Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auvik helps us manage all our devices on the network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik for around two years.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using Auvik for about two years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been three years since I started using Auvik.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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