Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

I use the monitoring on a daily basis. I receive the alerts. We have two monitoring software solutions and Auvik complements the other one. We use Auvik to cover the gaps in the other one. We get alerts from both sides.

Working at an MSP, I come across very different networks. No two are quite the same. Auvik makes it really easy for me to get a logical outlay of what switches are connected to what switches and what equipment is connected to what equipment. It takes a lot of the detective work out of the equation for me.

Without a doubt, it has affected the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. Having everyone in one portal, they click on their client and, as long as we have it configured properly and we're getting that accurate picture, it's absolutely incredible. That visibility is fantastic. We'll hop on a call and the other guy will also log in to Auvik. We can say, "Hey, search for this. Look at this path. The VLAN is everywhere except on this device. What are we going to do here?" It really helps us out with collaboration and brainstorming.

Auvik makes it much easier to trace connections and log in to a switch without having to jump through all those extra hoops. It makes logging into switches accessible for some people who may not be comfortable with that.

The network mapping, the logical layout, is the part that I love the most, showing what switch is connected to what switch. I couldn't live without it. That is the big selling point for me. If somebody asks me a question about a network, I log in to Auvik, 100 percent, to look at their network before I can make any decisions or answer any questions. The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is excellent. I don't know how I lived without this solution before.

Most people will also use Auvik for one of my favorite functions that it provides, the remote terminal. That's pretty much the preferred way as far as management goes. We still have people logging in to a service locally using SSH and getting into networking equipment. But personally, in the last year, I have really shifted over to Auvik-first management for my tasks.

In addition, we are all about consistency, and having one unified platform is very nice. Familiarity breeds efficiency. It's important to use a unified platform because you're going to know where things are at for all your clients. You're going to know what you're looking for and where your tools are. That's why I've been shifting to Auvik-first to administrate my network devices. I could be at any one of 150 clients in a day, remotely, and Auvik makes it such a breeze because they're all showing up in one platform.

I have a love-hate relationship with the network mapping. Navigating around the map on more complex networks is pretty painful if you're showing endpoints. I know there are filters to knock it down, but sometimes that's not enough. It handles like "early-90s Java."

For instance, I just pulled up one of the clients that I work with a lot. When I get a view of the entire network, it's highly complex. I see a lot of it. When I filter it down to just network items it's great. That sure helps simplify it. But actually trying to get around, for example, if I need to go to the right, I can't quite grab things and move them. It's just not super responsive. 

I would love to be able to use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out on the map, but instead, it scrolls the page, which it's fine. But sometimes it resizes the map too. I have a really high-power system and that map resizing sometimes even chugs my computer down.

In addition, I would love to be able to drag assets and place them where I want to, maybe on a session-by-session basis. Sometimes, if there are a bunch of devices to the left or the right of the core switch or stack or router, the connections blend together. I would love to be able to grab a device or a device group and drag it out of the way a little. It would still maintain the links between the icons, but the ability to place the icons where I want them, spread out a little bit, would be really cool.

I've been using Auvik for just over two years.

I have a very positive impression of its stability.

We had some kind of database error with accounts last year but that was resolved in a reasonable amount of time.  And I do see maintenance banners up for planned downtime, but I can only think of one or two times that I thought, "I really wish I had Auvik, but it's down right now." It's such a rarity so I'm not complaining. 

The stability is very good as far as I'm concerned.

Aside from making the map too big, the scalability is great.

We have it deployed in about 150 locations.

I haven't needed to contact customer support. It's intuitive enough that I've been able to get through it on my own.

I did not use another solution previously. I actually spent a decade saying, "Man, I really wish there was something out there like this." When I saw Auvik, my jaw dropped.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have installed the agent.

To my knowledge, there is no recurring maintenance. Occasionally I need to move an agent or restart an agent if it stops responding, or restart a server.

Part of the value of Auvik comes from being able to trace connections graphically and visually, rather than having to manually back-trace MAC tables. That alone saves enough time for me.

The only other thing I've ever heard of that is comparable to Auvik is something called The Dude. I looked it up once. I don't get intimidated by technology, but that was pretty intense and I never looked back. When somebody showed me Auvik, it blew my mind because it was pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

Install it on more than one client, make sure that you have your network scoped properly for scanning, and enjoy. Also, make sure you have your SNMP set up on all your devices. That's the hard part.

Within the last year, we made it a requirement for all of our clients to pay for an Auvik license. This is required software for us, going forward. That's a win.

Although I don't know anything about the pricing, I would definitely say look into Auvik. If the price is right, I understand why our organization has made it required, per client. If I was doing this on my own, Auvik would be a requirement for me as well.

In our organization, everybody uses it and everybody recommends it. Everybody says, "This is the way to go." Everybody hears about the efficiency, ease of use, and what's going to cause the least amount of stress. Everybody here likes it.

We are an MSP. We've got about 500 clients. So, multitenancy is pretty important to us. We're only interested in monitoring and managing network devices, and we define that as switches, routers, access points, and ESX hosts. Even though some of the things that we traditionally consider to be a computer—such as a laptop, a workstation, or a server—appear in Auvik, we do not do any management of them there.

The RMM platform that we're currently using is wonderful when it comes to servers, laptops, desktops, and all that, but it is absolutely horrible for properly detecting or identifying a network device. In other words, SNMP to properly identify a device flat out did not work and does not work in our other solution. Auvik fills that gap and does a pretty good job when it comes to that. We have always used multiple applications, and it comes down to finding out what the strengths are of a particular application. Auvik does a great job when it comes to networking devices, but we couldn't do nearly as much as what we do for servers and workstations. So, we use it according to its strengths and our other tools according to theirs.

Auvik is a SaaS-only product. There is no on-prem version. There are some definite pros and cons to it. Having to rely on someone else to handle all of the security aspects of something that's SaaS, especially in today's world, can be a little bit nerve-racking. When it is on-prem, you've got full control of ingress and egress. You can lock down the firewall and do all of that good stuff, but at the same time, not having to mess with all of the infrastructure and the things that are required to make a product function is pretty valuable. So, we don't have to worry about storage space, server speed, etc.

It provides a single pane of glass, which is very important. We service around 20,000 endpoints, and they include network devices and computing devices. The fewer places our technicians have to go to get information or address an issue, the better it is.

It has definitely given us a much better inventory of the devices that are on client networks. It has also got a fairly decent API integration with other products. We also make use of Meraki products, and through the API, we're able to pull those and all of their data into Auvik.

It is very good for visualizing the network mapping/topology. The network map and visualization of what's going on are really good. For somebody who is not a network engineer but needs to troubleshoot something, it is invaluable. If they're on call and it is the middle of the night, being able to look and see whether there is a switch loop or something weird going on is invaluable.

It is very intuitive in terms of network visualization. It is almost like an org chart. You can see the ingress point at the very top, and then you can see what's connected to other things. It visually flows very nicely from top to bottom to give you a quick idea of where things are.

It has reduced the visibility of our IT team in a positive sense. We like our techs to be able to work under the hood and not disrupt clients, and it definitely provides a lot of the right remote tools that are needed to go in and address issues or provide updates, firmware, and things like that, but visibility for us is really not a key. As an MSP, we do have a number of ways to provide evidence of the value that we bring and the work we have been doing under the hood, such as the number of patches that have been successfully applied and things like that. 

It does a very good job of keeping device inventories up-to-date. It helps our teams focus on high-value tasks, which goes back to the initial configuration of determining which alerts are high priority and which ones are just standard response and maintenance. They were very easy to configure.

Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date has saved us time in a huge way. A part of the value that we provide is that we help our clients develop a five-year tech plan so that they can start to budget. Having an up-to-date and accurate inventory of all of those network devices feeds into those reports through our own automation on the backend. So, it is very valuable.

It is a combination. The discovery portion of it is extremely valuable. It allows us to get a good inventory of what is actually on a client's network. You can turn on TrafficInsights, which is basically a NetFlow feature, for troubleshooting. It allows you to get more detailed information on what's going on with a particular device. So, you could determine why a client is complaining that the internet is slow at 1:00 p.m. every day.

Its interface is very sluggish, and that's probably its biggest impediment. 

It is easy to set up. However, with the wizard-like setup, the choices are lacking. So, there is a lot more that we feel like we could be doing. If it is outside of their pre-configured monitors, you start getting into a level of difficulty.

I have been using this solution for close to three years.

It is very stable. There is sluggishness in the interface, but it is rock-solid.

There could be some potential problems with scalability. We took on a client not too long ago that was fairly close to enterprise-level. We were forced to break them up into different geographic sites so that the web interface would present smaller chunks at a time. That was because it simply fell to its knees if you tried to open up the full site for this particular client. It was just too much for the interface to handle, and that was definitely a negative because it would've been really advantageous for us to see the full network map as opposed to seeing only small pieces of it.

They do a solid job.

Positive

We used to use PacketTrap, and it had basically gone end of life. It had a lot of good features. It was an older product. There was a one-time payment upfront for it, and there were no recurring fees. Those were the days, and those days have gone. Because PacketTrap was the end of life, we were forced to go for something to take care of our clients.

Switching to Auvik hasn't saved us any time. It also hasn't reduced our mean time to resolution (MTTR). That's because the product we had before was solid. It had just aged and had to be replaced.

It is easy to set up. 

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik. Despite the sluggishness of the interface, it has definitely provided a significant amount of value for us.

Its pricing is definitely competitive with everything else that's out there. If somebody has not shopped for a product like Auvik for a while, there's probably going to be some sticker shock because it is not cheap, but that's true for all the products that we looked at.

Its pricing is fair based on what I've seen for everything else that's out there in the market. They're certainly not looking to gouge people. For whatever reason, network management products are just expensive. Before this, we were using a product for which we had paid a one-time payment upfront. We had paid for it and bought it for years and years. There was no additional cost for us. So, we definitely suffered from sticker shock when we started shopping around.

There were quite a few. We looked at around seven different top-level products. We did product reviews for around a year. We were looking for something that was the best fit for how we tend to do business, and Auvik came at the top.

We have a checklist that we go through when we're evaluating a product, which includes:

• Things that are important to us and are required in a product
• Its integration with our other systems

A good example is that we use ConnectWise Manage for our ticketing system. So, it has to have full integration with that. We have multiple teams that handle different verticals, and each one of those teams has its own board. A lot of the products that we evaluated claimed to have good integration with ConnectWise Manage, but when we were really getting into the nitty-gritty of the evaluation, we came to find out that they could only send tickets to one single board. That was a deal killer for us right there.

Having a good, robust API is also very important to us. Again, some products would claim that they had a good API. We would go in and research it only to find out that you could get the minimal amount of information possible, which is a no for us. There is an API, but it is not useful.

Ease of setup is extremely important to us. Some of the products were very complex to go in and set up and configure. In addition, not all products provided the ability to set certain rules that would be global at the top of our hierarchy so they would automatically be applied to all clients below. Fortunately, Auvik has that, and we were able to make really good use of that hierarchy and inheritance to our advantage.

I would advise negotiating as hard as you can on price per agent because that did help us do a fair amount of pre-planning. This would have been true for any of the solutions that we looked at. You need to know how you plan on grouping your clients, or how you plan on organizing. Knowing how that structure is going to flow makes a huge difference in your onboarding time.

It hasn't helped us reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. There is almost no automation. It is great at learning. It is great at visualization and things like that, but there is no automation in there. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. There are areas where it could do better, but all things considered, it is a good, solid product.

Our primary use case is to have a monitoring solution for our managed service clients. That was something we were offering, but we weren't really doing well on that front, in terms of having a proactive monitoring solution. That was the primary pain point we were trying to fix.

The main benefit is that we are able to offer better proactive support. Previously, we would deploy a lot of Meraki firewalls and we wouldn't really have proactive support on that. Meraki only offers email alerting, so alerts would come in by email and we wouldn't see them and we'd have to devise other means. With Auvik, we provide a quicker turnaround time for network issues. 

It also enables our lower-tier techs to support everything. Normally, especially on the network side, the lower-tier techs are not as able when it comes to conceptualizing the network and visualizing how it's set up. Auvik's dynamic mapping really helps flesh that out. Even less-technically-oriented clients are able to look at Auvik and understand how their network is functioning, at least at a basic level.

In addition to the overall efficiency improvements due to the proactive alerting and the dynamic mapping, the ease of exporting the data that Auvik provides is a big benefit. There are several options throughout the product that allow you to export your data as an Excel spreadsheet. That means you can get the data that Auvik is using to show you everything. That makes it very easy to do asset inventory or to assess the end-of-life of certain products. It takes a lot of the human involvement out of those processes.

Also, in the past, there was a lot of effort that we'd have to put into keeping assets and inventory up to date, and it was mostly through manual data entry. Auvik cuts a lot of that out. Once you have the network monitoring set up, it has all that data that we would normally have to manually enter into ConnectWise, specifically. Now, that information can carry over automatically. So instead of having to do 10 or 15 clicks, and a bunch of typing for each configuration, you just get the network monitoring set up and set up the inventory syncing, and it happens in a couple of minutes.

By keeping inventories up to date, it saves us time. We heavily utilize ConnectWise configurations for determining contract renewals and we're able to focus more on that aspect, and less on ensuring accurate counts.

Another benefit is the ability to use the connector as a "jump-box "and get into other devices. Previously, we would have to either VPN into a network or get into the network through some other remote means, to troubleshoot and configure. But with Auvik, you have the ability to do quick, one-off troubleshooting commands. A technician can do that. You can also get into all the network devices and computers through Auvik itself.

And given the way it alerts, and how it shows the product, it does produce a lower mean time to resolution. 

Auvik has a dynamic mapping feature. Once you get things loaded, it will show you how everything is connected. It also shows the alerts on that map, making it a very quick and human-readable way to dig into it. Overall, that visualization is really nice, especially the dynamic facet. You don't have to make those connections manually. Auvik does all that automatically. The mapping is very intuitive. The filters have a little learning curve, but even the part that isn't immediately intuitive is not hard to pick it up.

Other useful features are the typical ones, like configuration management. It will keep track of configuration changes on devices and log them.

The alerting is also definitely important. The solution integrates well with ConnectWise Manage and with Opsgenie, which we use for alerting techs after-hours.

It primarily monitors network devices by SNMP and command-line interface. They only charge for network devices, such as wireless LAN controllers, firewalls, switches, and routers, but they'll also grab and monitor printers through SNMP, Windows devices, and Windows hypervisors through WMI credentials.

Auvik also has a really good feature for keeping device inventories up to date. We haven't used it too much, because of the way that we've set it up. Auvik ends up overriding some of the stuff we do internally, but it has a very good way of keeping assets and inventory up to date. The most useful is the ConnectWise integration. It can find certain values, like serial numbers and it will either produce it if it doesn't exist or create a configuration in ConnectWise to match the device. It's really good for keeping all of our products up to date with the information.

I would like to see more extensive syslog capabilities. It can ingest syslogs and I think it can alert based on quantities of messages. You can also look back at some of the messages, but it's not a forensics level syslog.

Also, when it comes to mapping and visualizations, there are some imperfections. If Auvik can't exactly deduce how something is connected, it will show an inferred connection and that makes the map a little messy, but with the preset filters, which you can use to only look at network devices or known connections, you can get all the clutter out of there. Overall, it does a great job, but it would be nice if it had a better export feature. You can export it in a usable format, but it's not on the level of a Visio drawing, if you are trying to produce a network diagram. There's a lot of "in-Auvik" usability, but not necessarily outside of Auvik.

I've been using Auvik for a little over a year.

We have had no issues of note, in terms of stability. There may have been one incident, but it was so minor that we don't even remember it. We have not had outage issues. They're usually pretty good about notifying you about outages and, usually, there are no adverse effects.

The scalability is great. It's designed for an MSP, so adding more clients is extremely easy. We have yet to have an issue. Granted, we're probably not one of their larger deployments. Maybe at scale, when you get bigger, there are some issues, but so far, with our setup, we've never had any issues with scalability.

It is a cloud solution with an on-prem agent that you deploy at each site. We have it deployed for about 30 clients, and there are multiple collectors per client.

So far, the tech support has been great. The only issue is that they have up to a 24-hour turnaround. Typically it's not that long but it's only available during business hours. For any type of issue we have, we can typically wait that long.

There would be an issue if a high-paying client had some sort of emergency situation.

Positive

We were dabbling in PRTG Network Monitor. We were not using it in the same way but we would use it for occasional troubleshooting and gathering the same kind of data. That was what we would recommend before having our own product: to do a PRTG instance, given they give you the first 100 sensors for free, which covers a lot of niche issues.

The initial setup is a straightforward process. After the Auvik code is implemented, it starts to populate network mapping within 10 minutes. Our average time for a full deployment is about an hour and a half.

At a lot of the places where we initially put it in, we didn't have great documentation on what was in that environment or how to get into the devices. If that information is already there, and especially if you have already had a solution in place, it should take less than an hour to get a site completely into Auvik.

There is no maintenance of the solution required at our end. Our support team of about 10 utilizes Auvik pretty frequently in the day-to-day. And client-facing managerial types, like chief information officers, use it quarterly to pull data and information. Other users include anyone else who needs to do troubleshooting or needs information. We have systems and network administrators who occasionally look at it, just to get a feel for the network.

The time-to-value was instantaneous. Once we got the deployment done, it immediately allowed us to better support networks in a proactive manner.

We were looking at a few options but it was hard finding the right balance. Some options had a lot of customization and you could get into the nitty-gritty. LogicMonitor was the primary example, but price-wise it was too much.

The other ones were open source and would have taken too much of a personnel investment. We would have had to dedicate someone to the role of understanding, maintaining, and updating the product.

Auvik hit a really good middle ground in that it had the usability and the features that we needed. And it's updated by them so we just have to use it. It's really an ideal solution given our setup.

Another reason that we picked Auvik was that its pricing is very good. The only non-open-source solution that had better pricing was PRTG, but Auvik had it beat in ease of use. All-around, Auvik has a really great price for the market.

In addition, the cloud aspect of Auvik is extremely useful in that we don't have to worry about downtime. We had a bunch of on-prem appliances at our main site, which wasn't really set up to be a data center. There would often be issues with unexpected downtime that would affect us, client-wide. Having Auvik in the cloud helped us immensely. Not having to worry about the infrastructure or the updates definitely takes a load off of our team. Those are areas where we previously had to put in notable effort.

The deployment of Auvik is much quicker than PRTG, given how PRTG sets up its agents. And once you pay for Auvik, there is no additional cost. SolarWinds is a little more complex and doesn't fit the same niche as Auvik. SolarWinds is more focused on a single enterprise, whereas Auvik is more MSP-focused.

I'm one of the biggest Auvik fans out there. I have used it personally, and I have brought it to every single company since 2015 as a product offering or for the internal use case. I currently own a firm, and I am yet to talk with Auvik. When the time comes, I will absolutely be doing its implementation for my company, and I will be offering Auvik to my customers.

I did its implementation for a company in the November of the last year. NetFlow was one of the biggest use cases, and it was for monitoring the type of traffic inside the network. We were also able to do a lot of Syslogging, and with one pane of glass, we were able to remote into the various routers and switches that we had.

It was deployed via Windows services and not as a virtual box inside VMware, which is probably better. We also had a cloud collection point, which was also a failover in our Chicago environment. I was deployed for five different sites along with the NetFlow application.

Auvik provided one of our clients the ability to see the network in its entirety. We were seamlessly able to implement an encryption deployment because we could see the whole network from a bird's eye view. It was internally implemented, so it didn't really help us in terms of performance, but it improved the productivity of the project on which we were working.

In terms of whether the automation of network mapping enabled junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks, as an IT Manager, it has allowed me to delegate tasks. What was nice was that a lot of people were annoyed that Auvik just didn't combine everything, and everything was slow when Auvik did combine the whole map. When we broke it out the way Auvik told us to, which was by the site, it allowed me to actually assign a small networking team of two or three personnel essentially to that specific location. Everybody knew what exact equipment they were responsible for, and then it just trickled down to all of the other systems and processes. This made the communication more effective. We could hand off jobs and shifts at almost a seamless rate. When it came to documentation and password inside of Auvik, I knew and felt that they were secure. It has definitely decreased our mean time to resolution. It improved our overall productivity by at least 20%.

Its TrafficInsights feature shows the network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption. Most of the time, I'm able to get a pretty detailed kind of report or visionary on it. This feature is extremely important. From a managerial standpoint, we wanted to know what people were doing. The pandemic was huge for a lot of work for home people, and we wanted to know what our employees were doing on their computers at home. While they were connected to the VPN, Auvik provided us the ability to see whether they were watching Netflix and things like that, or what other type of bandwidth they were taking up. It was very amazing. We were canning people over it, and we were utilizing it to kind of take a temperature of our culture.

The TrafficInsights feature is helpful in showing where your system is experiencing performance issues. When we have a network problem, I'm able to see where and what's causing it. Back in October, we had some sort of network storm on our layer 3 in Chicago, and we were able to pinpoint different types of traffic going on. It was nothing, and packets were coming back at zero bits and different bits, and it was just noise. We were able to figure out that there was a loop somewhere. We had to physically go down and examine it, but without it, we probably would have chased our tails around or spent a lot more money than we did to resolve the issue.

The TrafficInsights feature has helped in improving our network performance. It improved our understanding of the network and what was going on. It helped us utilize other tools that were in place to block traffic, allow different traffic, or redirect different traffic.

It provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. I had to go in and do some configuration myself, but it was very simple. It automatically pulled the configuration from the device, and I could download it from Auvik. It probably saved me a couple of hours a week. At $100 or $200 an hour, it could save you a couple of thousand bucks a year.

It has definitely enabled us to consolidate and integrate other tools. Auvik integrates really well with other tools such as Lucidchart and different PSAs such as ConnectWise. With that, I can just utilize more functions inside these solutions. I don't necessarily have to have my Lucidchart. It integrates well where I don't have to add any more products. It is kind of that last missing link theme. It takes away from having to purchase a Visio chart, individually go and pull network reports, or have a product at each site that does that. It has this overarching big brother side. Not having to spend on these tools has probably saved us $10,000 to $20,000 annually in licensing costs. These are the software that you got to get rid of, and they are probably about $10,000 per piece.

NetFlow is probably one of the most valuable features. Since starting with Auvik, and seeing how far it has come, NetFlow has been one of the most valuable features. This feature is important because as a network administrator, you always want to examine what type of traffic is going on. You can limit users from watching Netflix on a route, or you can also pinpoint malicious activity going on in the network. So, I really do find Auvik to be a utility, not only from a network standpoint but also from a security standpoint. It provides a very good security feature in a way even though it is not branded like that.

Towards the actual Auvik side or the networking side, one of the most valuable features is its capability to quickly go out, discover, and have the intelligence to either utilize known usernames and passwords (when it comes to SNMP) or ask for the proper credentials. If they weren't provided, then it provides information about how to go retrieve them. When you examine the whole workflow or compare it to SolarWinds Orion, which got hacked, Auvik blows it out of the water because of this feature. This feature is important because when you're monitoring multiple locations and managing multiple employees, it is important to have that piece fit inside of that business continuity. I like to involve those things in security and business continuity when I am selling, deploying, or implementing it, thus making it the culture behind the product.

Its network discovery capabilities are very impressive. The discovery piece is amazing. I don't know if they have an AI or some type of advanced intelligence inside of their program that helps with the discovery piece. I haven't seen anything that discovers products that well and is able to label them, tag them, and pull as much information about them. I don't know what drives that engine, but I'm just absolutely blown away by it. It is cool.

Its ease of use is great. I was very pleased with how the junior employees, and even a couple of senior employees who had not worked with the product, were able to jump in, learn quickly, and work through the interface.

Some of the automation pieces for discovery still need a little bit more improvement. I wouldn't mind seeing some more security features as that's the world we're driving into. I know Auvik probably wants to try to keep itself separate because that's its brand, but even if they brought on board another brand that was able to plug into them, it would benefit us. It would lower some more network security costs if as a company, they are a one-stop shop. They have already got the network piece going. If they improved in that area and focused a lot on that, they would gain me as a customer, and they would probably gain a lot of others.

I have been using Auvik since 2015. 

I've been pretty impressed with its stability. I've been with Auvik for such a long time, and they've improved over the years. That's why I have nothing bad to say about them. Its stability in 2015 was great, but now with the redundancy and this cloud thing that they've got going, it is even more impressive.

They've improved it in that area a lot. It is scalable now.

In the previous job, we only paid for 20 billable endpoints, but we had more than 100 endpoints. We had three users. My title there was a senior systems architect, and then I had a network engineer under me. Above me was my boss who was the Chief Information Officer. 

If I had to rate its usage on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being eight hours a day and one being twice a week, they would probably fall in the five range. They probably use it four out of five days and for an hour or an hour and a half a day.

Currently, I don't have it as an offering in my own company. We are brand new, and I just opened this firm this year in February. As we get the ground and the ball rolling, we will be an Auvik customer within the next six months for sure.

Their technical support is the best. You can talk to an Auvik support technician about something Cisco-related. They don't have to, but they are very knowledgeable in that technology, which is so impressive. 

I'm glad, and I'm sure that Auvik hires nothing but educated people, which is probably why it's just that much better of an experience. I can talk to them, and they know what I'm talking about. A lot of the things that we talk about are complex things related to the Cisco technology, FortiGate, etc.

In the previous job, we had a third-party firm called Transcendent, and they resold SolarWinds Orion, but it was not good. I replaced it shortly with Auvik after Orion was hacked, and then we integrated their team into the product. We had it all on-prem, but we utilized this hybrid thing that Auvik had. If our on-prem collector went down, we weren't completely blind. We had redundancy built into it.

It makes me so much happier to be an Auvik customer and a champion of the product. I'm really glad that Auvik hasn't been touched like SolarWinds Orion. It gives me the confidence to keep utilizing and selling their products.

Auvik automatically updates the network topology at an interval of approximately 60 seconds, and you can also go in there and forcefully update it. We, however, never really relied on that technology. You could click on a spot, and it was a 50:50 shot if we had to move in and relabel it, which was better than SolarWinds where you get a 10% chance of getting it right. So, you're doing 90% of the configuration in SolarWinds versus having to do 40 to 50% in Auvik. That's why Auvik is better.

It was pretty complex. When you are setting up Auvik, you can set up the collector, which is straightforward. However, when you are trying to set up your router and switches, you have to have at least an associate-level degree in Cisco networking, for example, to understand the commands and the things that you need to do to prepare your router or firewall to work or integrate into the Auvik system. You need somebody who knows networking. When it comes to finding those people, they're expensive. It is probably cheaper to go through Auvik's offering at that point. If you have them on staff, utilize them. So, it is complicated, but it is no fault of their own. Auvik was easy, but they can't really control Cisco or the other people who have their technology.

The deployment probably took about two weeks. In terms of comparing the setup time of Auvik with other solutions, Auvik allowed me to do it from one location and in my chair. For other locations, I probably would have had to travel at least twice with a SolarWinds solution. I would have had to deploy it on physical hardware at that location and then use my Cisco DMVPN to make everything toss, which isn't really all that cool or modern. So, Auvik saves me traveling time and money, and I am able to do it from one location. Such cost savings probably translate to $10,000.

Our implementation strategy was to start with our home office, which was our data center here in Milwaukee, and then to set up a redundant site in Chicago. We discovered there, and then we went by the office and deployed it office by office through discovery. We didn't move to the next office till every piece of equipment was accounted for, labeled, and documented.

I have not used any third-party integrator. I did it myself. I also did all the maintenance, which included server maintenance, different updates, patches, backups, etc.

They weren't like that, but I can tell you that they've made it.

The cost for all the devices that we were billed at in my last job was about $2500 annually. It wasn't much.

It has the most reasonable pricing as compared to any product out there. I can't complain. It is amazing. It allows me to bundle inside the package what I charge customers per user per month. I don't charge them per device anymore. That's not how we do things in the industry. It is per user per month. The way Auvik is charging us allows me to do it. For example, if they charge $250 for a certain number of seats, I'm just going to write the costs onto per user per month. I have a few leftover licenses to use, which allows me to go out and make some more sales and give some freebies at some shows. So, it makes me very flexible. I am very happy with it.

It is billed by network devices. You could choose which billable device you want. What is really nice is that if you don't want one switch to be billable and the other one to be billable, you can do that. You just won't have the features that the billable switch has, which isn't horrible. Sometimes, you don't need that. What I'm really happy about is that Auvik doesn't force things on you and doesn't say, "You have to have all of this," and that's a great business model.

Sometimes, you can get overages if you go over your agreement per device, but they don't try to nickel-and-dime you on it. They're very reasonable, and it is easy to go in and look and see. They harp on it too. They ask you to go in and check and make sure you have what you want because you have this many licenses.

They didn't evaluate any other product.

To anybody utilizing it internally, I would advise going through Auvik directly. You'll pay a little bit more, but you'll have the support as an IT staff unless you want to come through a company like me. Auvik has just recently opened up their company to accept companies that want to utilize it internally. As a consultant with the landscape that I'm looking at right now, I advise Auvik to keep pricing in the same way.

I would advise taking your time and doing your implementation right the first time. You're going to gain more knowledge about your network, and the people coming after you are going to be able to support your network that much easier. 

Its ease of use is great, but I firmly believe that if you don't have experience in networking, you're going to fail. If you don't take the time or pay the money to sit down with Auvik and have them teach you to utilize the tool, you're doing yourself a disservice because of what and how inexpensive it is to get the tool and how valuable it is to have their time to teach you how to utilize the tool. They have an implementation team that will walk you through it. You have to pay for this service separately. I utilized this service once, and I've been able to implement it myself. I would highly recommend that somebody without experience should pay for this service at least once in their career.

It doesn't really help us put out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. That could be because of the customers that I've had. However, Auvik does allow me to pinpoint the problem right away. I may get the alert two minutes later than my customer alerted me, but I'm able to get a fast resolution in place right away. It is easy. So, that's what I'm very happy about.

As a seller of Auvik, the cost-savings that it provides allow me to be more mobile. I don't have to hire as many employees because I can have them sitting in a chair watching a dashboard, which saves cost. If I'm a customer myself, I don't really see cost savings, and it is just another tool for my IT guys to be successful. So, it doesn't really save costs, but at the same time, it has a positive impact on the network.

As a consultant, Auvik has shown me the habits of end-users or IT staff. For example, Auvik has been able to pick up on rogue, small six-port switches that get plugged in somewhere under somebody's desk. I am also able to see the weird things that get plugged in or turned on in the network. I am also able to have conversations, but it is just weird to see how that technology or software translates to the behavior of these people. It is kind of neat.

Its time to value is what it is. There is a cost to everything, and there is really no value when it comes to implementation. Especially with how I am going to have it implemented in my environment, I have to ask somebody with a reasonable amount of knowledge, and he is going to cost me $80,000 to $100,000 a year to go out and implement. It is just a cost, and there is really no way around it.

I would rate Auvik a 10 out of 10.

I do internal IT for a company and I use Auvik for most of my daily tasks as they relate to firewalls, switches, and routing.

The automation of network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and helps to free up senior-level team members to perform more involved tasks. It can be a key tool in environments where somebody who doesn't have a strong network skillset can go in and see, "Is it good, is it not?" and be able to make a decision on whether it needs to be escalated to me or not.

It also automatically updates network topology. One of the things that I really enjoy doing, when I first get into a new environment with it, is to watch it rebuild the map as it learns in real time. I can see its process and for me, as a very technical guy, that is one of the most entertaining things to watch, as it learns and updates the changes in a network in real time. It saves time maintaining network topology since the tool actually does it automatically. I have a high level of confidence that the information is correct, and it is immediately available. Just last week, I got a call from one of our internal auditors who needed to provide some information. He said, "Yeah, this usually takes a few weeks. Can you provide firmware information and serial numbers?" During our phone call, I was able to get into Auvik, pull the list, get it sent over to him and say, "Here you go. We're done."

Auvik has also decreased our mean time to resolution. Being able to go in and look at what's not broken, very quickly, and get that confirmed, means that I can look at what I actually need to fix. It eliminates a whole bunch of other problems and a whole bunch of checking. It has reduced our MTTR by up to 80 percent in some cases.

And because we've got it triggering PagerDuty alerts, if something problematic really fires off, I will know about it and be in the tool looking at what's going. I can say, "Hey, this is a problem we need to alert," or, "This isn't a problem and we just need to be aware," very quickly.

Another benefit is the TrafficInsights feature which shows network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, and it does it very well. That is a very nice-to-have in my current role because we don't have issues with our network bandwidth. But in other environments that I've been in, where there were issues with bandwidth, it is a very well-put-together tool allowing me to find the answer and say, "This is what our problem is." It enables me to tell the business that we either need to spend more money on bandwidth, or we need to deprioritize a certain type of traffic. It gives that information in a format in which I can give it to somebody who is less technical than me. I can show them the graph and say, "This is what's going on and why."

TrafficInsights helps to show you where your system is experiencing performance issues around capacity and what is the busiest traffic. It can help improve network performance by letting me know exactly what's going on. It lets me see whether it is an application misbehaving, a lack of bandwidth, an upgrade that we need to make, or a configuration. It gives me these choices so that I know for real what's going on. In some cases, people "feel" that something is going on, but this gives me the facts to know what's going on. I would estimate TrafficInsights has improved our network performance by 50 percent.

In multiple environments I've been in, we've been able to eliminate other tools and use Auvik as our single network management solution. In those environments, I've had up to five tools that I have been able to decommission by using Auvik. In that environment where there were so many tools in place, replacing them probably saved $100,000 a year.

Some of the key features that I get out of it are that it is a well-rounded monitoring solution, so I know when something fails—whether it's a device or a service on the device. But it also performs backup, in inventory, of some of the key things to control and manage the network.

And one of the best things about Auvik, and it's why it's one of my go-to products, are the remote access capabilities. Without a VPN and without any other way in, I'm able to get in and work on and troubleshoot my devices through the remote access console. It has multiple options for that and has been very useful and a huge time-saver. That's one of the killer features. It's one of my must-haves and that's why I like it so much.

In addition, for products in this category, Auvik's ease of use is one of the best. It's really built for people like me. I'm heavy into the parts of IT that are not server-related, including routing, switching, firewalls, et cetera, and it is organized for somebody like me. It is the network engineer's toolset. It gives me what I need upfront in a way that I understand well. Auvik speaks my language.

When it comes to its network discovery capabilities, It is the best that can happen. I've used it in multiple environments, and as long as I've got the right starter information, it can go find information in an hour that would otherwise take a person weeks. It's very good and very quick. I've been able to benchmark it against competitive tools and it is way more useful, giving me information that I actually need and can use.

The automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backup capability is one of the key features for me in Auvik. To manage a network, one of my key requirements is to be able to rebuild that network if something catastrophic happens. Having up-to-date backups is a must, and this is a tool that I count on to get that right, and it has always performed as I expect. I am able to very quickly and easily audit that the backups happen and I know that they're there. I can also restore to a previous point with very little hassle, if anything goes wrong. Compared to other backup solutions, it saves me 80 percent in terms of my time.

The logging features could be a little bit better polished, although that aspect is relatively new. It comes in as raw data, with different formats for different vendors. It's not immediately clear to people what's going on with some of that and you have to read through the codes. Some of the higher-end logging solutions, like Splunk, which is very expensive, can parse through it and correlate items better. Improvement to the logging features would be a value-add, but I'm still very happy that it exists.

There are a few edge cases where I have found support for devices to be a little bit lacking. I'm migrating away from Check Point right now and Auvik and Check Point do not get along at all, so it was very troublesome to get those put in place.

Another issue that I know is already in progress, but that will be very nice, is full integration with PagerDuty. I'm using email connectors right now that have a little bit of a lag, so once the APIs are in place between Auvik and PagerDuty, it will give me better alerting when something breaks. I know that's on the roadmap because I've talked to them about it.

Between two different companies, I've been using Auvik for about three years.

The availability is 99 percent. They do have maintenance windows where it's not available. I've been happy with their communication on the maintenance windows and they pick the times very well when it's not going to be available. I realize that everyone needs maintenance, but it works out very well.

I've used this for everything from companies that are in a single building up to a company that had offices in 20 time zones with almost 100 offices, some of them with 1,000 users, and it was able to scale up to that. I've never had worries about how big this can go.

Their technical support is fair to good. There have been a few times where I've had to escalate to somebody higher, when I thought the lower-level person should have understood it, but I've always ended up with a good answer.

The initial setup is straightforward and, as far as the product category is concerned, it's the most straightforward. I've used this in an MSP environment and I've done deployments into close to 30 companies with Auvik and it is, by far, the fastest way to do it for a fresh deployment.

We can get the initial install going in a few hours and we can be confident in the data in a week or two. Comparing that to other tools, it would be an initial deployment of a week or two and two months until we're confident with our data. It has probably reduced the time spent on setup by 90 percent. And when dealing with an MSP, it cuts down a client onboarding by at least a month, which lets revenue start coming in earlier.

The implementation strategy depends on the size of the environment that we're going into, but we usually put in collectors at key locations and first let them do their discovery and see what's out there. Then we'll tune them down so that the collectors are monitoring from the right locations. But we like to get as much data in as possible, initially, and then tune downward.

As a cloud-based solution, it requires just about no maintenance and that's one of the other benefits of Auvik. With other solutions, we have spent more time updating and babysitting the servers and fixing our tools, instead of fixing our environment. That's a major plus.

When I was first evaluating it and we were going through pricing models, I was able to make the case that, for a team of five, this would be better than adding a person to the team when it comes to getting work done.

When I was new in this environment, I was trying to get a lot of stuff together. I brought Auvik as a solution to my supervisor and said, "This is what we used at my last company," and he was familiar with my last company. He viewed them as very good at what they do. I suggested we take a look at Auvik. As soon as he got the pricing during the first sales call around Auvik, he said, "Sold. Well worth that money." They didn't even have to finish the presentation. He saw what was being offered and he also based his decision on the fact that I'd used it before. The cost easily made it worth it in his mind for what it would provide to us.

The pricing is fair for the value and time saved that you get out of it. The larger you go, the more sense it makes per device, because as you hit different pricing tiers, it becomes much more affordable per device.

Auvik is billed by network device. They've got a very clear-cut definition of what is a device and what isn't a device, and that's very convenient. Anything like a server, or a phone, or an access point, is not billed but they are still captured for data, which is very useful. Auvik is very upfront that the solution is not a good server monitoring platform, but it's a fair server monitoring platform and that comes along for free with everything else. My server guys have another system they use for monitoring servers, but they find being able to look at Auvik as well has been a huge value-add.

I have used LogicMonitor, PRTG, the N-central suite, the ManageEngine suite, and the SolarWinds products.

In terms of the differences between those solutions and Auvik, I would summarize them this way: Auvik is a tool built for the network guys, primarily, whereas a lot of other tools are built for the server guys first and then add in network. It's a tool really built for what I care about and it values my time. I'm able to get it put in fast, I'm able to use it fast, and my information is fast. It lets me do more with less.

Definitely go through the proof of concept testing. The results speak for themselves. It's a fully rounded product and everyone I know who has used it has been happy with it.

When you're first deploying it, understand how you need to set up your locations. Otherwise, you're going to end up redoing work. If you're in a larger environment, you need a little bit of knowledge about where things are to be able to put stuff in the right places. If you're small, you can just drop it in and be super-happy with what it gives to you.

Overall, compared to everything else out there, it's a solid 10 out of 10. I haven't found anything that gives me what I need better.

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.