Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

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.

I run an engineering team with a dynamic cloud-based environment. I was interested in tools that can help me understand what we have deployed. 
There are about five people administrating it. In terms of the number of locations, it's hard to say. We're a distributed remote team, but we have multiple cloud environments. We don't have locations in the physical sense of the word anymore.

One of our core objectives is to understand the services and systems deployed in the cloud. It's not always obvious. I'm hopeful that Auvik will help.

Having a single platform is somewhat important. It's also essential to integrate Auvik with other solutions. However, I don't think there's a situation where one tool can be the single integrated platform within a space. I checked out the API and the integrations around that. It all looks good, but I didn't use it that much. I did some basic integrations, but I don't think having a single integrated portal product is everything. The right amount of features are integrated into Auvik, but it doesn't need to have everything integrated, and nothing ever will be fully integrated.

We use various tools, including our homebrewed management scripts, some monitoring tools, and cloud portals. They aren't all applications per se, but we have various overlapping tools. Switching to Auvik would save us some time, but some key hangups prevent us from proceeding with it. 

The automatic discovery would help us avoid repeated configuration steps. The automated device inventory feature is potentially valuable. Employees are expensive, and we want them focused on high-value tasks. 

Visibility is crucial. Auvik has alerts that help us be proactive by telling us when something is behaving abnormally. 

The automatic discovery feature is the most valuable, but I've got some issues. The monitoring and management functions are effortless. It couldn't be more straightforward. We use lots of tools, and they need to be as simple as possible. Auvik has an advantage there because I certainly would pick it over something else. However, we often find ourselves using functions that aren't so easy to use because we need them, and they're the only option available.

The network visualization was intuitive enough, but it's hard to say because the network I was testing had a reasonably flat structure. It was good for what I was doing, but I don't know how that scales.

We use a service called Tailscale, a peer-to-peer private networking tool. My biggest issue with Auvik was getting it to scan devices across the Tailscale network. I suspect it's not supported there. That would be a valuable extension for us.

I haven't used Auvik for long. I did a demo for about a day where I set up the features and played with the interface extensively.

Auvik is highly stable.

I haven't stretched Auvik's capabilities, but it's been fine.

I rate Auvik support a six out of ten. They were very responsive, but I didn't feel that the answer was quite accurate.

Neutral

We had a mixture of cloud consoles and self-management scripts. I saw Auvik advertised and thought the automatic discovery sounded handy, so I took a free trial.

I run the engineering team, so I wouldn't do the deployment, but I manage the people who would. It's pretty straightforward, and I implemented Auvik out of the box. It takes very little time to deploy. I could see devices within an hour. I spent most of the day playing with configurations, adding SNMP credentials, and exploring. I could get something running in half an hour to an hour. Auvik was much quicker to set up than some other tools. 

I'm concerned about the price. It seems quite expensive.

I rate Auvik a seven out of ten. Currently, it doesn't work for us because of the limitation on Tailscale. If it weren't for that, I would give it a perfect ten. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet our needs, so I can't score it too high.

The setup was smooth, and you can tell they've put a lot of thought into helping people with that. I'm curious why all the devices have API keys next to them when I know some devices don't have APIs. It wasn't clear what that meant. Maybe the way the APIs work could use a little bit of polish.

We are using it for more visibility on our network devices.

It did highlight a few things in the very beginning. When we were in the trial, it highlighted some misconfigurations, some of which were quite important to fix immediately. It has brought us to a better place from that perspective. There is comfort in knowing that there is something watching the devices. If a site was to go down, or something was to stop working, or someone plugged in something incorrectly where they shouldn't be, we would be notified, and then we could figure out how to fix it straight away, whereas before, we would be in the dark. We didn't have visibility on that before.

It provides a single integrated platform, which is very important because it saves time and it gets to the point very quickly. If there is something that's not quite right, we can find it and figure out a path to resolution.

It's very good for visualizing the network mapping and topology for our organization. It's really helpful. We do need network diagrams to be accurate and up-to-date for certain accreditations that we have. As we are still in our infancy with the product, with the diagrams that we've got, we do need to do a little bit of work. They are very detailed. They do show the connectivity parts, and once I tighten them up, they'd be sufficient for us to use for our audit purposes. They're good.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is pretty good. They are quite intuitive. It gives you the option to drill down into certain sites and see their connectivity and see what goes where. It's pretty good, especially when you get stuck into the filters and you start adding devices and adding different bits and pieces. It works well.

We've got various sites across the country. We aren't global, but in the UK, we've got various sites. It's very helpful to see the topology and what's going on in our other sites as well, whereas before, we had little to no visibility. This visibility is very important.

It helps keep device inventories up-to-date. It has saved time when it comes to us having audits and interrogations.

The alerting has been really useful. The integration with other vendors, not just using their SNMP feature, but the actual integration to other cloud-based solutions is also valuable. We use Cisco Meraki, and integration into that has been very helpful.

It's very important that it's user-friendly and easy to understand. They've got quite a good knowledge base as well. Their resource center is pretty helpful. I had to go there a couple of times.

The deployment could be better. It's something that we've done recently. Auvik uses something called a collector, and I added a collector to our main site. I only added it to the main site, but when it came to adding additional sites because this was in the testing phase, I had to reconfigure that collector. It wasn't overly clear about how to do that and how to share. They call it sharing a collector. I had to mess around a bit to reconfigure that collector and add some new sites. I originally set Auvik up as a single site and put the credentials. We share the credentials across the other sites as well. I did the credentials onto our headquarters, and then I realized that I could have added the credentials at the very top level or the organizational level. I had to do a bit of reconfiguring to move the credentials over, and then it scanned the device again to make sure they were the right credentials. So, reconfiguring was a little bit of a pain. In the initial setup phase, if it was described a bit better that if you use the same credentials, you can put them here instead of at the site level, that would've been quite beneficial. They could also mention that you can set your collector up as a shared collector from the very beginning. It could be that it does that, and I just missed that step. If that's not there, then just the description as to what it could do and how it would benefit, instead of having to retrospectively change it, would be useful.

There should be a slightly clearer understanding of how devices are charged. We integrated the Meraki system, and certain devices are chargeable and certain devices aren't chargeable. It would be quite useful to have some kind of message saying, "Right, we've discovered these devices on Meraki. Once you are monitoring them, you will be charged this per device, and there'll be an uplift of your billing every month." 

I have been using Auvik for a couple of months.

Although I haven't taken too much notice of these emails, I have received a fair few in our short period of being with Auvik that describe system outages and maintenance windows and changes. I was a bit surprised at how many I've had, but every time I've wanted to use it, it has been there. It's nice that they email to say that there are potential issues, but there seem to have been a fair few. The downtime hasn't affected us directly, but it potentially has been a fair bit.

It appears to be very scalable. In terms of usage, it spans the whole company's infrastructure. We've got five locations. It spans across all of those and most of the subnets at those locations as well. There are some irrelevant devices that don't need to be monitored there, but we have Cisco switches, and we have Meraki firewalls and wireless access points. We have also got some Polycom and Yealink desk phones that it monitors. It monitors our HP printers, and we've got some Lexmark printers. We monitor those across the sites, and obviously, we've got all of our end-user devices. So, we've got phones, laptops, and a whole mixture of tech that is connected to the end.

We are looking at expanding one of our warehouses to have a lot more infrastructure inside it. Its usage will be expanded. In terms of users, we've only two users who log into the dashboard.

It was pretty good. I only got in touch with them once about the collector we put in. They were pretty helpful. I'm happy to give them a 10 out of 10. They got to the point and helped me out.

Positive

We used PRTG, but it was decommissioned. It was only a free version. 

The initial setup was straightforward to add the single site, but when I wanted to change that collector to point at multiple sites and move the configuration of the credentials over to the top level, that was a bit of an arduous task.

We implemented Auvik out of the box. It took about an hour after the collector was implemented before our network mapping started to populate. I had to authorize the networks that it was detecting, and it took about an hour.

Overall, the deployment probably spanned over a couple of weeks. If I had dedicated time for it, it probably would've taken only a day or so to add all our sites and get everything as it should be.

In terms of the implementation strategy, there wasn't too much of a strategy because it was a trial that we then continued onward. We didn't really have too much of a strategy devised.

I deployed it myself. For maintenance, there is just our team, which includes me and my colleague. Maintenance is required only when we have changes on our network.

Personally, I have seen an ROI, but I am not sure if the decision holders who deal with spending money have seen that yet because it has not highlighted any issues. It has not had that value in their eyes. It will probably show its value when it highlights what's gone wrong and how quickly it could be repaired due to the information that it provides.

In terms of time savings as compared to our previous platform, the platforms that we used in the past were decommissioned. We were looking at finding alternatives, which is when Auvik came around. I'm not so sure it has had a chance to save too much time just yet because it has not highlighted anything that needs to be repaired. I can imagine it being a great time saver should something go wrong, but because we are only in our early stages of use, we've not been able to benefit from its fault finding so much just yet.

We have not yet seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR) because we've not had any problems.

Auvik has got quite a unique pricing model where you can spin up and spin down devices monthly. Obviously, there's the option to have a yearly commitment, but you can add different tiers of monitoring on devices. There are lots of bolt-ons and bits and pieces that you can choose to have. You can slim it down to something very cheap every month, or you can spin it up to whatever the requirements are, whereas others are a bit more finicky to set up and understand the billing.

The pricing could be tiered so that you get a discount for more devices. We're fairly early on in the billing process, but it could be slightly cheaper.

When we first signed up, it wasn't overly clear in terms of the devices that were chargeable. They seemed to be on the performance plan for some reason, as opposed to essentials, which had a higher tier of cost. So, I had it switched down to essentials. We use Meraki, and we also use another product called Cisco Umbrella. So, there are some aspects that we already have in other products that are a bit more detailed. I don't need additional functions, such as NetFlow, because we got Meraki Firewall, and we use Cisco Umbrella and all of their devices. We've already got the visibility that Auvik has, and we didn't need that portion of the billing. So, it cost a bit more initially because we were on this performance plan.

We did look into other products, but we didn't do a trial of them. I can't remember the name, but there were a few open-source products that we were considering for which we would have needed servers and other bits and pieces. Auvik being cloud-based was very appealing because we are very cloud-first. We did the test, and we liked it. So, we decided to carry on.

I would advise giving it the time it deserves to set it up correctly. Make sure that you are not preoccupied with other things. It doesn't take a lot of time, but just make sure that you aren't doing other things, and then you'll get it right the first time.

It's pretty straightforward. It takes a little bit of concentration. It's not something you could just set up in a rush. You would need to make sure that you're doing everything properly and giving it the attention it deserves, which sometimes I struggle to do because I multitask quite a bit.

It hasn't yet helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, but I can see it being able to do that. Similarly, its automation hasn't yet had an effect on our IT team's availability.

Comparing Auvik’s cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, I personally don't see any downside to it being in the cloud as opposed to being on-prem. It has security for logging in, and it's normally always available. It's easy to spin up collectors that will talk out to the cloud. You still have a small on-prem application, but the whole infrastructure, the system, and the database are all living in the cloud, which really helps. Personally, I find it brilliant. It's great having a cloud-based solution that is powerful, like this one.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We are an Auvik reseller, and we manage Auvik instances for our clients. We use Auvik to monitor our customers' network infrastructure and troubleshoot any issues that may arise. Auvik is typically deployed on the data center side of a company. If they have multiple branches, we will deploy an on-premise jump box running the collector. We usually manage the corporate data center for each client and the network infrastructure for remote branches.

Our company has between 500 and 1,000 employees, and we have around 150 customers using Auvik. Those companies range in size from 50 employees to thousands.

Auvik provides an overview of a company's infrastructure that helps you identify and solve problems from a single pane of glass. Without Auvik, you would need two or three times as much work to log into these devices individually and look at the back tables. It's great for identifying when things go offline if the spanning tree has identified an issue. You can pinpoint where in the series of commands something has broken. Overall, we've probably reduced the related network monitoring work by one-third. 

Auvik is automating aspects that we hadn't even considered because it was too much overhead. Rather than reducing the time spent on tasks, it has enabled us to perform new operations that we weren't doing in the past. It's added a benefit in that way.

The visibility into remote and distributed networks globally Auvik provides is essential. If something goes offline, you can go back through the alerts, even if you can't access that device to look through the logs. It has saved me hours of time troubleshooting. I can do something that would've taken me an hour in 15 minutes. From my own experience, I've been able to resolve problems much faster and made myself more available for something that could have taken a lot longer.

Auvik keeps device inventories updated, especially if a new network element is added that we are unaware of, like an end user plugging in a switch at their desk or endpoints in general. We don't use Auvik often for endpoint management or visibility, but it's great for network infrastructure visibility.

Auvik allows me to filter by network elements, so I can get a quick glance at a customer's infrastructure without looking through handmade diagrams. It provides me with an overview of how everything is laid out. From there, I can really drill down into individual inventories and switch ports. For example, I can determine what the issue is, but I don't need to be on the premises and log into customer equipment. It saves a lot of time. The network visualization is pretty and fun to look at. 

Monitoring and management in Auvik are relatively easy once you've had somebody show you how to do it or you've taken some classes. It's not entirely intuitive initially, but I find it relatively simple to use now. 

I would like to see some better training or public resources. It's not just Auvik's fault. Our company has a responsibility to explain the toolset and everything it can do. Many of our engineers don't realize how powerful it is. Due to a lack of documentation about Auvik's capabilities, so much can go over the heads of engineers who don't spend much time with it.

Most engineers are fine with taking some time to learn how to use it properly, but there are several engineers who don't know how to use it without spending the time. Auvik misses out on the wider base of engineers that could actively use it.

I don't know how long the company has been using it, but I have been using it at my current job for roughly a year and two years at my previous job. 

I've never really had a stability problem with Auvik, and if there ever is an outage, it won't be the end of the world for our clients.

The scalability is pretty good. It depends on how your company is scaled, but I believe Auivk can scale well. At the same time, our environments don't change too much, so I can't speak about huge enterprise environments.

We had a homebrewed solution that I've used before. I don't remember what it was called, but it also used SNMP credentials for monitoring networks. We also had a platform called ConnectWise Automate that managed some infrastructure, but it does not manage the networking part of the infrastructure. It mostly managed servers and hosts and some endpoints. It's huge that Auvik can reach all of those.

The previous solution was on-premises. Auvik's cloud-based solution makes it a lot easier, especially for a distributed enterprise. We have so many different customers with data centers, so it's crucial to have the ability to monitor and manage the solution remotely and switch through different tenants under our primary client login. It's a pain if I have to log in to someone's network and pull up their on-premise monitoring system, especially if part of their network is down and that tool is not accessible.

I am involved in deployments of Auvik for new customers or when customers open up new sites. Deploying Auvik is straightforward. It was initially implemented before I started with this company. When we acquire new clients, I set up the network probe and pull their tenancy into ours. The network map populates about two hours after you deploy the connector. 

It takes about 15 minutes to install the collector, then you need to ensure that you have all the correct device login information and SNMP credentials. That can take a long time depending on the number of devices, and the type of credentials. You also need to ensure your documentation is correct. That process can take anywhere from half an hour to a full day.

Auvik requires some maintenance, but it mostly just works. You need to comb through it once in a while if you're swapping out device infrastructure or spinning up sites. If things are being added to or removed from the network you need to ensure that it's representing your environment accurately.

To make an educated comparison, I'd need to know the other tools' capabilities in pricing. I'm not in management, so I didn't evaluate competing products, but I do know that Auvik saves a lot of time for critical responses and maintaining network inventory.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. I recommend first deploying Auvik in a scaled test environment, so you can break things without impacting the customer. You should see what it can do and how you can troubleshoot using it. I was sold on it once I saw the value in the response times.

We use Auvik as a dashboard in our service desk department to monitor the network status of our clients, as it helps us with real-time connectivity. We use the solution for our service desk and applications and infrastructure team, including all the managers, so we have it across almost the entire technical support team.

Auvik improved our monitoring and awareness of our networks and helped us be more proactive in dealing with issues as a company. It gives us a clear understanding of what's happening on networks and what goes wrong, and the solution provides detailed data about events.

The solution helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, which saves us a considerable number of hours between all our clients.  

The product positively impacts our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally. We have more awareness of our networks, a visual representation to aid us, and more detailed information when something goes wrong.  

Auvik increased our IT team's availability through automation, especially around alerting. Previously, it could take 15 minutes to figure out what was happening with a downed device, but Auvik detects an issue and automatically alerts us through the ticketing system. It tells us exactly why a particular switch has gone down or when a specific firewall loses connectivity. We know exactly what the problem is right away, which saves us a lot of time.  

Auvik helps keep our device inventories up-to-date, which saves us a lot of time because it provides us with serial numbers, IPs, and other device information which we would previously have had to find ourselves. It helps with firewalls, access points, and servers; all the device data is kept up-to-date in the background, and that's excellent. For a new client for whom we haven't documented any devices yet, that's 15 minutes saved per ticket or logged device, which adds to a significant time-saving. 

The solution provides detailed device information, including serial numbers, configurations, IP, warranty status, and when the device was purchased. This is very helpful when it comes to replacing old devices.

The visual layout of the network provided by the product is a nice feature, almost like a family tree for the network.

I'm impressed by the way Auvik helps visualize the network mapping/topology, which is one of the features I like most. It isn't 100% accurate, but it helps us understand the network by displaying different components with different icons, like APs, machines, switches, and servers, and the connections between them.  

Auvik allows us to do SNMP checks and load separate accounts on all the devices. 

The monitoring is excellent because it helps us stay proactive all the time. 

Using Auvik's monitoring and management functions is straightforward and comfortable, and we have it integrated with our billing system. If a device on the system goes down, has an alert, or packet loss, a ticket is automatically logged into our ticketing system, which is very convenient. The management side takes a little getting used to, but with training and after a few days of experience with the product, it isn't too tricky, so it's pretty user-friendly. 

Automatic configuration backups would be an excellent feature for network devices and access points. The solution could take a backup of the configurations weekly and store that, which would be very nice.

We have been using the solution for three to four months. 

The solution is very stable; we didn't have any issues with the dashboard, ticket logging, or anything like that. 

The deployment team manage the scalability, so I don't know about that. 

We have about 40 end users in total. 

I never encountered any issues requiring a ticket to technical support.

We previously used PRTG, and it wasn't ideal. I don't remember precisely why, but it was either too expensive or didn't give us the desired results, so we switched to Auvik.

I wasn't involved in the deployment, but our applications and infrastructure team found it simple enough, and they like the solution too. From my perspective, it didn't look like a complex process; it seemed seamless.

I don't work in the finance department, so I'm not familiar with the pricing details; however, I know some clients declined Auvik due to the pricing, so they found it expensive. Other clients have adopted it, so they think it's worth the cost.

We evaluated another solution I don't remember the name of, but Auvik was on the cards for quite some time, so we ended up going with it. 

I rate Auvik eight out of ten.

I advise those considering Auvik to thoroughly read through the alerts if they have a ticket, and they'll know what the issue is.

As we are early in our integration with the solution, we have yet to integrate with much, just our ticketing and billing system.

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik.  

We use it to monitor network devices, and for alerts when things are down and when devices need to be fixed. It lets us know about outside-facing IP addresses, external and internal MAC addresses. We use it to monitor everything on all our clients' networks.

It has saved us, as an organization, a lot of time, although I don't know the exact quantity. It lets us get on things right away, when we get those alerts, so that we can tackle things and get them done within the SLA. It's really quick.

For me, personally, it allows me to learn how a network is mapped out for each site and have a better understanding of what connects to what in terms of location. Auvik is good for helping me to visualize where everything is. In past environments, when working at different companies, I didn't really have that so we didn't know what was going on. It was more that if something went left or broke, we would hear about it by word of mouth. We didn't have the chance to see or have a system that would let us know.

When things are down, it lets us know what to do next. We can remote in or try to power up using PoE and it lets us know from that step. It is our first line of alerting, and from there we'll take the next steps into remoting and using other platforms to then get to the issue. That visibility is really great. It's important due to the fact that, when things are going on, we can easily know. If we're focused on other tasks, or we have a project coming up, it lets us know what's happening across our different clients' networks. 

Based on past experience, Auvik saves me three to four hours daily.

The solution's automation has had a positive effect on our IT team's availability. Compared to where I was before, it saves us hours just identifying what exactly the issue is, where it's happening, and what may have caused it. When major things are down, the other tiers will look at it, while the lower-level alerts will be handed off to level-ones, which they can assess. That saves a lot of time by distributing workload.

And the fact that Auvik keeps device inventories up to date saves us about 
70 percent of the time that would otherwise take.

The most valuable feature of Auvik is that it lets us know when a network is down. It lets us know right away and we can find out what's causing it: whether it's the firewall, an AP, or there's a whole network outage. It makes things easier by giving us an "eye in the sky" when we're not on the site. It's great for monitoring.

Also, for an audit, Auvik will help us know why something happened and what it was doing before that.

It's really great for visualizing the network. Usually, you only see where things are either in person, or you know how a switch is connected, or to what AP, as well as at the port. But seeing it online, and everything tied together, is amazing. It's something I had never seen before. You really see the design and everything. It's really easy to read and know how it works.

I would like to see some recommendations in terms of steps that could be taken to assess the alerts. A platform that I have used is Darktrace, which does security testing, and it let us know what was going on, what may have caused it, and what could be done. Even though everyone has their own troubleshooting style, if Auvik could recommend common ways to go about doing what needs to be done to resolve an alert, that would be helpful.

I have been using Auvik for about a month.

It's a stable platform.

It's a scalable solution. We use it for over 90 customers, small and medium-sized businesses, with a total of over 15,000 users. As we get more customers, and as we add devices, we reach out to use more features.

I haven't reached out for any technical issues yet.

I watched some of their videos and that led me to read some of their documentation. It was good, an easy step-by-step guide. There were some pictures too, which made it a little bit more helpful. Most documentation is just text, but they give you a view of the actual platform. That is good.

We have one other application that we use, ConnectWise RMM, but this is the one that we use heavily. 

First starting out, it was a little bit difficult to use, but I did some training that they provide in the resource library, which was really great. From there on, it was self-explanatory. It was really easy to know how to navigate to the dashboard, review alerts, and use the system in general.

Auvik saves you time. It's worth the money.

Auvik has been here since I've been here and it has been great, for the most part. I don't know if our organization was down and out before, but I do know that it's a great platform. It takes the stress off. You have to get your hands on it to truly know what it feels like, but there are no special requirements. I would recommend it.

We use it for monitoring clients' networks.

One way it has improved our organization is with respect to managing switches for clients. We didn't have a solution before that would back up our clients' switches. So if a switch failed, and we didn't have a safe manual backup somewhere, we were scrambling to figure out what was configured on that switch: Were there VLANs, was there some advanced configuration that we don't have now and that we have to rebuild? With Auvik, we just grab and restore the config file.

There are fewer steps for us to do as an organization. We set the tool up and it does all the work for us. It's taking a lot of that manual leg work out. It has recaptured some time that we can give back to other tasks. I wouldn't say it's a huge amount, but it's still a good chunk of time.

And it has been extremely useful when it comes to visibility into remote and distributed networks, especially managing devices. Being able to log in to a switch without having to log in to a client-server, since you can do that from Auvik, has been extremely helpful for our IT team.

And our MTTR has been reduced by at least 50 percent because, as a switch goes down, we get the alert without having our client call us. We have the alert and we know what's wrong, which is great.

I like the switch device configuration backups.

Also, the monitoring and management functions of Auvik are pretty straightforward. I haven't really found too many issues with them. The ease of use is pretty valuable for us.

It also integrates with our ticketing system. We use ConnectWise and having that integration is valuable for billing and for all-around general management. Having one product that can integrate with everything is valuable because we don't have to worry about building out APIs or custom maps to do that for us.

Overall, it's very intuitive and very easy to find help on how to configure things. Their knowledge base is very deep. There are no issues there.

There is room for improvement on the development side. As new devices and models come out from different manufacturers, they aren't always supported by Auvik right away. For example, Sophos switches came out within the past year and we only have CLI support right now for those, so obviously Sophos configs cannot be backed up at this time through Auvik. It's an issue of being more proactive before products are released. I would like to see the manufacturers working with Auvik in advance, before new products come out, to make sure they're supported.

I have been using Auvik for three or four years now.

The stability has been great. Obviously, there are planned outages but they warn you about them ahead of time. There has been no issue where we needed to get in there and it was down.

The scalability seems great. We're still a small business and if we had larger clients our experience might be different, but for what we have it has been great.

We have it deployed in multiple locations. Each client's site has a collector installed and they have one, or maybe two, offices.

Auvik's technical support is a seven out of 10.

Neutral

This is really the first product that we've had that does full network monitoring. We used ConnectWise for machine management, but its network capabilities were somewhat limited. That's one reason we chose Auvik. The dynamic map of the network it provides and the ease of troubleshooting were additional reasons. It helps in pinpointing where issues are. When a switch is down we get that alert from Auvik and it definitely saves a lot of time for our help desk.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's definitely gotten better, but I didn't have any issues setting it up for our organization or for clients. The experience has been the same.

Out-of-the-box, it worked just as it should. After the collector is implemented, within the day the network mapping starts to populate. It's pretty much instantaneous.

Setting up other products was a lot more involved. Another product we used was SolarWinds, but it was something of a bear to set up. It's not really straightforward, out-of-the-box like Auvik. With Auvik we definitely saved on having to research licensing and then install software somewhere. We don't have to do any of that. It's all hosted.

For the most part, maintenance is handled by Auvik. Obviously, if new devices are added to the network, they have to be configured to talk to Auvik. But other than that, you just set it up and it's good to go, unless you change the credentials. Overall, we just set it up and sit back and watch it.

We did it in-house. It was just my boss and me involved.

The pricing seems fairly competitive with what may be out there. We haven't looked around too much, but the pricing is very reasonable.

We were set on Auvik right away.

Make sure that the networks you're going to be managing with Auvik all have managed switches and that those switches or devices are supported by Auvik.

Auvik does a fairly good job of mapping network topology. It's about 90 percent of what we need. There are some inconsistencies with port mapping. For example, it will discover that this switch is connected to this switch in this port, but sometimes it's inaccurate. There's some work to be done there, but overall, it's been extremely useful for us.

Auvik helps keep device inventories up to date, although that's not generally a time-consuming task with our clients. As an MSP, we handle small to medium-sized businesses. But if we were to grow, that feature would definitely help more.

We are on MSP with multiple clients. We set up a site for each client, and that way we can review and verify all their network equipment: firewalls, switches, routers, even servers, and VMware ESXi. We also get alerts and notifications when everything is disconnected so that we can quickly find the reason and make sure clients are not affected.

Auvik has really improved our time of response when a client is down, or there is a problem with a firewall server. Before, we didn't know when a client was down, or it was really difficult to know. We pretty much had to wait for the client to tell us, "Hey, we are down, what's happening?" One or two hours could pass while we worked on finding out what was going on. But now, if anything happens, we get the alert and we get everything resolved. It has helped us to make efficient use of our time and to act more quickly.

It is also very useful because one of the low-level tasks is monitoring. Because everything is up to date, high-level managers and employees can focus on more important things.

There are a number of features I really like. One is the graphical map where you can literally see all the connections: where they come from with respect to the firewall, when they go to the switches, and how the network is set up.

That network visualization is really cool. I've been working here for a year now, and the first time I saw it I said, "Whoa, this is so cool." Sometimes, when you start working with a client, you don't have a visual representation of anything. Your boss tells you, "Okay, they have several switches and firewalls," and you have to draw that in your mind, and it can be inaccurate. With Auvik, the map is accurate. It is great and always updating. That's definitely one of the best features of Auvik.

Another feature that I really like is the fact that it's very easy to remote into the firewalls, switches, and ESXi, to manage the appliances. It's also really easy to use the monitoring and management functions. Everything is shown very well. You can immediately see the options for the appliance, including the documentation and the remote management. It's really easy to use.

That ease of use is extremely important to us. It is one of the cornerstones of our operations, in addition to our tickets which are on another platform. With Auvik, we monitor the heart of every client's operations. It's really important for us that the Auvik is working well and accurately, and that we don't get any false alerts, because that would make us waste money and time finding out what's happening. So far, it has been great and a very important part of our operations.

And I really like the alerts. They are very accurate and fast. The moment that anything is down, we can act right away.

I don't know if it has integrations with ticketing systems so that alerts would get to the ticketing system right away. That would be a good feature to add.

I've been using Auvik for about eight months. I use Auvik every day.

The stability is good.

The scalability is great too. It's really easy to add new infrastructure, new appliances, and they will show up because the collector is already installed.

I've only used their support once, and it was fine. It's okay but not perfect because I would prefer that they have longer operating hours. That's an area for them to improve on because sometimes, on the weekend, we have problems and technical difficulties and we cannot reach support. If we could have extended support on the weekends during normal hours, and even a bit more extended, that would be great.

Positive

The initial setup is pretty straightforward because the tutorial is very good. It gives you several options and it guides you. And their knowledge base, if you have any kind of problem, is pretty comprehensive. You can get it to work, even if, like me, you are not an experienced technician. I have implemented Auvik for five clients now, and it's all good.

Depending on the size of the client, it takes 10 minutes to 15 for the network to start populating. For a midsize client, it might take 30 minutes to have it completely set up, but even that is an extreme amount of time. Generally, it's even better, about 10 to 15 minutes.

The deployment can be done by one person, no problem. It could be a junior technician. They just need to install the collector, set up the correct services and ports, set up the credentials for the appliances, and that's about it, as an overview. The technician needs the appropriate permissions and credentials for the appliances.

Almost all of our clients have a firewall connected to a modem with one or two switches, most of the time Cisco, connected to those firewalls. Then everything else is connected to switches, including servers, printers, computers, and workstations. The switch will have VLANs so that we can segment the networks and do a proper installation, but that's pretty much it. And on the servers there will often be VMware ESXi that we monitor with Auvik.

There hasn't been any maintenance, as far as I know. We have never had to manually update the collector.

The time-to-value is right away. When you set up Auvik with your very first client you see its value with the graphical interface, the ease of remoting in, and the alerts.

Try all the features, investigate it and be curious about everything that Auvik can offer. I've been using it for several months, but I don't think I have used all the features. If you test it, my advice would be to try all the options.