Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use this solution to monitor our network devices and servers, get alerts if devices go down, and get alerts when they come back up, which is important. Auvik alerts us about abnormal network traffic and certain ports on certain network devices or high utilization and high bandwidth. We're going to use it to monitor our virtual servers and virtual systems that of which our servers run. It gives us good visibility into our network.

We're a resort and have about 800 employees. It is a single network with multiple VLANs. It is relatively straightforward, but we have a lot of remote buildings connected by fiber lengths. Therefore, it's spread out over about 1600 acres of property.

Auvik bridges a lot of gaps for us. We have several remote locations on our campus, and there are network devices that are spread out. They're not manned all the time, so if a tree falls down on a data line or if the power goes out, for instance, a lot of times we wouldn't really know about it until people come on the property or go to that location and let us know. Auvik lets us be more proactive by telling us exactly when something goes down, and we can respond to it as soon as possible rather than waiting for service disruption for a user.

It also bridges the gap as far as backing up our systems and backing up the network switches, which, before Auvik, was a manual process. Now, we don't even have to do it; Auvik does it automatically.

I like the fact that it's easy to set up and learn our network. I've used some other systems where it takes a lot of time and effort to manage the monitoring system, so you get what you put into it. The nice thing about Auvik is that you put the credentials in, put the agent on the network, and it just does its thing. It sets up alerts that you would most likely turn on anyway without even having to do it. If you add another new device to the network, it detects it and sets alerts up for that device. With the other systems that I've used, I had to manually add those devices in and manually set the alerts for new devices. I like that it's an almost set-it-and-forget-it sort of system.

The other feature I really like is the network switch backup. It backs up the configurations of all our devices. We can go back and look at the history of the configurations as well. It's a feature that the other systems I used didn't even have.

There is one portal to access everything that Auvik does, that is, it provides a single integrated platform. I don't have to access it through any other panes of glass. It's important because when the Auvik device is in your network, it uploads all the data to its cloud. That's nice because you can access that portal from anywhere. You can access it from a phone, tablet, or PC.

We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks. It wasn't an all-in-one system, and we'd have to manually do a lot of the tasks that Auvik can do.

It's very easy to use the monitoring and management functions. It's automated and keeps itself up-to-date. If you want to monitor traffic or monitor a specific device on your network, it will already be up-to-date. You just click on it and view it.

The network visualization is very intuitive. It's easy to use and navigate, and if you have any questions, the technical support staff and account manager can answer any questions you might have. I didn't really have to read any manuals or receive any training on Auvik. It's easy to install, configure, and get going.

Auvik helped to reduce repetitive low-priority tasks through automation. It automates the network switch backups, which would take four or five hours a month to do before. It also eliminates the need to tune our monitoring system because it does it itself, which is very nice.

Our IT team is more available for higher-priority tasks, end-user issues, and training because we're spending less time doing menial tasks.

Auvik helps to keep device inventories up-to-date. We have other inventory systems as well, but we can use Auvik to keep track of workstations, servers, printers, and other devices on our network. It even keeps track of printer toner and paper, which saves time.

We have seen a reduction in our meantime to resolution. Auvik helps us to be more proactive and lets us respond to issues faster.

If the out-of-the-box price was about 30% lower, I think it would have allowed us to purchase it sooner. It definitely costs more than some of the competitors that are out there. It's also better, so I understand why it's a little bit more expensive.

I've been using Auvik for less than a month.

Auvik is stable. I haven't had any issues yet with either the collector or the cloud.

We used WhatsUp Gold previously and switched to Auvik because it is easier to use, is more robust, and has better features. It's a more mature, better product.

Auvik is cloud-based but has an on-premises component to it, which feeds the data to its cloud. The good thing about that is that I don't have to do any updates or upgrades to the software. Auvik takes care of that for us. They will update the collector that is on-premises as well as their cloud systems. With the previous on-premises systems that we used, we had to manually upgrade them periodically ourselves. Auvik eliminates that.

The initial setup was straightforward; it was one of the easiest systems to deploy. I implemented it out-of-the-box, and it literally took me about 20 minutes or less to get it going. I downloaded the virtual server, installed it on my virtual system, booted it up, gave it an IP address, let some firewall rules through, and signed up with an account on the Auvik website. At that point, it was talking and running.

The somewhat harder part is adding all the credentials that you need for it to talk to the different systems. Auvik gives you usable, good data within 20 minutes.

After the collector was implemented and once the credentials have been added in for the network devices, within 20 to 30 minutes the network map started to populate. It's amazing how it updates the map pretty much right away.

If I were to compare the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus that of the solution we used previously, the cost is higher by 50%. However, the installation was quite a bit faster. It took probably 20% of the time it took me to install and configure the other system, and the maintenance, if any, is definitely less with Auvik.

Maintenance-wise, we make sure that we update credentials if we change passwords and tune alerts a bit to make sure that we're not getting bombarded with emails that we don't really care about. Auvik is straightforward and finds everything on our network for us and keeps us posted.

I worked with my salesperson who knows the system really well, which is very rare in the IT space. I had a few questions, and he worked with me on some configurations. He was able to get me a quote and configure my system.

If you are comparing network monitoring solutions but are concerned about pricing, my advice would be to look at the big picture. You may spend less money on a solution, but you're going to spend more time configuring it and keeping it running properly. You may have to manually do some tasks that aren't featured on the cheaper version of the system. Overall, you'll probably end up spending the same amount of money with labor savings.

Auvik is straightforward. I recommend looking at the time it's going to save you, and take that into consideration when purchasing it or looking at the price. Overall, Auvik does more than a lot of solutions, so it's definitely a good time saver. I would definitely recommend it and rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't see a limitation to the scalability.

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

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

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10.

We manage IT infrastructure for 400 companies, and Auvik allows us to monitor it remotely. We have a portal to monitor these companies' servers, devices, routers, and APs constantly so we know when something is down and needs to be repaired in real-time. It's nice. We have it implemented in our Autotask and service desk portal, so it can automatically open and close tickets.

Auvik has improved our company's operation tenfold. It allows us to do real-time network monitoring down to a printer connected to the network. 

We can also automate and streamline fixes for recurring issues. We can determine an ongoing problem and find a real-time fix for it. We monitor and log different events. Once we have enough cases, we create an automated fix for that issue and cross it off our list, so we don't have to worry about it again. It's been overwhelmingly successful in our company.

Previously, we had various managed portals and a list of URLs to check. We went to a client company to see what portals they used. It was an absolute nightmare. Credentials would change constantly, so we couldn't log in. It was horrible.

Auvik has saved us a lot of time. Much of the solution is automated and monitors by itself, letting us know when critical issues occur. We no longer need a dedicated technician to log into every network. It gives us real-time monitoring, so we don't need someone to check every network first thing in the morning to see if any issues require a response. 

When I click on one of the 400 companies we monitor,  Auvik will give me a spanned view of everything on their network, from their DMZ to their servers, switches, firewalls, printers, and PCs. It opens a tree view, so you can go down the list from top to bottom, which makes troubleshooting things much easier. We get a much broader view. In addition to monitoring endpoints for threats and performance, Auvik lets us see the topology of the entire network, which is perfect for our purposes.

The intuitiveness of the network visualization is amazing. Several times, it's picked things up that I've missed. I look back and ask, "Why is Auvik alerting me about this? I know that's not an issue." I'll dig deeper into it; they've noticed something I didn't even see, saving me time and energy.

Without Auvik, our technicians would spend countless hours troubleshooting things unnecessarily. When you get a call from a client with network issues, Auvik can pinpoint precisely where the problem lies. Otherwise, you'll blindly go through every device, trying to figure out what's happening, which could take hours. 

It has freed up a lot of time for our technicians to work on new projects or get certifications. We have 25 technicians, and Auvik has freed up around 24 to 48 hours of additional time for our technicians to do other tasks. Auvik has also enabled us to utilize junior staff better. The GUI interface is easy for a low-level tech to learn. After three or four days of training, they can understand how Auvik works and become accustomed to using it more often. 

I would not want to work at an MSP without a networking monitoring tool. It would be a step back to a point where you struggle to get one ticket done when you could have done eight because you don't have the necessary information. That's what Auvik does for you.

Without the updated real-time information Auvik's device inventories supply, we're not giving the customer the reliability and performance they request. These monitoring tools allow us to be proactive and see things before the customer realizes a problem. That's our reputation. That's what Auvik has given us. Any updated information will save us time. We can't use bad information when we try to fix the issue. 

I like the way everything can be integrated. Auvik uses SNMP and various protocols to ensure we can monitor any device on the network.

Auvik has issues with collecting information from some devices. I don't know if this is an issue on Auvik's end or if the device isn't compatible. We have noticed that some clients have been unable to add their devices to Auvik due to compatibility, but devices are fickle. I think it's a device issue and not an Auvik issue.

I've seen Auvik resolve these issues. They will create the ticket and tell us the issue is resolved. For example, maybe the customer restarted the modem, or the ISP got it running. They'll go ahead and close that ticket. The automation there is so nice that it will keep us updated if something's happening automatically.

I started using Auvik about a year ago. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for stability.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for scalability 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. We've had to reach out to them a few times for custom things or issues with devices not connecting. They've always been very helpful.

Positive

We previously didn't have a managed or automated solution like Auvik. It was a list of URLs and an Excel spreadsheet for each company with all their networking and login information. After we got the pitch and went through the evaluation process, we realized what it could do for us as an IT company couldn't say "No."

Setting up Auvik can be tricky, but I think setting up any of these systems can be difficult initially. It's a piece of cake once you have the baseline down and your systems in there monitoring it. Our deployment was complex because we have 400 different companies, and each has various equipment with varying ages. 

I don't think using Auvik was complex per se. It was just the complexity we were trying to add to it. For a few small companies, we had to work with Auvik to set up custom APIs to get some things to work, but it went smoothly for the most part. 

After implementing the collectors, the network map started to populate within minutes. I think it's attributable to Auvik's ability to work the way it does and the protocols it enables to push this information over the network. We already have the credentials set up in the Auvik portal, so it has the permissions it needs. It can scrape that device for as much information as possible.

We've freed up a lot of extra employee time because of Auvik. It automated many tasks that required a dedicated technician to spend four hours each day checking every company's network. Auvik does that all the time, so it saves our employees a lot of energy and time.

It all depends on the scale of your implementation. It would be pricier for a smaller company ranging out for a few remote locations. It's cheaper if you're using lots of licensing. My advice is to try different solutions and see what works best for you. For us, that was Auvik. I think Auvik's current price is competitive and works for our business environment

We did look at a few other options, including Kaseya and SolarWinds. Auvik was the best option for pricing and features we were looking for in a product. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you plan to use old devices, verify that SNMP is an option. We had a lot of issues with a device that was 25 years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auvik helps us manage all our devices on the network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik for around two years.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Positive

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 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.