Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

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 Auvik Network Management to detect devices on our network.

We implemented Auvik Network Management to gain the exact visibility I needed. This allows us to see devices on the network that might not be company-issued laptops, or even managed devices at all, such as unauthorized routers or access points plugged in by employees.

The UI is easy to use. There are a lot of different menus but they are not difficult to navigate.

While Auvik's network map excels at linking most devices, some manual adjustments may be necessary depending on the situation. This could include scenarios where the map struggles to identify which devices are connected to specific switch ports.

Auvik's network map provides as close to real-time visibility as we can get.

We saw the benefits of Auvik immediately after everything was set up.

The most valuable feature is device discovery through SNMP. This allows the tool to automatically gather detailed information about connected devices. For instance, it can identify a printer and determine if it's low on ink, out of paper, or experiencing a jam.

Auvik's network map, while helpful, could benefit from improved clarity. Currently, the amount of information displayed can become overwhelming. Zooming out provides a wide view of all devices, but compromises detail. Conversely, zooming in allows for closer inspection of specific devices, but sacrifices the overall network layout. This clutter makes it difficult to find a balance between seeing everything and seeing things clearly.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for three months.

Auvik Network Management is stable. We have not had any lagging or downtime issues.

Auvik Network Management is highly scalable.

The initial deployment was straightforward. I completed the deployment myself by following the easy-to-follow setup guide. The deployment took one hour to complete.

Auvik tends to be on the pricier side. Unlike some competitors who charge per site, they bill based on the number of devices they discover on our network. This per-device pricing can lead to costs quickly adding up for larger networks.

We evaluated one other solution, but Auvik had more features and was easier to use. The platform layout, overall functionality, and detail stood out with Auvik.

I would rate Auvik Network Management seven out of ten.

No maintenance is required from our end.

I would recommend Auvik Network Management to others.

For a smoother and faster setup, Auvik users should have a good understanding of their network devices beforehand. This includes identifying firewalls, switches, and access points. Preconfiguring SNMP on these devices would be particularly beneficial.

Auvik is an excellent tool for monitoring all our infrastructure devices, particularly network switches, servers, etc. We also use it to manage assets such as printers and workstations.

We use multiple products in our system, and Auvik is one of the top tools when it comes to monitoring; it does its job well, and we're pleased with it.

The product significantly helps us; the real-time updates and alerts, and the rapid response time those facilitate, are beneficial. It gives us a lot of confidence knowing that if something goes down and needs to be fixed, Auvik will notify us immediately, and we can start working on a solution right away.

The solution's automation had a significant effect on our IT team's availability, especially when it comes to issues that may arise on the network. Automation provides us with real-time information, which allows us to resolve quickly.  

We've seen a massive reduction in our meantime to resolution (MTTR) with Auvik; having real-time problem alerts is a game-changer for us. 

The alerting is fantastic; if something goes offline, we're notified right away. It gives us a lot of peace of mind knowing the solution will alert us to issues automatically 24/7.

Once the solution is set up, the monitoring and management functions are straightforward to use. This is important because we want our systems to be as easy to use as possible for our daily operations. 

Overall, Auvik's network visualization provides us with a lot of information. The interface, icons, and mapping showing the icons and labels for particular devices are intuitive; the solution does a good job of providing us with the information we need in this respect.  

The product helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, which is a game-changer for us. Automation benefits our team and department, as well as other departments and business units because we can integrate their systems into our Auvik system. 

Auvik provides good visibility into our remote and distributed networks, although most of our infrastructure is local. We have data centers in different locations, and all our network devices are visible on the Auvik interface, including VMs, servers, and workstations. Everything can be integrated into our system.  

Comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, being in the cloud is another game-changer. There can be some advantages with on-prem, but we prefer cloud-based, so it's great that we have that option. The cloud is the future, and everyone is moving in that direction, so that's a big plus for Auvik.  

The ability to subcategorize our inventories, between physical and VM servers, for example, would be a welcome addition. 

We've been using the solution for six to seven years. 

Auvik is very stable; we've experienced 99.99% uptime. It always provides us with the accurate information we need.

The stability could be better. Auvik can cater for many units and devices, but adding subcategories would make scaling easier.

The product has been steady since implementation, so we never needed to contact technical support.

I arrived after the solution was implemented, and before the implementation, I assume everything was done manually.

I wasn't at the company when Auvik was implemented, but as with all systems, the implementation can be tricky.

Auvik sometimes announces maintenance on their end, which is all done in the cloud, so the solution doesn't require any maintenance on our end. 

The pricing is fair; it's just the right price for what the solution provides.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, with the features and automation Auvik provides, it's on top of the game. There are some cheaper options, but Auvik is one of the top tools, and I recommend it to anyone with the budget.  

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. Auvik could be better, but overall, I highly recommend the tool.

We don't currently use the solution for managing device inventories. 

We're an MSP using Auvik to deliver a service for our clients. It's good at monitoring switches and networking infrastructure overall.

Auvik helps us troubleshoot, providing another way to look at a problem. Clients call in to tell us when something is working, and the cause of the issue is often unknown, so you need to attack it from different angles. Auvik offers another means to go in and look at the problem. If I know it's a network issue, Auvik will typically be the first tool I use to troubleshoot. It also provides excellent alerts. Auvik has reduced our resolution time by 25-30%

It has helped us with some low-level tasks. For example, if it's configured correctly, Auvik can monitor the age of VMware snapshots. Old snapshots can use up space on your server disk. Automating that task has been helpful. You can also automatically back up device configs. That's a level of automation that is hard to get in any other products, and I don't see ConnectWise Automation doing that. It can use WMI, too. 

In the past, we probably weren't backing up the configs as often as we should have. Typically, we would only back up the configuration when we upgraded the firmware. If you have the config, you don't need to rebuild it from scratch, so that saves hours of work. Previously, we had to check the VMware snapshots manually. We also tried an automated script that would send out an email. It didn't work well. Auvik was a significant improvement. Automation equals a roughly 50% improvement in our efficiency. 

The more complex the network, the more critical visibility becomes. Auvik helps a lot. We also use it for some smaller clients, but it's not all that beneficial for them. It's more crucial when you have multiple switches and a larger client.

In terms of delegating tasks to lower-level staff, Auvik seems like a tool that requires a certain level of networking knowledge. I don't think they need to be a Cisco-certified networking expert, but you need to know the basics like Ping, Traceroute, etc. It's okay for a level one engineer, but I think some were intimidated when they first saw it. Someone with extensive experience could get more out of it. However, they'll get more proficient once they start to use it.

Auvik does automatic device discovery, which is essential because you can pick up devices that are out there but unknown. I check it against ConnectWise Automate, which can automatically install things, but it's a more complicated operation. It's a little heavier. It's fitting for the devices to see if something responds, so it can inventory the device. If the SNMP networking is set up correctly, it will automatically add and monitor the device. 

It saves time because you don't need to add all the devices manually. That's the number one benefit. With Automate, you can automatically install the agent in a domain controller environment. However, some customers don't even have domain controllers, so you have to install the agent. We save 15-20 minutes per agent. It doesn't do as much as the other agent because it doesn't allow remote control, but it does allow us to inventory the device.

The stand-out feature is the automated config backup on networking devices. This automation is handy in a bind when a machine crashes, and you need to pull the config out of Auvik. 

The monitoring and management features are somewhat challenging to use initially, but you can figure it out after digging. It isn't hard for those with a high level of networking and computer knowledge. However, it's going to be difficult for some people.

Auvik provides a single pane of glass for all our customers in one portal. It's essential because many platforms are out there, and we can't have one for each client. 

After Auvik inventories a Windows device, installing a lightweight that would allow a remote connection would be excellent. A technician could use that agent to gain remote control over the client's computer, allowing us to troubleshoot remotely. 

If Auvik started doing that, it would be more competitive with ConnectWise Automate, making it more popular. They could probably charge more, too. More organizations would consider abandoning ConnectWise Automate altogether and only use Auvik.

The network visualization is a little plain. Still, I think it's okay for what it does. It's hard to script that to make it work properly, but I think it's getting better all the time. It has improved over time, and I think it's relatively significant, but not the end all be all. It is an excellent place to start because you can see where the connections are on the network, so you sometimes need to look at that. 

I have been using Auvik for four or five years.

I haven't heard of any significant issues or vulnerabilities. I know that Kaseya has had an enormous vulnerability, and SolarWinds had a huge one that affected governments. I haven't heard about anything like that with Auvik. So, I think it's pretty good overall.

Auvik scales well. You can always add more collectors. One of our clients had collectors at different sites, so it seemed to be quite scalable.

I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I contacted them with a question a while back. It took them a couple of days to respond. The question related to a collector no longer supported on the OS. I had to install a new one. 

Positive

We used ConnectWise Automate, a competitor that offers some degree of automation for networking, but it's not like Auvik. ConnectWise is good at remote management. If the PC has an agent, you can connect to it quickly and monitor the particulars of the Windows PC.

Automate has some ability to monitor SNMP network devices and the like, but it never worked well. They have a probe that you have to install in a regular Windows system, but it's meant to be installed on a domain controller. You put it on a Windows box, and it runs these periodic polls to identify some of the networking devices. But it had some significant limitations. For example, sometimes, it was unable to go onto another network. If you had another subnet, it often wouldn't work for that, and they never improved that. 

I've done some deployments at the client level, where I've hooked them up in the collector. I've done some of that but haven't done the complete setup. I've configured nodes and endpoints. However, I haven't done the initial design for the whole tenant. I've only been involved with client setups.

It's relatively straightforward if you read the documentation, which is pretty good. The Auvik collector can get outdated and require an update. It was all relatively easy. If you get stuck, you can typically Google the answer and find it in a knowledge base. Auvik also provides internal training. 

After the collector is installed, populating the network map usually takes a couple of hours. It's ready to go in about two to four hours after. It also depends on the complexity of the environment and what you need to set up in terms of credentials and everything you need to pull the devices. 

Auvik does require some maintenance. Much of that is automated. However, if you're deploying it on an ESXi host, those collectors will shut down when the host is rebooted for Windows or VMware updates. Overall, it's a pretty low-maintenance product. 

Auvik gives us the ability to assess problems quickly and address them. We can also restore services faster with the backup configs and alerts as long as you have a mechanism to address alerts and someone watching them as they come in. If you have a system in place to monitor and respond to alerts, you can get a good return from Auvik.

I don't know Auvik's exact pricing, but I hear it was competitive. We provided Auvik-based monitoring for nearly free to a few of our clients to get them to sign up. A lot of these MSPs are monthly contracts, and they make the numbers work behind the scenes. I'm not in sales, so I don't know exactly how that works, but I think the contract is enough per month that we bundle it in.

The sales team tells the client that we'll give them Auvik so we can monitor our network and make our support a little more stable. It's a fantastic way for a company to get the necessary visibility and not worry about something going down. The story you're getting from the client is often inaccurate because they don't fully understand what's happening. 

For example, we had an issue the other day with a client who didn't have Auvik. They had some weird networking stuff and weren't onboarded properly. Auvik could help you onboard in an area where it would be beneficial when you're bringing on a client to figure out what they have because it's going to go in there. It will do a lot better with inventory and the devices there. It might find some that are unknown, but if you see something strange, you should figure out what it is and what it's doing on your network before ignoring it. So, that's a good example.

There are a lot of solutions out there, but I don't think there's another solution as good as Auvik. I've used Kaseya and ConnectWise, and I've had some exposure to N-able, so I'm pretty familiar with a lot of these similar products. I'm more familiar with the older version of Kaseya. PRTG is another one. I found PRTG difficult to use, but it worked pretty well once installed. 

I rate Auvik 8.5 out of 10. It's a good product. The more effort you put into Auvik, the more you'll get out of it, so do the work up front, and it'll pay off down the road. You'll see a switch that goes down, and then you'll know there's something wrong with the switch. You can either get someone onsite or try troubleshooting that switch remotely as best as you can. 

Whether it's a power cycle or whatever, you need to work with what you have. Auvik provides some powerful tools, but you need to do the work initially to ensure it's configured correctly and you're using all the product's functionality.

We're a managed services provider that caters primarily to movie theater clients. Most of our Auvik collectors are deployed at active movie theaters and point-of-sale environments.

We use Auvik to get alerts on network activity and server resource utilization. We monitor firewalls, interfaces, traffic bandwidth utilization, and VPN usage. Auvik alerts us when a VPN or other device goes down. We monitor aspects like port utilization and which switches are being used for what or how much traffic goes across ports.

We don't automate anything through Auvik. We have other tools we use for automating tasks on our systems. We're utilizing Auvik specifically for visibility into the networks and SNMP-assisted log alerts and functions like that. When those are triggered, other tools outside Auvik run the daily automation routines.

It provides a single integrated platform for monitoring, but we use some other RMM tools to log into our servers and things like that. Those have some monitoring built into them, so we get duplicate alerts along with those. If a hard drive on a server fills up, I'll get an alert from Auvik and our RMM solution. But there's no other platform offering more monitoring or alerts that Auvik's not giving us. Auvik gives us more than what all of our other platforms give us, and it's all in one spot.

Auvik helps us be proactive versus reactive. We stay ahead of the curve by getting alerts and knowing that a problem could potentially occur. The ability to resolve potential issues before they become a problem is a massive benefit for us.

The visualization is excellent, and our customers will speak to that too. We often export the map it creates and hands it off to customers, so we don't spend lots of time manually creating these things in Visio or Lucidchart. We don't have to use any of those kinds of tools anymore.

I might have had trouble with the visualization if I hadn't had all those sessions with them to walk us through all the technical points of it. There's a lot of information, so it's like trying to drink from a fire hose. They handed all that information about filtering and using the solution in those technical calls. I think they know that you'll get hooked and become a long-term customer once you get familiar with it and understand how intuitive it is.

The visibility into remote networks has been immense. It's quite a big project to swap out some network switches for a new customer. We weren't familiar with the current network. We deployed Auvik on the web and scanned the switch ports to understand what was on the other end of each switch. It helped us replace those switches and plug everything into their new destinations on the correct VLANs. It's a huge deal for us.

We have it set up so that various alerts go to different teams. If an alert comes in for hard drive corruption on a desktop, that will automatically go to the manager of the help desk team instead of the server infrastructure team. That works pretty well. 

Auvik keeps our device inventories updated, saving us time because we know what is deployed and what has been decommissioned. It's also helpful from a billing perspective. It was a manual process of exporting reports from our RMM solution to do billing per device. We can do it all through Auvik because we can see what is active and what isn't.

We're a pretty small shop, so Auvik has helped us a ton. I would spend two to three hours a day manually doing this if we had to put it down to an actual number. With Auvik, it takes no more than 30 minutes of just browsing through alerts in one spot, creating tickets, assigning them to our resources, and taking care of things that need to be done.

Auvik is easy to use. It took some time to set it up, and they were pretty good to us. They offered us around six sessions with a technician to help us set up the monitors we wanted. After we were trained properly, I had no issues using it.

It has been crucial for us to have all these monitoring capabilities in one place. That's why we've been willing to shell out the monthly expense. It's helped us tremendously.

Configuring alerts is pretty tedious. It would be nice if they had a wizard who walked you through instead of having everything turned on or off from the start. 

For example, it could have some radio buttons and ask you, "When this kind of alert happens, where would you like the alert to go?" Is it push alerts to a cell phone or an email address? Is it simply alerting? I think an initial onboarding wizard would help you to build out Auvik and get more out of it from the front end.

We first used Auvik when it came out or when ConnectWise started pushing them. That was in 2019. We used it for about a year. I don't remember why we stopped using the product, but we picked it up again eight months ago and have been using it consistently since.

We've been with Auvik for eight months, and we've had a few alerts that Auvik collectors are not communicating with the solution. We had three of those in an eight-month period, and they were fixed within an hour. I'm pretty sure some of those came in overnight while they were doing maintenance. The uptime has been reasonable. 

It's pretty easy to scale up Auvik. We cater to movie theaters, so many of our sites are cookie-cutter from our end when we set them up. It would be nice to have the ability to copy a site and apply the template to another site. 

This may be a solution that they offer, but I don't know. We've never been able to do that before. In terms of deploying the collectors, the scalability is fine. After that, you need to go in and approve all the networks you want to scan. That takes at least an hour.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. I needed some help setting up an alert to monitor the VPN. I needed to get an alert if a specific VPN tunnel went down. I had no issues with that. They sent me a quick knowledge base article on how to configure the alert.

Positive

Previously, we used some open-source solutions called Observium and Libre. They're both SNMP and sys log monitoring tools hosted internally. We had to maintain the servers and do the updates. A lot of time went into that, and it would break frequently. When it broke down, we'd lose a lot of data and dedicate significant resources to maintaining the solution. That's the main reason we switched back to Auvik. Once we got into Auvik, we realized we got so much more data through it.

Auvik's cloud platform was a critical reason why we switched. When you're hosting an on-prem solution, you need the resources to maintain it. You have to apply patches to the software and maintain the infrastructure it's running on. In terms of capabilities, Auvik is like a hybrid solution. The platform is on the cloud, but you have an on-prem collector agent running these scans. There aren't any gaps in the data that it can obtain, and it's much easier not to have to maintain the infrastructure.

The deployment was straightforward. You create a site on the web portal, and it gives you an installer. You download the collector onto the device you want to monitor, and it starts collecting data. After deploying the collector, the network map takes 15 to 30 minutes.

We have Auvik deployed to around 25 sites, and our networks are heavily segmented. We have to create extensive rules on our end, which isn't necessarily an Auvik thing. We want one device to see everything on every network segment and VLAN. You have to have a rule specified for that. It took an hour at each location to get Auvik fully deployed. We started with those technical calls to understand the controls needed in the firewalls. Now we have a template that we use to deploy.

Configuring the alerts took four to six hours worth of technical calls. A lot of those were global. Those alerts could trickle down through each customer site as we had them set up. Our previous solution probably took the same amount of time to onboard a new site. At the end of the day, we have no internal resources dedicated to maintaining the infrastructure whatsoever. It runs and collects the data. We just log in and review it from there. It saves us at least two to three hours per week in the long run. It doesn't require any maintenance after deployment. 

In our experience, you get what you pay for. Everything is priced based on its actual value. I think Auvik is on the pricey side, but it has been worth it for us. It depends on how much you will use this and the level of visibility you need into the networks you're monitoring. Some managed services providers don't do much monitoring, while others monitor extensively, so it depends on how much it means to you. If you go with a low-end solution, you'll miss out on quite a few capabilities. On the higher end, you need to justify that cost.

I understand the pricing model with it, but I don't know the details about how much we pay monthly. I am not usually the one that handles it within our organization.

We did not look at any other solutions this time around. Initially, we were a ConnectWise customer, so we got a free trial to test it out. After we left, we decided to come back because it was a project where we needed visibility into a customer site. I knew Auvik provided that capability, and we did it. Once the owner of our company was able to get in and poke around through that, he was like, "Oh wow." So, he decided to sign back up for it.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. To implement Auvik, you must understand what you're trying to monitor. If you don't know where you're trying to go, it's much harder to pave the road. You must understand how to allow that monitoring within your infrastructure before trying to get it. 

We ran into a problem when we were deploying the collector and were only getting limited amounts of data because particular ports are closed on the firewall. We weren't getting alerts within Auvik saying something wasn't happening because it was blocked. It just wasn't working, so we had to figure out the hard way to create rules in our firewalls to allow the collector to get its data.

We use Auvik to map out networks and to view device health, meaning not just if it's up or down but also if there are any system-generated errors that can be listed via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

It saves me from having to log into each device through whatever login they may have available to them. It's a single interface for the devices.

It has greatly increased our speed. We don't have to check individual device-specific interfaces for monitoring. It also handles real-time monitoring, as opposed to a daily or hourly check. In some cases, it also allows us to find a device that's in trouble and directly connect to it from the interface. It's a huge time saver, and it does save us a fair amount of leg work.

It has helped to reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, such as checking on a device and opening and closing tickets for the devices that are in.

We now have a lot more visibility into the networks than we did before. This visibility is very important for our IT teams. The IT team would have a fairly difficult job checking all these different devices manually. In some cases, the work just wouldn't get done if it wasn't being done automatically.

A simple site view with the associated devices populating as things to add to or remove from the network is valuable. It's also nice to have it integrated with our ticketing system to create tickets in certain cases for devices that go down or have some high-level alerts, such as high CPU or overtemperature.

It's pretty easy to use its monitoring and management functions. There's a wizard that's involved when you first start it up and then you can pick. The initial network sets itself up and then you can add networks if they are available to the devices being monitored. Its ease of use is fairly important. There are some other monitoring tools that we have available to us, but they're agent-based. We can't load an agent on a switch or a router or something like that. We need some sort of SNMP interface to detect those errors. Otherwise, they would go unnoticed.

It's pretty intuitive. As soon as you pull up the site, the map comes right up. You can expand or contract different device types. In many cases, it will attempt to interrogate the device and find out what device type it is, but sometimes, you may have to set it yourself.

For the most part, it's great for visualizing the network mapping/topology for our organization. However, when complex VLAN networks are involved, sometimes, the picture can get a little cloudy. It would definitely be nice if there was some way of choosing a VLAN to view or something like that. They should definitely improve the handling of multiple networks and VLANs. I do know that the information has been gathered, and I know it's possible to give different looks. There could be a layered approach to the VLANs where you can take the default VLAN or you can toggle a switch and show, for example, a security camera VLAN or a voice-over IP VLAN. It would be nice to be able to have it pull up the information relevant to a particular network. 

The GUI map view could potentially be adjusted so that we can manipulate it without necessarily having it resize every time we adjust the screen. There should be a single focused view. Currently, it resizes every time I move this bar that has the information underneath it. Sometimes, that's after me zooming in on a particular piece, which makes it difficult to find my place again.

I have been using Auvik for at least a year. I'm a senior engineer for an MSP, and I use the Auvik system on a daily basis. 

Auvik's stability is great. They do run regular maintenance, and they always have an announcement about the maintenance ahead of time.

Its scalability is great. You're not limited to a number of devices, etc. Your only limitation is whether or not it can see the networks that you're trying to track. Because this is a cloud-based solution, it wouldn't be good for somebody who has an isolated network or something that's not on the internet. Other than that, whether you've got 5 workstations on the small network with 1 switch and 1 router, or if you've got 6 switches, 30 telephones, 7 printers, and 18 access points, it shows them all irrespective of whether it's a big one or a small one. The pricing on it is based on the devices. A small network is going to have a smaller cost than a larger organization.

It's deployed across multiple clients that we have. Each one of our nine different sites is a different client. Of those clients, none of them has two sites. So, it's not necessary that we have multiple site issues. We have nine sites and nine clients.

Normally, we have been just speaking to the sales team. So, contacting the sales rep is something that we've done, but there is a knowledge base that is fairly fantastic. They have it set up for a bunch of different device types from different manufacturers. You can see how to configure them so that they're sending the right information to Auvik. Each one of them gives step-by-step guides on how to integrate that device with Auvik.

There is obviously technical support, but I have not had to use it, which is great. The support is available right from the interface. You just go to the website, and they give you the phone number, and there you go. It would be fairly easy. You can do it through a message or through their phone number.

Their sales support is fairly techy. They are not just managers. They know their devices and their software. I would rate the support provided by their sales engineers at least an eight out of ten. They were easily able to answer any of my questions. However, not a whole lot of questions came up because the product pretty much runs itself. There are how-to guides on adding the capabilities of new devices. If there's a router, a firewall, or something else, there are instructions on how to configure it to connect to Auvik.

Positive

I have, but they belonged to certain ticketing systems, such as HP OpenView, etc. HP OpenView comes into play if you only have one network to manage. Currently, I've got nine different networks under Auvik, and for me, it's a switch between them. It's as simple as just dropping down a box and looking at the next one. However, because it's integrated with my ticketing API, I don't necessarily have to drill down into it. I'll receive tickets for certain devices that are having issues.

It was very straightforward. There was some hand-holding that they needed to do for us in order to integrate it with our ticketing system, but so far, setting up Auvik, starting a new site, and having that site inventoried and discovered has been mostly wizard-based. So, it's not difficult. You probably don't even need to be familiar with the technology to set it up.

We implemented it out of the box, but there are checkpoints where you authorize networks to be scanned. There is a stop there, but it's not too big a deal.

It probably took about two hours to set everything up for the first client, and then after that, each additional client would be about half an hour.

Auvik had a sales team that assisted us in the initial setup. In terms of the staff involved, I and the owner of my franchise company were there. He didn't need to be there. He just wanted to be there.

It doesn't require any maintenance from our side.

It saves me time on a daily basis. So, there's a great time-to-value. A fair amount of my time has been spared using this tool.

Its licensing is very fair. The devices that stand to gain the most benefit from this product are the ones that are billed. In the case of routers, switches, and firewalls, I won't necessarily have the ability to put a management agent on them to gather errors and activity logs. This type of solution is a requirement for me to properly monitor and manage these devices. The devices that aren't being billed are workstation servers, etc. For those devices, I can put agents on them to monitor their health. It has a fair billing structure. Additionally, the billing seems to only happen for devices that I have linked to my ticketing API, in such a way that I could stand a benefit from it.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that when comparing with other applications, they need to check if the other solutions are able to integrate with their ticketing system APIs. They also need to check how many device types they expect to log into during any one of their days, in order to get a true look at the device health of the networks that they have under them.

I did know of one other option available, but we did not evaluate or entertain any others before we went with Auvik. It was presented to us as a trial, and we were simply impressed.

The best advice is to make sure that all the devices that you want to come up in the map view have been properly configured to send their SNMP data to the collector.

Auvik helps to keep device inventory up to date, but typically, we do device inventory in a different way. It's nice to be able to validate the inventory, but in most cases, inventories are handled by different tasks. Auvik is invaluable for taking the initial inventory for a new client, but normally, we would go with a different inventory process, and we would use this to validate that going forward. It helps with the building of the inventory, and it helps to validate the inventory as it progresses.

I would rate Auvik at least an eight out of ten.

We originally purchased Auvik to map our network because I didn't have any kind of network diagram. I thought this would provide a better view of our network. 

In the past, we had several solutions for monitoring our network. Switching to Auvik saved quite a lot of time. We have a small team with limited resources, and we saved a lot of time trying to do all this. It has increased our IT team's availability by about 40 percent. When we implemented Auvik, we didn't have a network admin, so Auvik helped fill that void. Auvik provides a general idea of the network layout and our infrastructure, allowing me to work with third-party and in-house engineers.

Auvik has helped us automate repetitive tasks and streamline processes. For example, it's easy to recognize when we need to upgrade our firmware or patch something. It has reduced our resolution time because it can take time to resolve issues if we don't have a network diagram. Auvik's cloud SaaS model saves money because we don't need to maintain devices or pay for overhead on our end. 

I like that Auvik keeps track of our contracts for the network devices and tells us what updates are needed. Using Auvik is pretty straightforward. We've gone through onboarding a few times there with the representative. It's easy to use if you have a good grasp of network administration.

It has a nice dashboard that rolls a few solutions into one. That integrated platform is crucial because we don't need to navigate multiple dashboards. It's a single pane of glass. Auvik's interface is intuitive and gives you an understanding of what to look for.

The discovery of devices in your inventory could be more automated. It doesn't find anything without an SNMP string. If you have an SNMP string, it'll find it for you and keep it in the inventory. 

We've been using Auvik for about six months.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for stability because we haven't seen any issues.

I rate Auvik support 10 out of 10. We have had ongoing contact with Auvik support. They check in with us periodically to make sure we're doing good. That's pretty consistent.

Positive

We started with Auvik.

Setting up Auvik is straightforward. I implemented it by myself with some guidance from the vendor. It was a matter of running a wizard and ensuring we had the right credentials. We used the out-of-the-box configuration. After deploying the collector, our network map started populating instantly, but we allowed 24 hours to ensure the collector had run its full course.

We gave it about 24 hours just to make sure. It started populating almost instantly, but we wanted to make sure that we had everything there and that the collector ran its full course.

We had support from a vendor consultant who helped with the setup and followed up with routine maintenance. The service has been great. 

Looking up every device to see if it's on contract or renewal takes time. Auvik provides a single pane of glass with all your devices, which saves considerable time. I estimate it's an 80 percent reduction. 

Auvik is a good product for the price. The license is reasonable. We took a chance on it and figured it would work for us. It did even more than we expected. 

The closest network mapping solution was SolarWinds, but it couldn't offer the same visibility into firmware updates, contract renewals, etc. SolarWinds was a lot more expensive, too. Price was the deciding factor.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. I would recommend it for companies looking for an easy way to get their network mapped and features like device contract management and inventory. Auvik's ease of use and price are the most important factors, especially for small teams. 

You should do a proof of concept before you deploy it.

We use it for network monitoring and for configuration backups.

Auvik makes it much easier for techs to diagnose issues. And the automatic configuration backups are a game-changer. In addition, the ability it gives us to see more accurately what's going on inside our networks is very important to us.

It has also reduced our MTTR by about half.

The monitoring and management functions of Auvik are as easy as they can be for the functions they do. It's definitely the easiest product I've ever used. That ease of use is a nine or a 10 out of 10 when it comes to importance. If I have to hire somebody specifically to do those functions, it's very expensive to keep that person. If someone who has general skills can use it, it's much more affordable from a business standpoint.

It gives us a single integrated platform for networks and that ranks as a seven or eight out of 10 in importance.

And it's a tool we use every day for visibility into remote and distributed networks. That too is very important.

We also use it to keep device inventories up to date.

The network mapping is just okay when I consider what I would typically see in a network map. It doesn't fulfill what I would expect, but it does some other things: dynamic port information and VLAN. But that whole overview map in a single pane of glass can be pretty messy and a little bit of a performance hog on computers. The network mapping needs improvement in Auvik, as a whole.

I've been using Auvik for about three years.

It's very stable. I can't remember a single time when we've had an Auvik outage.

Other than the network map becoming a little bit of a performance hog as you get into bigger networks, it seems very scalable.

As an MSP, we provide IT for about 50 organizations, from healthcare to manufacturing to education. That means we have Auvik deployed with collectors at single sites and at multiple sites with multiple collectors. It covers a broad spectrum for us.

We weren't really doing Auvik-type functions on any kind of scale. We've used SolarWinds or PRTG, but we weren't really using anything, before Auvik, for all of our clients.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Once the Auvik code was implemented it took a couple of minutes for the network mapping to start to populate. It was very fast. We have about 50 clients, and the overall deployment took about 20 hours, when all was said and done.

There is no comparison between Auvik and previous solutions I've used when it comes to setup and maintenance. With other solutions, I would literally have to touch every single networking device to monitor them. With those solutions, it probably took at least five times as long to set up. For deployment, we quote three hours, and for ongoing maintenance, we don't even think about it. It just works.

We did a pre-sales call with Auvik for the basic training, but outside of that, we did not use other help.

Our time-to-value with Auvik was right away.

I would love to be able to get into the tier with the sys logging and the NetFlow/sFlow. That tier is a little bit expensive for us. If that could come down a little bit in price, we would be using that everywhere.

We looked at SolarWinds, but Auvik was really the only fit for our business model, since we are an MSP. I couldn't find anything else that met the needs of a multi-tenant environment the way Auvik does.

If a comparison is being done among network monitoring solutions and there are concerns about pricing, I would tell them to look at the amount of time it takes to set up and maintain other solutions, as opposed to Auvik. Also, having to look at a MIB or do an SNMP walk for our devices, functions that would require a high-level tech, are things you don't even have to think about in Auvik. You put in the device, you tell it what you want to monitor on, and it does it for you. It honestly saves money.

As a cloud-based solution, Auvik is reliable and easy to use. I wouldn't even consider an on-prem solution at this point.

I would recommend it to anyone who would ask me about it.