Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We're an MSP, and we handle and monitor the network for many different organizations. So, we use Auvik for any client that has on-prem resources such as firewalls, switches, and servers. It's basically for any client that has a physical office.

We used it mostly for alerting and to have visibility over resources on a network. It's centralized oversight over what's going on.

The network map is really good. It gives us a good idea of the topology for new sites as we deploy the software. The ability to remotely connect the network devices is great. If we don't have direct access we can pretty much just do it from anywhere that we have an internet connection to. That's really helpful.

My team does the knowledge training. They have a university, and when we have new staff, they take the Auvik certification course. Otherwise, there is a lot of stuff to do in the solution and a lot of things to see. Without training, people will have to guess their way around it. Maybe they will see some basic features, but to actually leverage it to the fullest, you do need to take the training.

The dashboard and the network map give a real-time picture. It is really good so long as you have the credentials for everything. I don't really have any complaints. I think it's really helpful. It has been a lot of use for us in the past. Regarding things such as suggestions, it tells you where you have devices you do not have credentials for. That's something you can see if you go to the discovery settings. 

The benefits were realized pretty immediately. The benefits are very self-evident. The only thing you have to do to see the proper benefits is make sure you have a good setup. It's important to know how to deploy things, which credentials to add, etc. Otherwise, the topology will not be of much use. You will not get the configurations. However, if you have the proper knowledge of how to set this up, it's great.

We do not give our entry-level technicians access to Auvik most of the time. It's usually for tier-two technicians or our network engineers. However, it does help them with the Epic training. Before we are going to give entry-level permissions, we have them take training, and the training gives them a lot of information on the network on how to use the platform. 

Auvik helps decrease our mean time to resolution. What's good about Auvik is you can define thresholds where you can close alerts. So, if something goes down, you can see the condition. That definitely helps us take time out of the resolution process and lowers our oral ticket numbers.

In terms of the dashboard, maybe seeing on the map, for example, if you have an access point that's connected to switch one, and the access point you do not have credentials for, that could help us make management a bit easier. However, it's not terrible. It's just something to make it easier.

It has a monitoring feature. Besides just monitoring the network, you can tell Auvik to monitor a host name, like a domain name or an IP address on the cloud, and it just pings the IP address and gives you information. I feel like that's something that could potentially be improved a bit. For the service monitoring feature, we can check for port status or cloud ping checks. We can check against domains and against IP addresses in the cloud. That's a feature that has been of a lot of use to us. However, it is a little bit lacking in some features compared to other solutions that we have also used in the past. We used to use another solution, and we wanted to transition this service over to Auvik since Auvik does largely the same thing. However, as we were migrating, we noticed specific features were missing, and we could not add some of the monitoring back into Auvik since there were some technical limitations. For example, if Auvik has an IP address for the domain you want to monitor, and if the domain does not respond, it will take it as the services down, and it's going to trigger the alert at that point. It does not check when giving out a ping request. It checks by just making an HTTP request to the website. However, basically, some websites that we manage do not respond back to ping requests based on safety settings and so on. So, we have to do HTTP checks to check if the service is up. However, Auvik does not support that at the time. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

Mostly, it works well. We do have some sites that seem to stress the platform a bit. We might have been over the edge when it happened, and that's the only time I have seen performance issues. 

It's really easy to scale. Previously, and I'm not sure if this is true any longer, you could not turn a single site over to a multi-site and vice versa. In that case, you may need to delete your current site, or sites, and migrate things over. 

Technical support is really good. They are really quick. I have no complaints. 

I've also used Datto. However, Datto provides actual infrastructure, whereas Auvik is just monitoring. They aren't quite the same. 

Setting up the solution is not difficult. We just have to make sure we have credentials for everything on the network. However, that's something that comes from our clients. As long as we have the credentials, it's pretty quick to set up. We had everything set up in about two weeks. 

However, if someone is not tech-savvy, they will see many unfamiliar terms. If someone has knowledge of API integrations, they'll have an easier time.

We tend to need two people for each deployment. Someone will take care of provisioning and collecting, and someone will do the technical setup within the platform.

There isn't really any maintenance needed. There may be alert tuning. Auvik does come with a lot of alerts that are already pre-built in. Some we disable, some we modify, and some we just create from scratch. 

I do not handle the licensing aspect of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten with my biggest complaint being the documentation and knowledge base, which is difficult to navigate.

As an IT company, we rely on Auvik, a network monitoring tool, to support our many clients. We install an Auvik agent on their networks, which then provides real-time monitoring. This allows us to be alerted of any issues, like a downed server, so we can promptly investigate and resolve the problem.

The interface is straightforward.

After familiarizing myself with Auvik, I could see the many benefits it offered.

Auvik empowered our entry-level technicians to resolve more tickets independently. It complements our existing internal monitoring tool. While the existing tool might initially flag issues like a server outage, Auvik provides additional insights for our technicians, helping them verify the information and identify potential false positives. This allows them to tackle problems more effectively without needing to escalate to senior staff.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution.

The most valuable feature is the alerting system. This ensures we're notified immediately of critical events, such as a server failure, allowing for a swift response and minimizing downtime.

I find the network map confusing and believe it could be improved by simplifying its layout or using clearer visuals.

The quality of technical support varies greatly. Some representatives are very helpful, while others are less so.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for three years.

There have been one or two instances where the Auvik website or portal seemed to be unavailable, but the actual appliances themselves seemed to be functioning normally. Overall, Auvik has been stable.

Auvik Network Management is scalable.

The technical support experience can be inconsistent. Sometimes we connect with fantastic technicians who solve our problems quickly. The customer service representatives are always friendly and supportive. However, occasionally we encounter technicians who suggest basic troubleshooting steps I've already attempted, like restarting or pinging. In these situations, I prefer immediate escalation. Thankfully, the escalation process through chat is usually swift, and the escalated representatives are very effective.

Neutral

While the initial deployment is straightforward, the overall deployment time will vary depending on our chosen option. On Windows machines, the process takes just five minutes, while Linux machines require approximately 20 minutes.

I start with a pre-configured Auvik collector packaged as an OVA file. I upload this file to VMware to deploy the collector. Once deployed, I SSH into the Linux machine and execute the necessary commands to update its firmware to the latest version. This completes the deployment process.

The implementation is completed in-house.

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

I recommend spending some time familiarizing yourself with the portal. Once you're inside, you'll find it to be quite intuitive.

I use it as a first line of information gathering. When properly configured, I am able to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot issues from the network's infrastructure level and go up to servers and other devices.

Auvik has helped to decrease my mean time to resolution. If configured correctly, it definitely takes 10 to 20 minutes off resolution. I am able to diagnose things at least 15 minutes faster than I would manually.

I like the feature that allows us to remote access and remote troubleshoot many of the devices, including terminal Windows.

When it tries to build the topology, it does it in a way that is usually incorrect. It cannot validate VLANs correctly, and it is a bit cumbersome. When we have a known topology, it makes it completely different. The network maps are not accurate.

It does not always give a real-time picture of your network. It all depends on how it was configured. I have seen proper configurations, and they look fine, and then there are other ones that are completely broken. For example, I have several clients with mixed equipment, but the topology map shows switches that are on top of the map, whereas firewalls are technically on top. It does not see them correctly. At times, it puts random switches not even connected to anything, even though we know they are physically connected in the topology.

If we are able to manually move devices on the topology, that would be great. It would be amazing if the network map could be manually redrawn. I have submitted this as a request previously.

I have been using Auvik for the last five years.

I have not seen any stability-related issues.

In my opinion, it would be a very scalable product.

I have not contacted them in more than four years. I only contacted them once very early on when I was asking about being able to move things.

To my knowledge, we did not have any solution that would be a comparative analysis of what Auvik provides. In recent months, I have come across a similar topology and diagnostic tool that is built into Fortinet's security appliance. It is a bit similar.

A similar networking map topology that I used to use was when we would build things in Visio and have them as interactive maps.

I was not involved in its deployment. 

In terms of maintenance, it does require maintenance. We have to update devices. When there are changes being made, we have to go back in and make sure that things are updated. Password maintenance needs to be done every so often, and our collectors need to be changed out every once in a while. We have some communication errors with them, so we have to do some troubleshooting with those. That is a bit of internal maintenance.

I was not the person who made the choice.

If you are a managed service provider, it is one of the best tools, and I believe it is worth the investment for senior engineers to do critical troubleshooting. It will take an application champion to make sure that it is configured properly, but it is very powerful for those who deal in the managed service provider workspace.

Auvik has not empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own because we do not allow our entry-level technicians access to Auvik.

It took me some time to learn the product and know exactly how it worked and how it was deployed. After I learned some of the nuances that were inside of Auvik, I was able to see remotes and things like that. It did take a few months of training to really understand it. A lot of it was self-paced. There was no sponsored training, so I had to learn on my own.

I would rate Auvik a solid seven out of ten.

Our use cases are around network monitoring. That was our biggest challenge.

The most important thing to me has been the benefits around visibility. If I don't have visibility then I can't report on things and the tool doesn't work.

And when it comes to reducing repetitive tasks through automation, it has absolutely done so, for example, through the backup features and functionality. Also, from an auditing point of view, it has greatly helped us because we now don't find ourselves in a situation where we have to figure out who did what and when. It sends out reports on a user basis, meaning we know when a user was logged in. Those are all very cool features and functionality.

With the reduction in repetitive tasks for my team, at different levels, time has been freed up. Another factor in saving time is definitely due to the improved fault finding we can do now. Because we have a network map, when something goes wrong, such as what couldn't communicate with which device, it saves us good chunks of time.

The network monitoring and backups of specific devices are really impressive. We've seen very good responses from our staff regarding the backup functionality. You can add a product, such as a switch and, once the product is added, it backs it up for you.

The ease of use of the monitoring and management functions depends on what level of engineer you are and how you perceive it, but to me, it's quite simple to use and user-friendly. The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is about eight out of 10. That aspect is actually quite good in the product. There are small tweaks and improvements that can be made, but overall, it is really good.

It also does change-tracking, which is a big aspect for us. If someone makes a change on a device, Auvik will report on it for us.

In addition, it helps keep the devices up-to-date. At a minimum, it gives us a monitoring feature on the versions of the devices. If it can't auto-update, the key here is visibility. As long as we have that visibility, there's a lot we can do with that info. The visibility saves us time.

And while it's not a single, integrated platform for everything, because I still use some of my other network tools to complete some other tasks, Auvik is a comprehensive platform.

I would like to see some improvements in some of the reporting functionality, meaning I'd like to be able to deep dive more into the reporting.

The reporting is still being scaled and built out and I would love to see some additional products being added to the stack. For example, Auvik covers certain types of firewalls, but I would like to see more enterprise stuff added to the stack. These aren't exact examples, but it may cover Sophos and FortiGate but not Palo Alto.

I have been using Auvik for about six months.

So far, I have found it to be quite stable. I haven't found the cloud provider to be offline and I haven't found that I was unable to log in to the cloud portal yet.

This is a quite easily scalable solution because it's a cloud platform. It's an easy rollout and the solution should be able to scale very simply. It shouldn't be difficult to scale out if we want more agents or more installs. It would be quite quick.

We have it deployed in a few different locations.

I haven't needed to contact their technical support yet.

We use different vendors' products and they have been troublesome or quite challenging. We did not have something that can do proper network monitoring around the devices themselves. We needed something that can scan the network, find the switches and devices, assign licensing, and then monitor them from there on out.

We're in the middle of transitioning, so we are still using the previous solution. It's a mix of SolarWinds and Darktrace. Those are two of the two bigger ones. This is a process, which means we won't jump to Auvik only and not use anything else, but we're finding it to be a great tool when integrated into our stack with the rest of the tools. We're definitely finding value in it.

Auvik is priced in the middle tier. We have customers using bottom-tier products and those who use what I wouldn't say are necessarily higher-tier products in terms of functionality, but more extensive products. For the way that it's deployed, where the pricing only affects certain devices—meaning there are some free devices, so that you don't pay for everything—it's quite nicely priced in the middle. It's not an overpriced product, but it's also not a very cheap product. It is in a good range of pricing.

If someone is concerned about pricing, in most cases the functionality makes a strong use case and it mostly trumps the pricing. Generally, functionality wins. If you give me a product that works really well and it's a little bit more expensive, I'll take it. It doesn't make sense to sacrifice functionality for pricing.

We didn't really evaluate other options. In our specific case, Auvik came recommended by one of my friends, so we started a trial and then used it from there. I wasn't necessarily looking for just this type of network tech. It was just a happy coincidence.

As for our team's visibility into remote and distributed networks globally, it has helped us somewhat. My team has started really integrating the product, but they've deployed it on a smaller scale at this point. It's not deployed on such a large scale yet.

Auvik, as a cloud-based solution, versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, is quite simple and intuitive to use. The cloud-based aspect is actually a very nice touch since some vendors require you to have an appliance onsite that they communicate with. It's very useful that it's a cloud-based application from an ease-of-deployment point of view. With no onsite appliance, there are fewer dependencies.

My advice would be to review and focus on the features and the functionality of the product. Don't necessarily, off the bat, just look at the pricing and say this is very expensive. With some customers, the first question is always, "What's the price?" without our having even said a word about the product. Take it for a test drive first, before you look at the pricing, so at least you know what you would be getting for that price.

We use it for network monitoring. We don't do a lot of systems monitoring with it. We predominantly use it for core switches, external network adapters, and other similar things but not for the endpoints or server hardware.

We are currently not using any of the automation functions.

It definitely assists with visibility into our remote and distributed networks. We don't necessarily use the Windows side of things, but we do have a couple of systems that are monitored. It is almost like a ping test or just a sanity check. From that perspective, it definitely helps. This visibility is 100% critical.

It helps keep device inventories up-to-date. It has saved us time because we have pretty much everything at a glance. It does allow us to prioritize what needs to be replaced or anything that would be necessitated by the device inventory, such as software updates or vulnerability patches. It definitely helps, especially with the end-of-life hardware. We're able to determine that and apply a device lifecycle to it.

In terms of helping our teams focus on high-value tasks and delegating low-level tasks to junior staff, in our network team, we do everything. There are all types of tasks that would be normally assigned to juniors. It definitely provides a lot more visibility and helps in delegating specific things. For example, when an interface is flapping or a port is shut down, it is a lot easier to delegate such a task. We're an MSP staff that doesn't necessarily deal with high-end network equipment. Turning a port back on is something most of us can do as long as we can log into a command prompt. Even the server admins can do some network tasks if need be. Within that, it does allow us to prioritize and state, "Okay, a senior network admin can figure out why this entire site is down," versus, "We need to update a switch."

Our mean time to resolution has reduced due to the alerting system.

We are seeing that the monitoring is very accurate. We are seeing that in terms of problems and solutions, there is a lot of functionality to it, such as APIs. So, you can dig down. You can dig deep into it. It does provide very useful metrics, and it has improved a large portion of our day-to-day operations.

The network monitoring portion of it has pretty sane defaults, and it is fairly good as a product. It is probably one of the better ones that I've used.

The visibility on the site itself is a bit of a problem. We do have the alerts panel, but there is no central monitoring. When we had requested how we would do this to place it up in the NOC and how we would view it and everything else, their answer was to use a third-party tool, such as Power BI. That was the response that we got. A front-end component to show the actual NOC operations at a glance is not present. That would be a major con in my opinion, especially for what we do as a data center. 

The actual adding of networks, systems, and everything like that is fairly easy, but the problem that I have is getting the metrics out. Specifically, if you go to the Auvik webpage, sign in, and go through the alerts and everything else, they don't offer any plasma display with a red light, green light, or stop light indicating this device is in an error state, down, etc. To get around this, we have to use their API. I had to code an entire interface to work around that lack of information. 

One of my major concerns or my major problems is the API hasn't always been super reliable. Sometimes things get broken. Sometimes it is down for a little bit. It doesn't seem to have the same reliability as their primary service, the actual web page itself. The API reliability is problematic when you apply a user account. I have a super admin account, and I have an API user that is a super admin as well. I create a new site as a super admin, and you'd expect everything to fall through, where the top level is the super admin and the subsites don't have access. We have network admins that create sites and DCOM sites and everything else all the time. When that happens, it breaks the alerts API and gives a 403, forbidden error, and that's across everything. If it can't access the top-level tenant, it just breaks the site. There are ways of counteracting that, and we're aware of the pitfalls there. 

We have had the API function in erratic ways where we do filtration based on various criteria, for example, if a ticket has been dismissed, if it is in maintenance, or if it is critical. We have filters for all the metrics. Sometimes, we had a couple of tickets where it doesn't acknowledge those filtrations or the filters, which causes a little bit of a problem, and we have to do a little bit of a sanity check within our code itself. It almost seems a little bit like they do focus on the front end and making it visible, but it seems like the API is almost a second-class citizen.

We've been using Auvik for about two years.

Because the API is what we use frequently, we've had various issues. It could use some work, but in the front-end portion of it, where I'm assuming most of the customers would be looking, we haven't had any downtime that hasn't been pre-planned and reported to us in advance.

Its scalability seems to be fairly good. We're not having any real problems. With the way we're doing things now, it seems to be fairly scalable, and I don't think we'll have any problems.

In terms of our environment, we have operations predominantly in New York. Specifically, there are a few in Manhattan. We have a few in Queens and Suffolk County. We do have one location that is in Singapore, which is one of the smaller operations that we have, but it is predominantly located in the New York, Long Island region.

They were very friendly. They were very good. Generally, if there was a problem, I was able to talk to an engineer on their side relatively quickly, which was a good thing. I was able to very easily prove the point that I had with the calls and everything else, and it worked flawlessly. After I was able to show them the output and everything else, they were able to resolve the problem. I believe they were able to resolve it after six hours or eight hours of having the call with them. That was a pretty good response time in my opinion.

I would definitely rate them a 9 out of 10. Getting a 10 is almost unheard of. All things considered, support is one of the better parts of Auvik in my opinion.

Positive

We have been using OpsRamp. We got Auvik because one of our larger customers used OpsRamp and then changed to Auvik. In our case, my boss said, "Well, why don't we use it too? They seem to be really enthused by it." However, that customer doesn't use it with the same use case. They monitored a lesser number of sites and locations. Their use case is slightly different and their monitoring is not the same, so it works for them, but it doesn't necessarily have the same impact on us. 

In terms of the consolidation of tools, we are still using multiple software types. Auvik is what we use exclusively to monitor network areas. We are currently using OpsRamp with which we are monitoring network hardware as well. We also used Kaseya, which was the worst software for monitoring anything. That was the reason why we immediately binned it as fast as we could, but we also have a couple of other different software. We are using an application manager. We do have Zabbix, and we monitor some things through that as well. That's mostly the ESXi and servers that are on-prem. We are a data center, but we also provide managed services as well. We have a lot of different systems within a lot of different operating systems and environments. Some are PCI. Some are non-PCI. So, we do use other software, and Auvik fulfills some of the same monitoring purposes but for different clients or different hardware.

In terms of time-saving by switching to Auvik, the OpsRamp software has some faults and after the actual interface that I wrote was deployed and started to be used by our NOC, there have been time savings. However, getting to that point took a little bit more frustration in setting up compared to some of the other products that we've used.

We spent substantially less time with Auvik than with our previous solution. The initial setup was relatively straightforward, but my experience level is closer to DevOps than a traditional Systems Administrator. Between my own level of experience and my network team, it was fairly easy to get it deployed.

We were able to deploy it, but then we found that for our monitoring needs, it was a little bit lackluster. I had to code the webpage.

In terms of maintenance, with regard to the API and the coding work, maintenance is required, but it is infrequent.

We did it by ourselves.

There were quite a few options that we looked at. It has been a while, but there was a large selection of software that we've tried, both on-prem and cloud-based. We did monitor or look at NinjaRMM and ScriptLogic. There was Nagios for the on-prem and Applications Manager from ManageEngine. We checked out Enable as well.

When comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus the on-prem network monitoring solutions, they serve different use cases, but the cloud-based Auvik has its advantages due to the fact that we don't have to have firewall ports opened. We can very easily monitor various devices and various client sites without having to be concerned about any leakages because we have the accumulator of the agent gateway and whatever the terminology that they use. It definitely has its pros and cons in the sense of firewall access, deployment speed, and monitoring aspects. We can apply a template across all different types of devices, and the scanning works perfectly in that sense.

My advice would be dependent on how many sites you are monitoring and what you are intending on monitoring. For network equipment, Auvik is very good. For hardware and software, such as Linux, Windows, ESXi, and other similar things, it is very poor in those regards. That would be the major thing. If you are intending on having one tool to rule them all, I would probably steer you toward that limitation because it is quite limited in the endpoint monitoring and server monitoring, but it very well exceeds in network monitoring.

In terms of providing a single integrated platform, the API access to it is good. It does provide that, but the actual OS and software side of things that are not network devices is a little bit lacking.

Overall, I would rate Auvik a 7 out of 10.

We primarily use Auvik for network monitoring and occasionally to remotely access some devices. It helps us monitor clients with a multi-site setup. We can monitor the network and overall network connectivity. The configurations of the devices we monitor are synchronized into IT Glue for documentation.

Auvik was part of the company's toolset when I joined as an engineer, and we have been perfecting it. We had a couple of big clients when I started. Everybody was under one site even though there were multiple sites. There was a site-to-site VPN and more. For some projects I worked on, we got directions from Auvik's account managers on how to implement multi-site within Auvik properly. That helped us manage these individual sites efficiently without creating too much burden.

Auvik's alerts notify us about an outage before our clients call us, so we can tell them that we're already on it when they call to say their internet is down. It gives them a sense of comfort and trust. Auvik is also crucial for any troubleshooting. If a device is down and we can't get to it from one way, it's always helpful to have another look through Auvik to start troubleshooting from the outside.

The cloud-based platform gives us ready access to necessary information without the need to go through additional steps to remote into a client site. Otherwise, we would need to set up a secure tunnel through a site-to-site VPN. Auvik makes it more convenient. 

It's arguably a more significant security risk in some ways. However, from the perspective of a managed service provider, it's more accessible to have a single pane of view for all our clients from the cloud-based portal. The initial setup and configuration are more straightforward. You don't need to pick a server or use many resources aside from setting something up in the portal and installing the Auvik collector. It certainly simplifies things.

It increased our visibility into remote networks since we can't be everywhere simultaneously. We don't need to deploy separate tools internally, which reduces the workload. It helped us improve network visibility in conjunction with our other toolsets.

As a managed service provider, we have multiple clients, so it's crucial to have visibility into their networks and our own. We have Auvik set up to cover our critical infrastructure. When the tool is set up correctly, it hums along pretty well. We can relax and let Auvik do the monitoring and documentation. It can gather the information or at least confirm it. If something changes, Auvik can pick it up. It does a lot for us.

Auvik helps keep device inventories updated. We have a couple of toolsets. For example, we have remote monitoring and management agents on servers. Auvik and some other tools can update the documentation automatically if one of the engineers forgets to do it after we change something on a server, such as an IP address. It provides another check for us and a general reminder, "Hey, this was updated. You should update the documentation for it because it looks different."

I like the ability to remotely access devices securely. The multi-site setup has also been useful. Once we learned how to set that up, we could customize each site and push out common information like SNMP credentials from the parent site to other multi-sites. The automatic network layout is excellent, and the overall monitoring is also beneficial. 

Auvik's monitoring and management features are relatively easy to use, but it depends on what you work with daily. When I started, there were features I didn't know about until somebody told me, "Set it up this way, and you could just monitor the internet connection as a whole." I didn't know that existed until somebody showed me. The basics are easy enough, but the advanced features require some training. 

They added two-factor authentication to access some of these devices remotely. It was a significant step forward because someone with access to Auvik has a lot of power. 

The network visualization is nice. We have some large clients with many devices, so the initial visualization might be overwhelming, but we manage that pretty well. There are some devices that we don't need Auvik to monitor. We lower the noise from workstations and printers because we have a separate toolset for that. However, it does get a little cluttered when you have a lot of servers. It was just a matter of getting used to it. I don't know if any platform has figured out how to do that properly, but it's pretty intuitive.

The solution integrates with our ticketing and documentation system. We use Auvik as our primary network monitoring system and alert system if something goes down. It provides a lot of benefits by putting everything in one place. Having a single integrated platform simplifies the process of looking. We don't need to go to multiple vendors and look at everything or have several windows and applications open. We also use PRTG to provide network monitoring for some of our clients, and that's more on the internal side. Auvik is good at monitoring anything outward-facing.

There have been times when our SNMP community strings were incorrect or weren't updated for whatever reason, and Auvik kept trying to scan them. Changing it was a pain, and there wasn't a way to extract that from Auvik. I understand there are valid security reasons why we wouldn't want to do that sometimes. In those situations, we had to recreate those community strings and reapply them to various devices.

Maybe they could implement a way to do that securely. It could be restricted by the role a person has within the organization. For example, perhaps a junior engineer wouldn't have access, but it would be available to a supervisor, manager, administrator, or higher-up. 

I have been using Auvik for a little over a year.

I haven't heard any complaints about Auvik's stability or performance degradation. Auvik has scheduled maintenance windows, but they're transparent about when they will be. It hasn't impacted us. Reliability is crucial because Auvik is part of our service to our customers. We've had issues with a few vendors where they've gone down or had quality issues that affect our services and reflect poorly on us.

Scalability hasn't been an issue so far. There is one thing to keep in mind, and it's probably less of a scalability issue with Auvik itself. However, we've learned from working with large clients that having multiple Auvik collectors is best. It would be best if you strategized about how to distribute the collectors throughout your servers and put redundancies in place. 

I rate Auvik support a ten out of ten. The knowledge base articles are pretty thorough. Once, I had to look up how to confirm SNMP credentials or set up SNMPv3. Auvik's team is excellent. Our support and account managers have been responsive and helpful. 

Positive

I rate Auvik a ten out of ten. I recommend planning and going through the steps to evaluate this. It's a powerful tool with an extensive suite of features, and the support is there if needed. Auvik has good people working there. 

Going back to the SNMP portion, you need to plan how to design and implement the solution, especially if you have a multi-site situation or are monitoring many devices. You need to plan for scalability and collector distribution.

We use Auvik to manage our network devices and get alerts about what's happening on our systems. We've deployed it across our showroom office network. We have 140 devices.

We're discovering devices we weren't getting previously. For example, we can monitor printer status and be more aware of what's happening with our printers. It's given us visibility that we didn't have.

It's essential because we don't have a dedicated IT team to manage our network. In addition to our IT infrastructure, we need to monitor smart office devices like the cameras and ensure all our devices are online. The ability to monitor this is massively valuable for our potential clients and us. 

We plan to use Auvik to keep our device inventories updated, but I haven't set that up yet. However, it has already populated a list of devices we will keep up to date. We didn't have that list previously. 

The best feature is the ease of setup. Auvik immediately scans and finds everything. It automatically connects to multiple devices with a single set of credentials.

Managing the platform seems relatively easy. I've only used it for a few days, but it's far easier than the previous product we were using. It gives us a single integrated platform, which is crucial for our business model because we provide solutions for others. The network visualization makes rough sense. There are elements that I find tricky to get my head around, but I think might be because it's all new to me. 

I say it's fairly clear, but obviously, it needs me to spend a little bit more time maybe grouping things together and things like that to make sure we've got the correct devices that things are mapped incorrectly.

I'm still undergoing the trial period. My only complaint is that I still don't understand what the license cost will be. More transparent pricing would be massive. In terms of functionality, it's head and shoulders above our previous solution.

I have only been using Auvik for about a week.

Auvik seems more stable than our previous solution. 

The scalability seems good. I placed a collector on a relatively low-power machine, and it doesn't seem to be struggling on the network. Everything seems fine.

We previously used Domotz, but we switched because it required us to run a device on the network that took another device off the network for some reason. I began looking at other solutions to see if they all had this issue. I stumbled across Auvik and decided to try it out.

One of the issues we face is that some of our customers won't allow anything to leave the site, so it has to be on-prem. That's one reason we chose Domotz. However, that caused problems with our network. We prefer a cloud-based system on our network because I work remotely more often than not. On-prem and cloud solutions have advantages and drawbacks. Some customers need an on-prem solution, but I prefer a cloud-based one.

Deploying Auvik is straightforward, and I did it myself. You install the agent, add credentials, and click okay. After you deploy the collector, the network map populates in under a day. I deployed it in the evening, and everything was there the next day. 

When comparing prices, you should consider how long it will take to set up and configure. A cheaper option might not be completely deployed for months. We don't have tons of time to do these things. The most important aspect is how fast we can get it running. How good the software is, and how quickly we can start using it effectively.

There was no visibility prior to setting it up on pricing. Having set it up, their pricing seems fair. It's definitely more expensive than what we're paying at the moment.

I rate Auvik seven out of 10. It seems fairly simple so far, and we haven't had any issues. However, I haven't used it extensively enough. It's expensive, and it would need to be mind-blowing to justify the cost. 

My advice to future users is to ensure you get your credentials together before starting the setup.

I use it to monitor all the activities in our office, including printers and the internet. It gives notifications for each device.

As a single, integrated platform, it's easy to track all the devices in the office. That decreases the time it takes for people to work together to find a problem. In some ways, it improves efficiency. 

It keeps our internet safe and helps us to protect our data.

The monitoring is really good. It tells us when a printer is out of ink or paper, so we don't need to check it and can deal with the device as soon as possible. It also monitors the internet so that we know whether there is a virus or it is safe. It also backs up our files, which is good.

The topology map is good. It shows each device and whether it has a safe connection, how long it has been connected, and its activities. That's really helpful. Knowing the map helps our efficiency.

It also breaks down priorities, giving us much more time and space for priority jobs. Each day, Auvik saves us at least one to two hours.

Their system is a little difficult because it shows a lot of LANs and it's a little difficult to find each device. In our system, we have over 20 devices showing and it really takes a long time when I want to find a particular device. If it's easier to use, it will improve work efficiency.

I would like to see a much simpler platform so that we could learn it faster.

I have been using it for one month, on a trial basis. We have 12 users of the solution.

I tried another solution, but it was not very good. The functionality was too simple. Auvik provides more detail and more functionality.

The price of Auvik is okay. It is appropriate for the market.

I prefer a one-time cost and buying something once. I do not like to subscribe.

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance.

We use it for alerts, to a degree, but we mostly use it for networking, monitoring, and triage.

Originally, what really was good about this particular solution was its ability to give us an alert, should something be down, based on simple networking such as pinging. There are a lot of other solutions out there now, but Auvik was, originally, the main source of our networking alerts and it automatically gave us tickets so that we could triage issues.

In a specific service situation where we have a failure, Auvik can save us a lot of time because it can remotely give us a picture of where the communications have stopped in an environment. It gives us the opportunity to put the eyes of a more senior team member on it, someone who is more experienced in networking, to assist somebody who is onsite to determine where the problem is likely to be occurring so that they can solve it much quicker. Many hours are saved for a higher-tier technician because they don't have to be physically onsite. They can use this utility to assist somebody who is there and helps reduce our MTTR.

Another benefit is the reduction in time spent doing repetitive or low-priority tasks, thanks to the automation. By also alerting us when an issue has self-resolved, it saves us the time of triaging an issue when it's not necessary to investigate it. It's helped us be more proactive, and at the same time, has given us an overview of things that have self-resolved.

The visibility we get is vital to my team. Any type of clarity, communication—even background monitoring—are all important. There are a lot of other tools, including SIEM and monitoring tools for networking, that are more advanced and have a better outlook on what's going on. But all the communication, information, and metrics are important for us to get a better picture, even when we're looking back to try to figure out client stability and hardware needs.

And Auvik has probably had an effect on our IT team's availability by helping us know about a client's problem and enabling a proactive approach to resolving it. If, for example, something is going up and down, up and down, we will get an indication of that via the alert system and the way it notifies our ticketing system, giving us trends. That gives us the opportunity to be proactive because we can resolve a problem before it becomes a complete outage.

When you have the alerting set up properly and you have the integration set up properly with a ticketing system, the end result is that, if you have a service desk triage team to determine who gets assigned a ticket based on the criticality of the situation, everything works together. The alerts notify us by creating a ticket. A ticket is then triaged by my service desk team, and they send it to a responding team. Human interaction is necessary in our design, but it does help that Auvik has a lot of automation in it.

Port mapping is probably the most vital purpose that I use it for. My team has a lot of different needs and they will use it for monitoring server performance issues and the like. But the most important functionality for me, over the years, has been port mapping when I'm trying to figure out where a network has stopped responding.

And as an MSP, we have an overall client management portal through Auvik, so we can get to everything from one spot. That's important when we are looking at solutions for clients, giving us some sort of unified reporting and access to clientele.

It's also pretty good when it comes to visualizing network topology if you take the time to manually make sure the access to individual hardware is configured. On an automated level, it helps to some degree, even for sites that are not fully configured or maintained. It's pretty helpful. And from an experienced-networking-engineer standpoint, the intuitiveness of the visibility is pretty good. From what I've seen from my entry-level technicians, their first response is that it's a bit confusing. But I don't think this is really an entry-level program.

It requires a lot of hands-on maintenance when it comes to cleanup. That's probably the biggest problem I've had because I don't have a dedicated resource to manually clean up stale records. I have a customer where it shows 4,000 devices because of the duplication of devices that I have to clean up.

I have recently found that the way that they bill, based on what they detect and what you're managing, is not self-cleaning. It requires that somebody intervene to resolve that. I'm a little challenged with the cleanup of devices for a client and the need to manually maintain it. A lot of manual cleanup is necessary.

We have been using Auvik for over five years.

I don't think I've had any outages with Auvik. I have to give it a 10 out of 10 for stability.

It has the ability to scale, but with the number of billable and managed products in mind, and the fact that it takes so much manual cleanup to get it properly situated for a larger client, I would knock the scalability down to about a seven out of 10. We have to manually figure out the billable devices and manually clean up configurations all the time, making it less scalable.

We deploy it to any client that has advanced networking. If they have multiple sites, that's where the design is most effective: larger clients that have multiple sites, even a dozen sites. We utilize it for networking that has switched stacks or multiple locations.

The communication with their technical support has been pretty solid. They usually respond quickly.

Positive

When it comes down to it, sometimes we require direct access to networks. We used other utilities like N-able products. Other types of programs like that would be useful. Otherwise, you're doing port scanning, either from the switches themselves or from third-party utilities on individual sites, from whatever server or access you have to the site. It's much better in that respect.

Prior to N-able, we used basic utilities, launched individually at customer locations, such as Nmap and Wireshark, where we were looking for network activity and details. All of them were manual applications that were installed and run at the time of need, instead of automated reporting.

I don't know why we moved to Auvik specifically, but we review products regularly. We probably had a presentation by the vendor and then there was agreement that it was the best way to move forward. But we utilize it at the same time that we use many other products for network monitoring.

If Auvik is properly manually managed by my team, there is value from it. If it's just left to run and not manually configured, monitored, or adjusted, then we don't see value from it.

From a client perspective, pricing is always an issue. Nobody wants to pay more than necessary. You need to be aware of the number of billable managed products, because they will greatly increase the cost of Auvik, based on your clientele and what you're managing.

I don't think pricing and licensing are communicated well by the Auvik team, as far as billable products go, until you get the bill. Once you get the bill and you realize you're being monitored for a bunch of things you didn't necessarily want to manage or control, you then have to take the time to manually reduce those managed products so that they're not part of your cost. It's clunky and not quite what I had hoped for.

Overall, I think it's been much better than other utilities I've used previously as far as giving me an overview of switch stacks, switch connectivity, and access to networking.

Maintenance is very manual. It's not the agents that require installation updates, it's the general interface. The configurations, or the inventory, have to be cleaned up manually and that's a lot of work.

My advice would be to keep an eye on billable products, most importantly, and be prepared to assign a resource who is dedicated to cleanup and configuration.

We use Auvik to create a graphical representation of our network. It's easier to trace issues when we know what's connected at a glance. Auvik gives us alerts when a device goes offline, and we use Auvik to identify the place in the network path where the issue lies. Was it a core switch? A downstream switch? Was it not a switch at all?

Auvik makes troubleshooting more manageable and the workflow smoother. When troubleshooting an outage or a node that went down, we can immediately identify the problem. It reduces the time we spend troubleshooting, allowing us to spend more time on other tasks, which is a roundabout way of saying it makes us more efficient. I'd estimate that it reduces the time we spend on these tasks by about 30 percent. 

Troubleshooting is just like anything else. You always focus on the tools you use the most or the ones that are the most effective. Auvik is one of the top two we use for specific issues, namely network outages or known downs.

Auvik improves our visibility into your remote and distributed networks. It provides quick visualization, so we don't need to log into any individual switches. We can do everything through Auvik, especially port tracing. We need to see what device is connected to which port. This can be easily done within Auvik.

It also helps us delegate tasks within our IT team. As soon as we locate where an outage lies, we can instantly determine whether it needs to go to a low-level technician or a higher one based on what we see on the network map or alert that Auvik triggers.

It doesn't automatically keep our network inventories up to date because we still need to enable SNMP on the device. But once it's in the inventory, it's easy to manage with the existing devices we already have.

A cloud-based solution reduces our hardware costs because we don't need to deploy a VM for monitoring. Also, we're a managed service provider, so we would have to have an on-prem solution for each client, which would be cost-prohibitive.

I like Auvik's alerts. We can configure the alerts for a specific timeframe, i.e., we can set it to alert us when devices have been offline for a specific amount of minutes. If a device or port is flapping, we can ignore it or allow only the first alert to come in and mute the subsequent alerts.

The monitoring and management are quite straightforward. I rate it nine out of 10 for intuitiveness. During onboarding, we went through how to set everything up. It's a set-it-and-forget-it solution, and we can use templates to move forward with other devices that we add based on our documentation.

Auvik is one of our go-to solutions, depending on the issue. If we see a device go down, we usually get an alert from Auvik or our RMM solution. Auvik lets us trace graphically to know where the issue could lie, reducing the amount of troubleshooting we have to do.

It's a single platform but isn't integrated with anything besides our PSA. I don't think it needs to integrate with anything else other than our ticketing solution. 

Auvik could be more customizable. Also, the network map isn't as clear as it could be. I don't know if it's even possible, but it would be nice if Auvik could pick up on dumb switches. I don't know if that's possible based on SNMP, but if they can figure out a way to do that, it would make our life much easier.

Our organization has been using Auvik for about a year.

We've never had any downtime outside of their regular maintenance windows. They always notify us in advance when there will be maintenance. Even when they're down for maintenance, it's after hours, so we don't notice. 

Scaling Auvik is pretty simple. We just activate SNMP, put the credentials in devices, and we're set once the Auvik collectors are in place.

I'd rate Auvik support seven out of 10. We haven't needed to reach out to them much. I can only recall around three or four times in the past year that we contacted them. They've been pretty good. We have only used web-based support, not phone support. 

Neutral

We were using Nagios, but it was getting too pricey. Nagios also provided more information than we needed. Auvik provides SNMP, which is fine for our purposes. With Nagios, we had to install agents on each node to recognize it. If we could activate SNMP, we'd get more reporting from Nagios when we install the agent, but it wasn't intuitive how to do that. 

Once it was slotted in place, there wasn't much of a learning curve at all, so we saw an ROI right away.

We looked at Zabbix. Zabbix had a free tier, but it had absolutely no support. We went with Auvik because of their support.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you want simplicity, Auvik is probably the way to go.

Zabbix has a free tool, but their paid solution is actually quite expensive.