly and correctly.

For us, it's better that it's a cloud-based solution. I don't know about other companies, but we're remote to almost all of our clients. So, it's all cloud.

I did a lot when it comes to getting configuration polling working for firewalls, but other than that, I haven't been a part of its initial setup. The central services and networking teams got it set up, and then once it was ready, the techs like myself took the Auvik test. Once we passed, there was some tedious work that needed to be done at first setting up SNMP on networking equipment and making sure configuration polling was working, but that was about it.

It did take a while to set up Auvik, but that's because we have a lot of companies that we monitor. Everything was running smoothly within about six months we started working with it.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. It has cut down after-hours support. We're spending less time in the middle of the night trying to figure out why a network is gone so that we'll be up in the morning by the time people arrive for work. That was just huge for us. There are fewer tickets on the board during the day, or we can resolve the tickets we get faster.

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution. In my experience, it has just cut that in half. We can just look at Auvik, and we know what a network stack looks like. We can begin planning how we want to approach the problem.

I don't know anything about its pricing, but I would say Auvik is worth it.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10. It works superbly. It has made my job a lot easier. It made me understand networks so much better and more quickly too. I love Auvik, but they could do more with integrations. If we could just do everything through Auvik, such as push firmware through Auvik, and if Auvik was better at telling me which UPS has a battery that needs to be replaced, I would give it a 10 out of 10. 

We are a small company of about 15 people. We do open-source kernel development for lab machines. We have about 100 of these machines and they are all connected using smart routers. However, it is hard to monitor the routers' states.

We do open-source driver development as a contractor for other companies that may have licensing issues. We write the open-source network drivers for Linux and other open-source operating systems. That is the reason we need good network monitoring software: so that we know where there are problems in our network drivers. If the network drivers produce very bad network traffic, we need to know the first time. We have a lot of test devices, laptops, running in our lab, and they are currently monitored by Auvik, and we are very satisfied.

Before we got Auvik, we had to write scripts to get every device's state, to see the upload speed and download speeds, and whether there was any abnormal download or upload bandwidth. Because we develop network drivers, these are very important metrics for us, so that we know if there is any bad traffic in our network. Previously, we had to update our scripts every time there was an update to our routers' firmware. And if we had to update our requirements, we needed to rewrite the scripts and redeploy them on all of our routers. That required a lot of manual work. Auvik helped us eliminate that work.

Previously, when we managed the system, we needed to write our own script to run a single command on all the routers. Now, we can do that on the console. We can select everything and run a single command for all the devices with a single click.

A lot of tasks used to be repetitive work, like for new-device support. One of the really great points about Auvik is that it helps to reduce all that toil, including debugging scripts and maintaining them for the latest version.

The most important thing is that you can control everything, every device, all at once. As a unified platform, it handles all kinds of devices and all kinds of brands. If we decided to buy a new brand of router, we wouldn't need to check the manual and write new configuration scripts or record configuration macros ourselves. Auvik handles everything for us.

Before Auvik, we used multiple applications for managing things. Every week, we save hours. Previously, we spent a lot of time watching dashboards to see what went wrong. When a bug would occur, we would need to dump all the logs and look at everything. Now, we can usually diagnose everything within 30 minutes to an hour. It is saving three to four software-engineer-hours per week. That is a lot.

Auvik saves time and effort for our IT team. We can automate more things with the help of Auvik. It makes our team more available, always. It not only helps with availability of the software engineers on the IT team but with the availability of all our IT people. It has eliminated a lot of low-level tasks. And sometimes, it could be reducing work for senior engineers. Some of our issues can be hard to resolve, especially when dealing with the in-lab hardware. It can be hairy. Those weekly hours can be better used for the introduction of new devices or maintaining the high availability of our devices better. We can focus on expanding our labs a lot. It makes us more scalable, overall.

One of the most valuable features is the remote monitoring. It monitors the egress and ingress bandwidth and you can add custom rules to monitor if something is wrong. You can also add your own metrics if needed.

Auvik provides us with a unified management console. It is a website that displays all your routers, network switches, and devices connected to that router. You can easily see everything in that single dashboard.

You can use rule-based or simple, program-based monitoring to see if there is any abnormal traffic. 

It has good support for our devices, including our routers and Ethernet switches that come from the major brands. We are using Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, and Auvik has very good support for them. And it has pretty good support for other major brands like Netgear and TP-Link, as well. One of the reasons we choose Auvik is because the devices we currently use overlap with its list of supported devices.

Overall, the monitoring and management functions of Auvik are easy to use, but at times they seem oversimplified. Sometimes, we need more complicated scripting. Only using the basic logical rules like AND or OR or NOT is not enough. It can make the rules too complicated.

Also, when you load the Auvik website, it shows the topology. From my experience, it is mostly accurate. When we configured our network, there were some mismatches between the automatically-detected network topology and the actual topology. Some of the devices were not detected or were not supported by Auvik. We were able to manually modify things and everything has worked well since then.

Another issue is that to use Auvik you have to have a dedicated machine, either a virtual or Windows machine. Auvik continuously listens to the devices to look for all the devices on the network. This is a problem because it is a single point of failure. If that machine fails, all the functionality of Auvik stops. We can have redundant nodes, but it is still a problem.

Another problem is that it only works on Intel processors. Some of our machines do not use Intel processors. This was a problem initially because we had to get a new machine that runs the Auvik service. I would like to see it support more platforms and operating systems.

We started the 14-day trial plan this summer, and then we decided to purchase a license. So we have been fully using it for four or five months.

So far, the uptime has been really ideal.

Performance-wise, it's also good. For our use cases the monitoring machine is just a server, but it is not that powerful. It uses a lot of networking I/O, but it hasn't caused any network congestion.

It is scalable.

We have not been in touch with their technical support that often, but on occasion. Most of the team is in Toronto or the Eastern Time Zone and we are located in the Pacific Time Zone. But they are pretty responsive and their technical support team is pretty professional and reliable.

Positive

We didn't use any solution other than our own scripts to maintain the network.

As the head of IT, I led the work of deploying Auvik. It is straightforward because you use a new machine to run Auvik. It still needs to be part of the same VLAN as the other devices, but we didn't see any real glitches.

Our deployment is just a single location and we only use it for our lab devices. The lab has multiple layers of switches, Layer 3 switches, and routers, and all the test devices are managed over SNMP and Intel vPro.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping went pretty fast. After it started running, it populated almost immediately, within minutes. But to get it fully propagated and have every device fully scanned took a while. That was expected.

We did our test of Auvik in a physically isolated, small testing network during the trial period. When we actually deployed it in our prod environment, it went pretty smoothly. We followed the playbook and it worked well.

The time that Auvik takes to search all the devices and get everything propagated is average or slightly above average. If there is a device update, for example, and a router reboots, it could take a while for it to be rediscovered by Auvik. I think that is because the frequency with which Auvik checks devices is pretty limited. If it worked otherwise, it would make the whole network congested. So the speed of checking devices is throttled and that means it could take minutes to get the latest state of devices. But once everything is online, you get real-time information.

We haven't had to do any maintenance on Auvik itself.

We did it ourselves and we didn't run into any issues. We had two software engineers involved.

We have only used it for a few months, but in the future we are going to expand our testing-devices fleet. We are going to double our number of testing devices. For most of the tests, the waiting time will be cut in half. Developers will spend less time waiting for tests to finish running everything and spend more time on actual development.

It is on a monthly subscription plan and it's charged by the device. We decided to use it for a year, first, to see how good it is.

PRTG Network Monitor and LogicMonitor were quite a bit more expensive compared to our current solution. Some of the other solutions we looked at are one-time purchases, but they are longer-term investments. For our projects, Auvik is more elastic. Per router, per month, it is a fixed price. We negotiated and got a more competitive price.

We did shop around for other network monitors to see what the best option was before we decided to buy Auvik. We tried PRTG Network Monitor and we tried LogicMonitor, but both are pretty focused on automatic network monitoring using protocols that are common to all devices, like SNMP. 

Auvik attracted us because of two things. One was that it is easy to configure. You don't need to set up your own web server or something like that. There is a trade-off there. If you do everything yourself, you own all the data within your network. However, that scenario is more vulnerable to external threats. But if you give all the network topology to websites like Auvik, there could be some privacy or security concerns. We did an evaluation and it seemed that Auvik would be a reliable partner for us.

The second thing that attracted us was Auvik's pricing, which is pretty competitive.

In terms of deployment, Auvik is a mixed model. You don't need to buy a dedicated machine from Auvik, but you need something that can run the Auvik monitor, whether it is a Docker instance or just a physical machine. We chose to use a physical machine mostly for security. That gives us better physical isolation from the rest of our network and makes it easier to manage and monitor if an attack were to occur.

As a very small company with a limited IT team, we found that Auvik is really helpful when you don't have a large IT team to do a lot of things. A lot of tasks can be done by Auvik and it will really help automate things.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization provided by Auvik is an eight or nine out of 10. There are some glitches, but it is easy to handle.

On the whole, it is a good solution. There are some issues, but I'm really satisfied.

We implement Auvik for our clients as a network monitoring solution. About 20 engineers use it, including me. We also have a business analyst, a systems admin, a capacity planner, two vice presidents, and a couple of data scientists.

Auvik is deployed across several departments. Organization-wide, we have 20,000-plus endpoints, but Auvik is monitoring a tiny subset of that, so about 2,000 more or less. 

Auvik has saved a lot of time. Network monitoring and analysis tasks that would sometimes take a few days to accomplish can be completed in only 15 to 30 minutes. It has reduced our mean time to resolution by about 25 percent. 

Auvik has streamlined the way we put out tickets. The user interface makes it easier to communicate analytics and helps us filter out devices. It gives us robust visibility into our infrastructure in a single pane of glass. I have all the information and link data I need to troubleshoot any issue with the networks. The ticketing information Auvik provides offers some good opportunities for automation. It also allows us to automate data collection through the use of collectors.

Auvik has shifted IT teams to a shared model. so we can have all of the equipment and information mapped out accordingly. The other nice thing is that we can customize Auvik. For example, one department might focus on information extraction for query development, while another group is focused on layer topology and working with firewalls. Auvik lets you drill down based on the different types of appliances or shift toward programming if needed and root cause analysis. Auvik handles the four Ts—topology, telemetry, traces, and time—well.

Our IT team is working really around the clock. It's almost to the point where this automation has made it possible for normal users and businesses to accomplish their day-to-day tasks without any failover. Auvik is also more accessible to our low-level staff, who are looking for more functionality within the user interface as opposed to customizable development. They can get recommendations through the Auvik interface if there's a problem with the configuration or hardware. The junior analysts can review the historical data and live information to draw conclusions.

Auvik is crucial for keeping our device inventories updated. I can try to gather the system uptime for different types of devices and get something like NetFlow data. It works like a packet sniffer with real-time data factored into it. The higher-level staff members use Auvik in conjunction with another tool in the tech stack. They may also want to shift this in terms of data transfer assessment. To compare it with another tool, Splunk has a cloud migration app that helps look at how organizations use cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-ground, and ground-to-ground. With that assessment model, there's a focus on the total cost of ownership. Similarly, within Auvik, that's like an area of opportunity in terms of assessing the architecture being created for how it can be deployed.

I've found the topology mesh graph helpful, and I like the other features that factor into my work with Kubernetes. The solution is intuitive. When someone gets started with it, there are out-of-the-box solutions to accomplish tasks, so a new person doesn't always need to check the documentation. When they log into the tool, they can quickly fix a few areas and get everything running.

The monitoring and management functions are effortless to use. The process is pretty straightforward If I need to connect to an external appliance. Sorting out role-based access control is easy, as well.

Auvik has a single integrated platform with collectors and API functionality, which are crucial. It has application and network performance monitoring tools, with something to bridge the gap between the two. Auvik integrates network, application, and infrastructure monitoring. 

I would like to see Auvik have some more documentation with a typical CM solution like Splunk. I want to see more examples of things like configuring port forwarding for firewalls. In addition to collecting data from different types of appliances, I would like to customize more of the metrics for each appliance.

More encryption and data security features would also be helpful in case I have some confidential data coming through. Password management and encryption for specific datasets would be interesting. Auvik has this ticket functionality that could be used to construct pre-built workflows.

I would like to see Auvik add more features to help clients who work with cloud providers like Microsoft Azure. In Azure, they have templates within Azure Resource Manager. There are templates for 1,000 use cases that people can deploy, and they do some stuff around infrastructure as a code.

Auvik should go in that direction by integrating ARM templates where somebody can look to see SVKs, command interface, virtual machines, data stores, service management, etc., and try to take that on in terms of continuing with a declarative syntax. I find that some areas of infrastructure code could work nicely. They could construct playbooks like GAML files that could work alongside more with an Auvik.

I've been using Auvik for about two years.

Auvik is stable. There are occasional service disruptions, but they are quickly resolved.

Auvik is relatively scalable. Auvik provides a lot of rich analytics that can be translated into insights for SecOps, systems engineering, and capacity planners.

I rate Auvik support a ten out of ten. Their support staff is proactive and always ready to assist.

Positive

I've worked with Stack State, Splunk, Dynatrace, and LogicMonitor. Our department was tasked with looking for innovative ideas. We're a large enterprise, so some departments work with different tech stacks. Other departments might have a tool and try refining it for their analyses. We have Splunk and Dynatrace, but the use cases vary slightly based on their responsibilities. If I move from one department to another, I might be working with different tools.

Setting up Auvik is straightforward, and it took about two months. We started working alongside a larger team and began ramping things up. Our deployment strategy involved ensuring the data was populated throughout and figuring out which dependencies I needed to install at the same time.

I would say setting up Auvik is slightly easier than most other solutions. Splunk took quite a bit of work, but it ultimately paid off. Auvik is also a powerful solution, but it does not require much effort to get it running. After deployment, there isn't maintenance on our side. We get service notifications from Auivk based on a particular type of cluster. 

Folks in the market for a network monitoring solution often think Splunk is relatively expensive, so many are looking for a cheaper alternative. Some network monitoring tools are free but have tiers if you need a customized solution. 

Auvik's pricing model is bundled and flexible. If I need to monitor more endpoints, I have to pay a higher premium. I can estimate how much a typical network has in terms of endpoints and billed devices and break down what else is needed, like a hypervisor or more workstations. Auvik bills based on the aggregate count of billable devices. I can export the billing usage and compare that to the total cost of ownership. 

We also looked at Devo. We felt that Devo didn't offer much of an advantage over what we had already built or what we could do together with Splunk. We thought it didn't make sense to retrain our whole team for a solution that would not add much to our existing setup. We've also looked at a ticketing solution called SysAid.

I rate Auvik a nine out of ten. If you plan to implement Auvik, I recommend getting started on deploying the tools soon, so you can get the full value. You might also want to look into the certification program. 

We use it for our clients that have managed network services. We monitor their networks to see if there are any anomalies or unknown devices, and we use it for troubleshooting as needed.

One of the benefits is the insights into the network. We had one client that was having tons of issues. We put Auvik on there and we were able to isolate the problem to one device, remove it, and everything is now working well.

It has helped with visibility into remote and distributed networks, globally. For those clients that pay for the service, it allows us to see their networks, see what's going on, and sometimes even see an issue before the client knows and calls us, and that is what we want.

We have also seen a reduction in mean time to resolution, of about 10 to 20 percent, depending on what the issue is.

I like the traffic insights. That really helps to see what's using your bandwidth.

The monitoring and management functions, while there is a little bit of a learning curve, are pretty easy. Once you get it, it's straightforward and easy to go forward with. That's very important because we don't have time to sit around and try to figure out how to use it, looking at tutorials. It's pretty intuitive and their support is really great too if we have any issues.

And the fact that it provides a single, integrated platform for our organization is important as well. Having 50 different accounts to log into would make things difficult at times.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is great. It makes it easy to see everything and easy to follow and pinpoint what's going on.

The visualization of network mapping is good. The only complaint would be that VLANs don't necessarily show up as a regular LAN does. They do show up, but there is some manual tuning you have to do to make that look perfect. That's kind of the nature of how VLANs work, so I don't think there's anything they can really do to help make that better. Still, it does at least pick up devices that are on there, and tries to connect it all, but it doesn't always do a good job.

Also, it doesn't help keep device inventories up to date. It doesn't have any updating features.

It has been three years since I started using Auvik.

It's reliable. We haven't had any issues with it. We haven't had any downtime because the server wasn't available, or anything like that. It's definitely worth it.

It seems to scale really well. When we first started, we just had three clients in there. Now we have it on all 35 of our clients, and some of them have multiple sites. They're not all fully configured, but at least we have the agent on them and we're getting data already. I just need to go into each one and set up the SSH and SNMP settings, but that's no big deal.

It's deployed into our managed network clients who have anywhere from three workstations all the way up to over 300 devices on the multiple VLANs.

Their technical support is a 10 out of 10. They have direct support within the platform via a chat and they'll walk you through anything and give you the guidance you need. And their email support is great as well, if you have to escalate something. They'll even do a Zoom call with you if they're not able to resolve it by email or chat. They don't leave you hanging.

Positive

We didn't use any solution previously. We just used an ad hoc network scan to try to find issues, but that doesn't really give you a great view of everything.

I'm the one who does the deployments. The setup is straightforward. It's complex in the sense that you have to connect each device and configure its SNMP or SSH settings, but it's pretty straightforward overall.

Depending on the network, within 30 seconds to two minutes, max, the network mapping starts to populate after implementing the collector. It's pretty quick.

It doesn't require much maintenance. Once you get everything set up, unless you introduce new devices, you don't really have to mess with anything.

We did our initial implementation with the Auvik trainer. He helped us onboard clients and gave us training. Our experience with him was good. He was really knowledgeable and helped us out as we needed it.

Initially, it was me and our CEO involved in the implementation, but he passed it off to me after the first couple. And of course, we have had Auvik's help with it as well.

Time-to-value from Auvik has been the troubleshooting of that one client I mentioned, just by itself. We spent countless hours onsite trying to figure out what was going on, doing our own tests with freeware, but we weren't able to isolate the issue until we installed Auvik. If we had done that from day one, it would have taken three hours for the setup, instead of that ticket taking 22 hours of work. It's a big benefit.

Auvik's pretty good in terms of pricing. It can get pricey if you have multiple managed devices, but if it's just a simple network with only one or two firewall walls and smart switches, it's reasonable.

The one client that we had issues with has 15 managed devices. That client is pretty expensive, but it's worth it.

Our eyes were set on Auvik, based on reviews from peers.

It's not really replacing any tasks. Rather, it's a good tool to see if the network is down. We have others that do the same thing, but Auvik is more for investigating issues.

My advice is to take your time. Make sure that the credentials are correct when you input them. Go through their guide on setting up WMI for Windows workstations to get better results. Just don't rush it and get good data.

We mostly use it for network monitoring. We also use it for configuration backup.

With Auvik's network monitoring, the easiest thing is to see where issues are in the network, such as where the traffic is having problems flowing from one place to another. That is the biggest benefit for me. I can go into each company and see if there's a problem with the network. Auvik will pinpoint it and we can work through fixing it.

And something that is critical is the ability to visualize the network mapping. Most people just put something in and think it works, but without having much knowledge of what goes into actually planning the network and making sure they can't get to things they're not supposed to get to. With Auvik, the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is easily the best I've seen. It's very intuitive. There are pre-built filters and other pieces that allow you to visualize certain, tiny pieces of the network, instead of the entire thing. That means you don't have to move the map around.

The solution has also helped reduce the repetitive, very boring work involved in visualizing the network, where you literally map out everything. Auvik will do it for you. That manual process, for a typical company with a single site, may take 30 minutes. But if it's multi-site with multiple networks, it takes that process from roughly an entire day down to about 30 minutes.

And when it comes to IT team availability, we don't have to have someone dedicated to monitoring the network or documenting networks. We actually have him doing work that we need done, like helping our customers, instead of just documenting.

The ability to put in individualized SNMP checks that might not be in the automated playbook is a valuable feature.

It is also super easy to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. I've not seen something as easy as it is, although that use of ease is not so important to our company. Other companies provide knowledge base articles that make everything easy, but the management and monitoring functions in those products aren't as easy to use. That means you have to lean on the knowledge base. Auvik has a knowledge base, but you don't really need it. It's a lot easier in that way. It has a lot of documentation, a lot of information available, but you just don't need it because it's that easy.

Auvik is also a single, integrated platform, and because we are an MSP, that's a godsend. Other vendors have a single pane for each company, whereas Auvik has it set up so there is a single pane for multiple companies.

We use ConnectWise and it integrates with that perfectly. I don't know what else they could add there to have better integration, because it does everything we need.

Auvik doesn't help keep device inventories up to date in the way that I would like. It just helps keep us in the loop for anything that should or shouldn't be on the network.

The one thing that I need more help with is the networking of virtualization hosts. I need more information on those hosts and which virtual networks are attached to what, the virtual switches that are in there, and how they function. None of that exists currently. That's more of a need than anything else that Auvik is doing. If they wanted to monitor more of the network, specifically Hyper-V and VMware hosting, that would make it better and more robust, but that's not their goal.

I've been using Auvik for a couple of years.

The only time it's down is when AWS goes down, so as a cloud-based solution, as opposed to an on-prem network monitoring solution, Auvik means less worry for me. It's always there.

It scales very well, from a single site all the way up to multi-site. If you need more, you just add another probe and it automatically knows which probe does what, so you don't have to worry about that.

I have far less contact with Auvik's technical support now than in the beginning. I haven't opened a case with them in a year because everything just works.

In my experience, if their support can't fix the problem it's because there's a bug and they need to escalate it. I've never had complaints about their service. If there are any questions, support is there to help, and they will.

Positive

I am usually involved in the initial setup and deployment of Auvik and it is far simpler than anything else out there. Since we're an MSP, Auvik configured the initial, main site for us, and then I set up all of the subsites.

It takes 10 to 15 minutes after the collector is implemented for it to start populating the topology map, but it's not a solid "Here's the entire network" for a couple of hours.

We have two other team members, in addition to me, who do setups, but we just brought them on in the last six months.

A good tool like Auvik should literally pay for itself and it does for us, in time saved.

It showed value within the first week. That's how long it took for us to see it was going to save us money in the long run. As far as making money back on it goes, it took about two or three months. That's how long it took for it to have found everything and for us to configure everything.

They are way too lenient in their pricing. To put that simply, I can have an entire network being monitored and it will cost nothing, as long as I'm not monitoring the firewall or the switches.

There are three or four other solutions that I have used that do network monitoring, and none of them work the same. One was N-Central, which is the MSP version of SolarWinds. I also used SolarWinds, the full suite, for one company.

LogicMonitor is another one that we trialed but it didn't work nearly as well, and was way more expensive. 

We used something from Ninja, their network monitoring service, and it could handle a lot more than Auvik could, but you had to say specifically, "I want to monitor this device or that device," instead of just everything. 

I used all of those solutions before getting to Auvik and finding that it's better.

Auvik does everything through a single probe, whereas all the others require multiple probes and multiple connections to multiple VLANs. Either that or you had to know exactly what was on the network and then you could monitor the single pieces you wanted, instead of everything.

Most of what Auvik does is the high-level monitoring of what's going on, and then it does require the higher-level staff to see, when we have a problem, how we fix it. The lower-level staff couldn't figure that out. So it doesn't really help with delegating things to junior people.

If Auvik wanted to map out VLANs specifically, that could be added, but it wouldn't change my opinion of whether the mapping is good or bad. The mapping is good and the VLAN handling is good. Everything else really just comes down to having someone who understands network engineering to really suss out all of the issues that Auvik sees.

We did not see a reduction in mean time to resolution with Auvik. It is just one extra tool. We didn't have nearly the number of customers that we do now, back when we first started using Auvik, so we can't really point to a reduction. We've been using it for so long that we've brought on customers and put them in Auvik right away. 

However, when clients have networking issues, I'm sure it has reduced the amount of time it takes for us to figure out what the problem is. But for us, it's more the mean time to reconfiguration that has dropped drastically. For example, if we need to add another floor, expand a network, shrink a network, or add another site to it, instead of having to do a walkthrough of the network to see what's there, we hop into Auvik, spend five minutes looking at the map, and we're able to present a valid diagram to the customer of what needs to go where.

The solution is not perfect, but I can't think of anything that would make it better for me or my company. Between its cost and what it covers, I would give it a 10 out of 10.

We used PRTG as our network monitoring stack and SolarWinds network configuration manager. SolarWinds has hacked a couple of years ago, so we have been left with PRTG but no configuration management. PRTG doesn't do network monitoring very well, but it's suitable for server monitoring. I had known about Auvik for quite some time and decided to give it a look. We tested it and got insights into our network we had never seen before. We have three disparate physical networks, which provide insight into how everything is interconnected.

We have 55 users spread out over all our locations. Our sales staff is remote, but we have a primary site with two physical networks and a disaster recovery site co-located with one physical network.

Auvik has made things more accessible, and we're much more agile in dealing with problems when they arise. It has also given us an extraordinary amount of visibility into the connections of the physical network. We've found many issues that we didn't know existed before.

We've probably saved around an hour each week using Auvik, but it varies. We're typically looking at the network stack to troubleshoot a problem, which doesn't happen that often. I usually log into Auvik when there are alerts unless something is misbehaving. However, I log on to Auvik at least once or twice a week to look at some of the net flow things or get a feel for what's going on in the network in general.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up to date, which has saved us time. We're a company in the financial sector, so we regularly go through compliance audits. Having a centralized location for configuration management is helpful because we don't need to spend time doing that manually throughout the year. The cloud solution enables us to have our configurations offsite in case of a disaster. That is a benefit. 

Network mapping is the most valuable feature. It's handy to see which devices are connected to what ports. The net flow stuff and traffic insights are also helpful. The network mapping is a little better than average. That's one area where PRTG falls short. It's tough to use. Auvik makes that a bit easier. 

Auvik's initial setup and discovery were effortless. Tuning the alerts takes a little bit more work. Ease of use is essential. Usually, there has been some alert, or we need a specific piece of information promptly. It must be easy for us to find that information.

The integrated platform is a nice-to-have, but it's not essential because we only have three sites: primary, guest, and DR. I only use Auvik for the primary site. For an MSP, the integrated single pane of glass would be a huge deal. 

I would relegate the network map to its area instead of being the focus of every page. The network map is in the front and center of the UI. I would rather have the option to look at it when I need it instead of having it on every single page. It's beautiful, but I don't need it on every page.

We've been using Auvik for about four months now.

I have found Auvik extremely stable. They do a lot of scheduled maintenance, but it's almost always on the weekends, so it doesn't impact us. 

Auvik looks incredibly scalable. We scaled it out to three sites without any problem.

I rate Auvik support seven out of 10. I want to give them an eight, but eight seems too generous. 7.5 is kind of where I want to be.

Neutral

We previously used PRTG and SolarWinds Network Configuration Monitor. SolarWinds got hacked, and their software was janky at best. It worked, but only because we didn't put a lot of load on it. We finally decided to find a solution that worked. We got along without it for about a year before realizing we needed a solution.

PRTG is an excellent server monitoring solution but a poor network monitoring solution. It does the job, but it's not good at it. Auvik is a fantastic network monitoring tool that does everything PRTG does, plus all the things that SolarWinds and CM did. It took the place of two different products. PRTG is usable, but it would take me 10 minutes to do something Auvik can do in a minute. Auvik is light years better in terms of usability and simplicity.

Setting up Auvik was surprisingly easy to do. The initial installation took a day or two, but it took a couple of weeks to start seeing the results I wanted.  The network map started to populate within 24 hours. It was so much easier than PRTG was and a lot faster.

I deployed it by myself. The involved tasks included setting up virtual machine collectors, modifying the firewall and ACL rules, setting up accounts, doing SSO, going through the training, and training my team.

I did the setup myself with a little bit of help from Auvik support.

It took a little time to get it up and running, but now that it's running, it hums along and does its job. I don't have hard data about our ROI, but we've seen value from Auvik. For example, say we had a bandwidth problem where traffic was slowing down on one of our guest sites. It would take me 15 to 20 minutes in PRTG to look at the net flows and figure out who was doing what. It takes me a minute or two in Auvik. That is a huge time saver.

I was under the impression that it was costly in a larger environment, but I was very wrong. It's pretty reasonable. The pricing is much better than I thought it was because it's based on network devices, not devices. That was a key thing that I did not know.

I like that it's flexible. If we have a device that we need to spin up for a month, we pay a little extra that month, and it goes back down. We don't have to renegotiate the contract or pay that amount forever.

We also considered Zabbix, but that seemed like a ton of work.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I've heard of Auvik for 10 years, but I always shied away from it because of the size and complexity of the networks I work with. I figured it would not be cost-effective because Auvik is a big name. However, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be when I looked at the quotes. The value for the money is high, so if you think you can't afford it, look into it anyway because you might be surprised.

We use it as our network management tool and configuration backup utility.

It's made us a lot more aware of the network side. A lot of MSPs traditionally have been more server/workstation oriented, with some firewall-related activities, but when you bring in the network, it allows you to bring all that full circle and troubleshoot network issues more easily. And in the same way that a backup is important for a server, a backup is important for a switch or a firewall. If you lose one of those, you don't want to have to rebuild from scratch. Auvik provides that configuration backup.

The configuration backup has helped reduce repetitive tasks. With network, there's not as much daily touch as there is with PCs. The automation has primarily been around backing up devices and alerting on down devices.

It has also helped with visibility into remote distributed networks. As an MSP, most of our customers are remote networks for us. Auvik allows us to manage their networks, whether they're local or in the UK or anywhere else. We're able to manage those networks much better via this tool. It helps our network engineers focus on those networks.

In addition, it helps keep device inventories up to date. That aspect helps a lot because people don't have to always worry about whether somebody added a switch or an access point. It scans each day and sees new devices. While that doesn't save us time on a recurring basis, whenever we need to provide a report, we don't have to manually gather the information. We're able to print it out and provide it, rather than having to do manual counts. But that's on-demand and not frequent.

We have absolutely seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution for network issues, using Auvik. For instance, if an alert comes through that a server is down, and we're also getting information that a switch or a firewall is down as part of that, we immediately know we don't need to troubleshoot the server. The server is down because those network devices are down. It allows us to get right to where the problem is, versus having to work our way back and that cuts out a lot of troubleshooting time.

If we get an alert that an AP is down and a firewall is also down, it may just be that the AP is not able to report back because the firewall is not up to allow it to. That's where it saves us a lot of time. It allows us to look at root cause better. When you're looking at that map and you see three things with red alert banners on them, you know which one is the closest point out to the internet and that you need to look there first, versus what's behind it.

The network management piece has been the most advantageous. First, it alerts us about network devices that are under duress or having issues. Second, it has historical data. That allows us to go back, if, for instance, a switch is having problems, and see if it is something that trends at a certain time of the day or a certain day of the week.

For what we use it for, Auvik provides us with a single integrated platform because it ties into their ticketing system. That is very important. The more touchpoints that people have to interact with, the less likely they are to interact. Trying to get it down to as few panes of glass as possible becomes an important piece. We previously used multiple applications for managing our network, and switching to Auvik has saved our organization a good bit of time, day-to-day. It has saved us the equivalent of half an FTE.

It's also the best that we have found for helping to visualize network mapping/topology. It does a great job of that, hands-down. The mechanism that it uses to learn about the network seems to be more robust than some of the others. The interface is very clean and sleek. It discovers devices well and the relationships between them, and the general aesthetic of the portal presents that information. It gathers more data than most and it presents it wrapped up in a really pretty way. Others can draw out a diagram, but they're just not as elegant as Auvik.

The network visualization is intuitive. It classifies devices accurately and presents the links and the relationships well. Plus, if something isn't discovered the way you think it should be, it gives you the ability to manually adjust it. For example, sometimes wireless bridges don't really present well. They don't show a link between them. You have the ability to go in and make that association manually so that it presents correctly on the map.

I've been using Auvik for a little over three years.

The stability is strong. They announce maintenance well in advance and it's not frequent. We haven't had many issues. I don't recall that it just went down all of a sudden. Typically, it's only down around maintenance windows.

It scales well. We've put large networks on it.

The solution's technical support is good. We didn't have to interact with it a lot, but when we did, they were able to answer the questions.

Positive

We used PRTG from a German company called Paessler, but it did not provide configuration backup, so we used a different application to provide the configuration backup. We had to use two products to do that function before. That was part of the reason we switched to Auvik. Bringing everything into one application, and that application being able to integrate with our ticketing system, were the two big reasons.

The initial setup was very straightforward. If you have intermediate networking skills you will be comfortable doing it.

We were able to implement Auvik out-of-the-box, meaning it was immediately available for use without intervention. When we signed up, we were able to download the agents to put on each remote site and begin scanning and gathering data. Once we decided to go with Auvik, we were instantly able to go with it. Within 15 minutes, after the Auvik code was implemented, our network mapping began to populate. 

Within about an hour or two, depending on the size of the network, the map was pretty well displayed. For larger networks—we have some networks that are 1,000 nodes—it might take several hours for it to scan, discover, and learn the relationships. It asks you to authorize networks that it finds. You may initially tell it to scan a network, but based on that network being scanned and the devices on it, it learns that there are other subnets out there. You have to approve those for it to scan them as well. That's why larger networks could take several hours and up to a day or so.

We did it all in-house and it required three people. They were primarily split up between

• networking components: switchers, routers, and wireless infrastructure
• server/workstation infrastructure
• integrations, such as ticketing.

Auvik helps us, but as I mentioned, it's a lot more for point-in-time needs. If a switch is down and we need to get information on the alert and possibly pull the backup to put on a replacement device, or if somebody needs an inventory, we can pull a report. Those are very moment-oriented. 

I can't talk about time-to-value over days, months, or years, but once you set it up, it takes care of itself. It scans the network for new devices. Once you stand the product up and have it connected to your ticketing system, it's just a matter of using it when you need to use it.

Auvik is not cheap. They've done a great job, it's a developed product, but you pay for it. When you compare, it's definitely in the upper tier of pricing.

Auvik has two price points. One is their Essentials license, and the other is their Performance license which includes flow data. 

For example, you may have a network with 10 switches and a firewall, and you really only want flow data going through the firewall. Auvik requires you not only to put the device you want under a Performance license, but all of the other network devices that are billable devices have to go to that same Performance license. It gets expensive in a hurry, so we haven't taken a Performance license with them for that main reason. If we need to do flow data, we'll use a different product. I wish they allowed you to only license the devices you needed to have Performance.

We looked at Traverse Network from Kaseya. It was very similar to Auvik in terms of capabilities, but we thought Auvik was more polished. It seemed to be further down the road as far as how well it had been implemented.

And Auvik's cloud-based solution, when compared with on-prem network monitoring solutions, is better. It's hard to monitor something on the network locally because if you lose your internet connection, it can't report out, which is pretty important. That's why we like it more than on-premises solutions.

It's an easy user interface to work with. They've done a good job with the GUI and how to navigate it. That's not of huge importance to us because a lot of us have been doing network management for close to two decades. That means we've used a lot of tools and we are very familiar with them. But for entry-level techs, it's easier because they can do some things without knowing a lot of what we've had two decades to learn. It makes people with less experience much more comfortable using it.

The solution's automation hasn't had that much of an impact because a lot of our frontline people don't have to interact with it on a daily basis. They use it for point-in-time troubleshooting. It's not a huge help on that side. It's mainly the networking engineers, who would have to do things through other systems manually, whose time is saved.

From a product perspective, it's a 10 out of 10. It's just that you pay for the product. It costs a lot compared to others.

The biggest issue is that if you need NetFlow, where you can actually see more information about the packets that are traversing the network, you probably need to work through your cost model first. Auvik is not going to be the cheapest out there, not even close. It's going to be, by far, the more expensive solution. If that is a strong need of yours, it may not be the best solution. It does NetFlow really well, just like everything else it does. It presents it well. But the pricing model makes it a very expensive proposition to do the Performance licenses.

We use Auvik for network mapping. It helps us to understand the layout and where things are so that we can troubleshoot the flow of data, where something is on the network, and why it might be having an issue.

Before Auvik, I had to go on-site to the client's offices to physically trace all the cables manually and draw the network map on a diagram tool. That would take a long time, and there was potential for human error. When something changed, I had to go back and update the map. It took hours. With Auvik, the devices quickly populate the screen, and I can click through them. That's incredible. It's a huge time-saving troubleshooting tool. We realized Auvik's benefits immediately. Once I understood the features, the benefits were very clear.  

Auvik has sped up our resolution time in many ways. When something is offline or something is wrong with a site-to-site connection or a switch, we can easily go in and see what's happening. We can identify what's connected and what may have been disconnected. It's more often used on the tier two side, but the tier one techs aren't using it. 

I like having a remote tunnel where I can access web interfaces inside a network, whether it's a DVR, an NDR camera system, a printer interface, or an IoT device that has a local web interface. I love being able to tunnel in straight through Auvik instead of having to VPN in or remote to another. It's more straightforward and makes troubleshooting that device more accessible.

Auvik gives us a real-time picture of the network. In the past, when we did things manually, it was never up-to-date. Auvik keeps everything updated. The network map is accurate in the sense that it generates the correct data. Sometimes, we need to update it with the SNMP credentials. If we're feeding it the information it needs, it's highly accurate.

Auvik's interface is decent overall, but I wish I could get more of a full-screen map layout. That would be helpful. Overall, the flow of everything on the screen is good, but I would like a more full-screen, immersive user experience. There are too many menus around. It would help to have the ability to sift and move through it more easily, but there's too much stuff in the way.

I found the search feature somewhat frustrating. For example, let's say I'm searching for an IP address. Even though this thing exists, it doesn't do a good job of showing it to me. 

We have used Auvik for a little over six years.

Auvik is stable. We haven't had any problems. 

Our customers aren't growing quickly, so scalability means rolling Auvik out to new clients or clients adding new devices. If we're talking about adding new clients, it's easy to implement. If we're talking about clients adding stuff to the network, it's automatic, so we don't need to do much besides inputting the credentials.

Before Auvik, I constructed manual network maps. We are using other remote management tools like Kaseya RMM. It's a different type of tool that overlaps in a few areas. 

I was not directly involved in the deployment. After deployment, it requires very little maintenance. We only need to deploy the Auvik collector and ensure it's running. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I suggest reaching out to their customer relationship people. They're super personal and helpful. Take advantage of them. 

We mainly use the product to analyze the remote networks. We are a managed service provider, so we have a lot of networks that are not really close, physically. We still have to keep control of them. This allows us to do so remotely. We put monitors on firewalls, routers, et cetera, so that we can see, for example, if something has gone down, and where. 

The solution provides good visibility into our network. We've also been able to respond to outbreaks and issues much faster. Previously, we'd have to get a call from a client telling us they've lost access. Now, we can start to troubleshoot before the client's even noticed there's a problem.

The discovery feature is useful. We've found network devices we didn't even know about. 

The reliability is excellent. It doesn't go down. It also doesn't occupy a lot of RAM. It's very lightweight.  We just configure it and we don't have to worry about it after that.

The intuitive interface helps support ease of use. 

We've saved time troubleshooting network issues. I can go directly to the client network and see what's going on, what has gone down exactly. It makes troubleshooting a very fast process. 

The Auvik network map, along with a dashboard, gives us a real-time picture of our network.

The time to resolution has sped up 20% to 30% since we can start troubleshooting much faster. We don't have to wait for a client to let us know there's an issue. 

It has empowered entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own.

The life cycle is a unique and important section of the tool. 

The automated mapping or alerting has impacted our daily operations since now we receive alerts directly to email. We don't have to wait to get a notice from the clients. On the client side, we waste less time, and there are cost savings in that aspect. The hours we invest trying to solve issues have been reduced since we can be more proactive and productive. 

I'd like the devices to be more integrated and easy to access. I find I have to move through various stages when it could be at least a side of the dashboard or something. 

I would like to use different network protocols that we could implement. It could help us with very specific problems. I wouldn't want them to focus too much on adding new features, as sometimes more features end up loading the system or the software with too much stuff.

I've used Auvik since December of last year (2023).

It's a stable solution. I haven't had an issue with it.

We have five people using the solution and 200 network devices on it. 

The scalability is very good. It expands very quickly. I'd rate scalability eight out of ten. 

We haven't had to open up any cases with customer support. 

We weren't using any specific solution before this product.

The deployment process is very straightforward. It's pretty quick; we didn't waste much time deploying it. Deployment times vary, depending on the size of the network. With small networks, with maybe one to twenty workers, we can do it in a couple of days. We can deploy it in maybe two hours and then configure it over a day or two.

If it's configured right, you don't need to do any maintenance. It just works on its own in the background. 

We've gained ROI via productivity; we've likely helped each person gain 15% to 20% in productivity alone. 

The solution is fairly priced. 

I'm an Auvik customer. 

Auvik's AI capabilities are helping a bit with my network tasks. However, I'm not sure to what extent. We don't use much of the AI aspect.

I'd recommend the solution to others. It's very stable and quick to deploy. It hasn't given us any issues and it's very lightweight. We gain a lot of information about the network when we're using it. People should do a demo and see if it fits with their organization.

Overall, I'd rate Auvik nine out of ten.

We're an MSP. We're pretty much monitoring our client's network. 

We offer a full suite of outsourced IT management solutions. We use this as an internal tool, not something we sell to clients; it's mostly something we use internally to make life easier.

It's reduced manual workaround troubleshooting network incidents. It also works around alert management. We get alerts, and those alerts create a ticket in our ticketing system. When the power comes back, the ticket closes automatically. We can have zero-touch intervention. Previous to the solution, the process was much more manual and a person would have to go and see what was happening.

When it comes to network visibility, we can see incidents. We found a lot of issues with our billing system, for example, and that's probably the biggest value-add for us. 

The network monitoring is great.

The solution covers a bunch of things. It's designed to be MSP-focused, which is useful. Your clients are tenants, and you can set it up at a global level so that you can drill down at a client level. It makes it very scalable. That's the biggest pro for me. Once you set up things correctly, it can scale very easily. You can just keep adding clients. You don't have to touch anything beyond deploying a connector on-site.

The alerting and network mapping are the most important aspects of our organization.

The interface is intuitive and easy to use. It helps a lot with troubleshooting network issues. It's comprehensive. It gives us a real-time picture of what's happening. It's fairly easy to gain visibility. Once you have things set up correctly, it provides a lot of visibility.

The automation of alerts and ticketing has saved us about 30% to 40% of our time.

We've been able to decrease our mean time to resolution. It's hard to gauge an average, however. For some tickets, it's significant, and for others, it may not be that much. Likely, we've improved mean time to resolution by 15% to 20%.

Auvik has positively influenced our operational costs and productivity. It's saved us a lot of time in terms of manual human effort. Since we're saving time, we're saving costs. It's also allowed us to position ourselves as network management and network monitoring experts and perhaps target a few clients more on the network side of things that are more network-focused than just the MSP and IT support side of things.

Sometimes we run into a new switch, firewall, or router brand that the system doesn't manage or interpret. If they could expand the products they support, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution for somewhere around two years.

The solution is absolutely stable. We haven't had any problems in two years. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. I do get the odd email that warns that the service is down. However, it's usually during the night, and it resolves quickly.

Our clients are mostly small businesses. 

The scalability is excellent. I'd rate it ten out of ten. 

Both support and the onboarding process were excellent. They have the best technical support experience across any vendor we deal with. The first person you talk to actually knows what is going on. You don't have to wade through different levels of service. 

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously. We did have some scripts set up to run manually without RMM that would mostly check online/offline status. However, the system was very precarious. 

The initial setup came with a bit of a learning curve. Unless you've used the product before, it's a bit complex. However, they offer the best onboarding experience I've had with any vendor. I had a team of people at my disposal.

I mainly handled the deployment myself. It took a few months to implement. Then, when we onboarded a new employee, they also assisted. We were a bit understaffed at the outset, however, once I had the extra person, the implementation went much faster. 

Once it is set up, there is no maintenance needed. 

The vendor assisted with the setup. They were very helpful and answered all of our questions. It was very personalized. Their service is very good, which explains the price point. 

I was able to negotiate the price. The list price is pretty unaffordable. 

We did evaluate other options before choosing Auvik. Other products seemed a bit buggy. Auvik was also cheaper and had a lot more room for growth.

I'm a customer.

I'd recommend the solution to others. It's not a cheap tool and may not suit all MSPs; however, it works for us. While it can be hard to get clients and end-users to understand the value of network monitoring, they do provide a lot of resources that can help.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.