Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

I use Auvik to monitor, check, and access all network licenses for different companies, including firewalls, servers, and other devices. The Auvik collector is deployed on the servers and in the management station. The agent collects all the information in the network and sends it to Auvik. Auvik's network map will display all of the devices. If a device is offline, it won't show, but the collector will automatically add it to the Auvik platform when it comes online.

I had never used software like Auvik. In the past, I would manually input the credentials and IP address of a single device from my machine and access the device, which took a lot of time. A task that previously took 40-45 minutes can be completed in less than five minutes with Auvik. It reduces the time needed to check a device for a single company, so we can act quickly before a disaster happens.

Auvik enabled me to automate a lot of repetitive tasks, saving me about an hour each day. It also improved our overall visibility by helping us to visualize the entire network topology and it made troubleshooting much easier because we can see what is happening with a device or throughout the entire network. When we receive an alert, we can look at the network topology to see if the issue is isolated to one device or if it's affecting other components. This gives us a better understanding of the problem's overall impact. 

The solution has also freed our team members up to do other tasks because they no longer need to check all the devices manually. We can do other tasks while Auvik is running in the background and monitoring the situation for us. Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date. When the inventory is added to Auvik, it keeps a register of all the information. It will notify us if we need to update or change something. 

What I like most about Auvik is that I can access all devices from a single location, and I don't need to input or remember all the information of the device like the IP address or the credentials.

Auvik sends lots of alerts if something is happening with a certain device. For example, if a device is offline, it will send you an email to say you need to check that. It will notify you if Auvik sees something irregular, like a process using excessive CPU or memory. Configuring it is somewhat difficult, but the monitoring is simple. It's essential because we would need to manually research if something is happening with a device, and that takes a long time.

It's fairly simple to see all the devices in the topology. The only difficult part is to add the devices themselves Auvik won't discover devices automatically. We need to add them manually and input the credentials. After that, it's effortless to examine and check all the devices and troubleshoot a situation by only looking at the topology.

The network visualization is highly intuitive because you can select all the devices from the top to see the firewall, switches, and endpoint devices, like all the computers and servers. You can see all the connections between all those devices. It is handy for a network engineer to see all the connections and pick a device to see its information.

Onboarding devices could be easier. When you first add a device to the Auvik platform, you need to add each one by hand. It would be nice if they could automate the process where we only need to run a script. 

I have been using Auvik for nearly a year.

Auvik is fairly stable. We rarely have any issues with the platform or installing the collectors on the devices. 

We can apply Auvik to everything, and I don't see any limit for it to keep growing. You can implement it in any company on any network, and it will give you all the information about your devices.

I rate Auvik support a nine out of ten. We once had an issue installing the collector on a server. It was on a virtual machine, but Auvik's support was helpful in that case. They responded quickly and were kind. 

Positive

I wasn't present for the initial setup, but I have deployed Auvik on other sites that we need to integrate. It was a little complex in the beginning because I was unfamiliar with the platform. My coworkers had to explain how this works, including how to integrate a device and check all the logs. Once I learned how to do that, it was pretty straightforward because it only involves a few steps. The network map starts to populate within 10 minutes. 

In terms of maintenance, Auvik is lightweight on our side because the vendor handles all of the upgrades. When there is scheduled maintenance, we usually see a message at the top of the Auvik platform saying that there will be an interruption of service. 

I rate Auvik a nine out of ten. The only difficult part about this solution is the installation because it's something new. Everything goes smoothly after the first step.

We used it for network monitoring and network health. We had it deployed at all of our sites. We are an MSP, and we've got about 30 different managed clients. All of them had an Auvik collector at each site to monitor the network for changes or infrastructure health. We have an RMM solution for remote monitoring and management of our workstations and servers, but that tool doesn't monitor network infrastructure. 

Its monitoring and management functions are very easy to use. With some of the other solutions, their built-in database of OID markers isn't great, and you need to manage all of your own MIBs. With a lot of competitors, if a device isn't in its catalog, we need to go and add it to the catalog ourselves, which is a big challenge, whereas Auvik has a phenomenal database behind it, and it is generic, which is another benefit of Auvik. It's not vendor dependent. So, whether you're using Cisco switches, Ubiquiti switches, NetGear switches, TP-Link devices, Hyper-V or VMware, FortiGate firewalls, or Barracuda firewalls, Auvik typically supports them. It has very broad support.

Its integrations are exceptional. The multitenancy in it is also phenomenal. It's very easy to jump from one client to another while also keeping those clients separate. So, if you have someone who is only managing a couple of sites, that's all they can see. They can't see everything else, but someone with a little bit more access can see all of the sites. Being an MSP, we have a lot of different sites that we're accessing. When we have a co-managed environment, a tech for client A can go in and see all the information relating to client A, but they won't be able to see anything for client B.

The time that it has saved is almost impossible to measure. For example, we had a client, and their firewall had failed. We picked up a new firewall. We were going to go set it up, but the last backup that we had on the client's server was from a year and a half prior. It was well out of date, and it was missing a lot of the recent changes. With Auvik, we were able to go in and download the latest backup and restore it instantly. It has saved all those hours that we would have spent troubleshooting or finding missing rules, as well as the management time of having a tech periodically go in and do all of those backups. Because the whole system is automated, it's very hard to measure how much time we saved, but it is a lot of time.

It is the best in class for visualizing the network mapping/topology of the organizations we were monitoring. It is extremely intuitive. One of the big things is everything is all color-coded. So, whether a connection is layer one or layer three, it is very easily highlighted with a blue line versus a gray line. If it is wired versus wireless, there is a solid line versus a dotted line. All of the device types have their own category associated with them. So, if you're looking for a firewall, you just look for the red dot, and you can pick that up pretty easily. If you're looking for a switch, you look for the orange dot. Finding devices on it is very intuitive.

They also had a great feature of being able to collapse and group some of the devices. If you had ten security cameras connected to one switch, rather than having ten little black dots on it, it was able to group them into one item saying security cameras, and you can click on it and expand. It's something that I didn't think about that much when I was using the product because it seemed normal and intuitive. Moving away to a different product that doesn't have the same mapping level or the same features has made the switch a little bit more difficult. You can still get there at the end of the day where you can find the devices, but it is just not as easy.

It was absolutely helpful in reducing repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. That goes back to things like backups. The fact that it would automatically go through and do the backups, and we didn't need to spend the time to go through and check that was phenomenal. The remote internet connection checks were very useful. ISPs can be very difficult to work with when you're trying to discuss service or packet loss or interruptions. Rather than telling the ISP " We're experiencing this issue," the reports coming out of Auvik gave us a great ability to go to the ISP and say, "Hey, here's some more data. We're dropping packets at such and such rate." Auvik gives you historical benchmarks and reports, and because we already have got the history of it, to troubleshoot, the ISP doesn't have to start gathering reports from that point.

If you have a client that has two locations and a data center, Auvik can group all of those collectors into one client, and you can have a larger view of all three locations and how they interact with each other in one overarching network map, whereas Domotz splits it into three separate locations. Domotz is great in the sense that you get one flat rate per site, but what it won't do is that it won't integrate those sites together. They would be three separate agents that need monitoring within Domotz.

The remote access feature was very useful. If a client's server was offline, we didn't need to VPN in or go to the site to turn on the servers. Auvik gave us the ability to turn on the server remotely without having to go anywhere. It saved us time on that side of things. Over the four years that we were working with it, on average, it has saved us about 150 hours.

Auvik has a phenomenal granular access model where you can even make your own custom role. If you have a co-op student and you want them to only have read access, that's easy to set up. If there is a more experienced person, but they're only allowed certain sites, it is very easy to restrict their access.

Auvik's SSO integration is one of the best I've ever seen. When we were first adopting SSO, Auvik was the first vendor we integrated it with because Auvik was able to get SSO set up where it's one per user or per tech. It's not a big bang migration, and you can have a trial with a couple of techs first, and if it works, roll it out to more.

We had integrated Auvik into ITGlue. When we're onboarding a new client, rather than having to manually add each device into ITGlue, after Auvik has scanned the network and picked up all the devices, we can import all the devices from there. From an accuracy standpoint, being able to import devices saved us from the manual entry and saved us from user errors, such as mistyping a map address or something else.

It definitely reduced the mean time to resolution. The spanning-tree notifications from it were helpful. We've had a couple of instances where a client found a cable that they thought was just loose, and they were being helpful by plugging it in somewhere, which created a loop on the switch. We got to know about it from Auvik. We knew which port it was plugged into and what the solution was to fix it instantly. It reduced our mean time to resolution to about a quarter of the time. We were able to fix things that would've taken an hour to resolve in 10-15 minutes.

Auvik is phenomenal for network monitoring as well as for other functionalities such as remote access or backups. A really cool feature that it has is that it takes a backup of all of the configurations automatically. Auvik periodically, most probably on a daily basis, logs into all the switches and firewalls that you have on-site to see if there is a change, and when there is a change, it does a new backup of the device. It logs changes for you. If you start experiencing some issues, you can go back to those logs to say, "Oh, there is a change made last week, Thursday," and with Auvik, you can just roll back to that snapshot nicely and quickly.

Its UI is really intuitive. It's really easy to get a hold of it. It's very easy for non-technical people to understand. One of our problems with some of the competitors is that they've got a fairly grayscale UI. It sounds very pedantic, but the color scheme of Auvik made identifying which devices were which and how they were connected to each other easy. It was a very useful feature that is underrated. 

Another feature that worked really well for us was the remote access tool. If we needed to log into one of the network devices, we didn't have to jump on a server, workstation, or local device, or connect through a VPN. Auvik was able to give us direct UI access to any device on the network.

It is amazing in keeping device inventories up-to-date. It mostly keeps them up to date as things change. There were a couple of hiccups where a device would get replaced and the mapping would break, and we'd have to go in and fix the mapping. It was with devices that Auvik couldn't fully discover or devices that would change frequently, such as cell phones or other devices on the network that are dynamic and change all the time. The integration would just show up with an IP address and a MAC address. There was no other information in them, which wasn't very helpful. They were the devices that Auvik wasn't able to discover fully. If they had full SNMP or SSH credentials and Auvik knew what the device was and it was matched correctly in Auvik, then Auvik could push it through.

It is not at all cheap. We migrated to Domotz because of its pricing.

We used it for about four years, and we just migrated away from it.

It was probably one of the best ever. I went to school with three other guys. When we graduated, three of them went to work for Auvik support. Full props to the support team. They are phenomenal. I would rate them an eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement. I do wish that they had more open-source pfSense support. There were a couple of things that I was hoping would come out as features but they didn't.

Positive

We didn't have a solution in place. Auvik was our initial solution, but now, we have migrated away from it to Domotz because of pricing. What really triggered it for us was that our firewall of choice is pfSense, which is open source. Auvik, by default, would categorize pfSense as a Linux server, which is essentially what it is. We would then manually categorize it as a firewall. Firewalls are on the list of billable devices for Auvik. However, we weren't being billed for them because Auvik was originally categorizing them as Linux servers. When we were onboarding the product, we mentioned this to our account manager, and we told him that none of our firewalls are being categorized as billable devices. The account manager at the time said that it was a bank error in our favor, and because they were not able to categorize it properly, they were not going to bill us for those devices.

We then costed out our offering with it and had that set with all of our clients. Recently, Auvik was able to fix that bank error, which essentially doubled all of our prices. This makes for a very hard conversation to go to clients and say that we need to double our prices to them because our vendor has doubled our prices. That was a challenge. 

I'm okay if you're going to double our prices, but the support for pfSense, for which they weren't billing us before, is fairly limited. With most of the firewalls, if you have site-to-site VPNs, they show up on the network map as a site-to-site VPN or remote access VPN. Auvik will monitor the usage on those to say, "You have 10 remote access connections, and everything is okay, or you're up to 50 people connecting remotely, and you're starting to get degraded service." All of these additional firewall monitoring features weren't available on pfSense, which was fine because they weren't billing us for it. Now that they wanted to start billing us for these devices, I had asked them if we were going to get support for all of these additional features. They said no because they are not looking to expand their pfSense development. That was frustrating. So, it basically came down to whether we double our costs and pass that onto all of our clients, or whether we look for an alternative, such as Domotz, that doesn't have as many features and is not as pretty in a sense, but it halves our cost. So, we ended up halving our costs instead of doubling them.

As part of onboarding, we got talking with some of the Domotz dev team, and all of the features that were missing have been added as feature requests. We're working with their engineering team to implement some of the features that are not quite there yet.

It was significantly easier than onboarding Domotz. Virtually, every alert or trigger that we could have wanted was built in by default. We didn't have to set up custom alerts, custom triggers, or their base alerting standards. In fact, if anything, it was too much. We had to turn off some of the alerts that were misfiring or not a hundred percent accurate, but there was nothing that we wanted that we couldn't get out of the box.

Its setup was easier. Everything was a lot easier. Even onboarding of new devices was easier. Auvik would identify them a lot easier. Our current solution is a lot more finicky and has more manual elements to it. It's definitely something that Auvik was better at.

Its time-to-value is instant. Before we even onboarded the product, we could see the value in it just from the demo.

Auvik is definitely one of the more expensive platforms. It is not cheap at all. If cost is an issue, Auvik isn't on the table at all, but they do have a fantastic solution for the cost. If budget isn't a concern, they are probably the market leader.

We migrated away from it to a competitor called Domotz because of pricing. Auvik bills per what they call a billable device, which is a firewall, a switch, and a controller. All of those count as billable devices. Domotz, as an alternative, bills per site. It's a flat fee for the whole site. So, whether you've got 3 switches or 10 switches, it's the same cost.

Auvik's premium product has a couple of other features with regard to NetFlow and some of the traffic analysis on that side. They've also got Syslog now in their premium product. However, we found their premium product to be fairly expensive. The whole product is very expensive, even for their standard offering. So, to bump up to premium, it's a lot more expensive. We trialed it for a bit. It was very useful but not worth the extra cost.

In terms of comparing Auvik’s cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, it is a tricky balance because while the Auvik database and the backend are all cloud-based, you still have an on-premise collector doing some of the management for you. The management of it is cloud-based, but there is an on-premise component to it. There are some alternatives, such as PRTG or Zabbix. They're all on-premise alternatives, but they are very much a pain to manage, particularly when you have multiple sites and multiple clients. Having the backend cloud-based is very useful. However, that's a feature that they share with Domotz. Domotz is cloud-based in the same way.

Overall, I'd give Auvik a seven out of ten. Tech-wise, it's a ten, but its pricing is a very big barrier to adoption.

We use it for monitoring our entire network. We head off a lot of problems with some early alerting on either storage or high utilization, thus we can get in front of problems before anybody notices. We have the solution tied into our help desk system so the alerts open up help desk tickets, then the guys look at it from there. We use it for troubleshooting devices that are not reachable. We also use it for backing up our firewalls and logging into all of our network equipment.

It has cut down on some of our major issues. We are very reliant on our printers, printing title documents, etc. The early alerting on those printers, i.e., when they are having a problem, has been enormous. For example, if somebody has a closing going on, we can avoid them having issues with printers.

The solution helps us put out fires before people or end users even know there is a problem.

The solution automatically updates network topology. The network topology has been great, not only just for troubleshooting things, but also for training. I can show newer or not-so-experienced guys what a network looks like from the top down. Also, we have used the network diagrams for our audits, where we just kind of print it out and hand it to them. It satisfies all of those requirements.

The automation of network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. We have our map up on a board in the office.

The alerting is the most important feature. 

Once it is set up, it is very easy to use.

Its network discovery capabilities are awesome.

TrafficInsights has given us better visibility. In the past, the TrafficInsights feature has helped show us where our system is experiencing performance issues. We have had high firewall utilization reported, and it appeared as, "These are the traffic insights that you are asking about." We had some high firewall usage issues. We were able to take it down to a single device that was copying files that it shouldn't have been at the time. We were able to find that using the TrafficInsight dashboard.

A room for improvement would be integration with our help desk system.

At my company, we have been using Auvik for a year. Personally, I have been using it for three years.

Stability has been great.

The maintenance requirement is just adding new devices and occasionally configuring a new appliance that it doesn't recognize, such as giving it a name. There is a lot less maintenance with this solution compared to other solutions that I have used.

Its scalability is good. There are no issues with it. We have Auvik loaded on everything.

There are four of us who work with it. I pretty much handle the maintenance of the solution. They tell me what needs to be done, then we kind of do it together. They are mostly just in Auvik looking at the alerts, etc.

The technical support has been fantastic. We used them a lot in the beginning. Recently, we have not used them as much. We use them now for adding a new site, which was a billing question. The technical support has been able to quickly answer everything that we have sent to them.

It was a straight-up replacement for PRTG. We switched to Auvik for the ability to do the network mapping as well as the ease of using the network mapping. Switching solutions didn't save us money on licensing, though. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took three months from the beginning to have it running the way it is right now.

The setup time for this solution is similar to other solutions that I have used or evaluated.

It took some assistance from Auvik's support desk, but it was easy to set up.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution for the issues that it alerts us on.

Auvik provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. We didn't have to do anything. It was all out-of-the-box. The automation of the backups saves us an hour a device. We were backing up once a month previously, and that took about half an hour to an hour per device. We have about 30 devices. So, it has saved us approximately 15 hours a month because we don't have to do this manually anymore. It is saving us about $18,000 to $20,000 a year.

Easily, within the first few months, you will start getting your money back. It has saved us a lot more than it cost us.

The pricing is in line with everybody else, but you get so much more. 

Auvik is billed by network device. They bill our firewalls and networks. However, there are devices that are not subject to billing in our environment, such as PCs, phones, and printers.

We did look at other solutions. We looked at PRTG's newer solution and HPE's native solution. We went with Auvik because of the network mapping and its ease of use. I also have experience using it from a previous job.

When you are stuck, I would recommend using Auvik support or their professional services, which are very good. It makes life so much easier.

Auvik TrafficInsights shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, but this is not critical for us.

In the network monitoring world, the solution is 10 out of 10. It is the best.

I use it on a daily basis to monitor the portion of my network that is backbone.

I have cloud access, but the collectors are on-prem.

It allows me to see a lot of problems before customers do. By the time they're calling me to say, "Hey, I've got an issue", I can usually tell them I have already seen it and I'm already working on it. There are many times that I'll get information on the screen or I'll see something change and know about an issue even before I get a ticket or a phone call. The most recent one was that I had a site go down on a weekend. Because we're a Monday-through-Friday company, I came in early on Monday morning and, by the time others showed up, I was pretty close to having everything resolved. They called me to say, "Hey, this isn't working," and I said, "Yep, I know. I've already been working on it and it will be up shortly."

It frees up some of my time for higher-value tasks. The first thing I do when I come in, every day, is pull up Auvik. In that single pane, I can see what my network status is and whether any site is down or if it's showing me there are issues. If not, then I can move on to whatever else I need to accomplish for that day.

Another benefit is that it automatically updates network topology. When I change out parts of the network or upgrade to a new device, once I've got it set up with SNMP, it automatically reconfigures what I see on the screen, including where everything is connected. I don't have to do anything to make that happen. That saves me a lot of time.

And when it comes to the backbone, it has decreased the mean time to resolution in a significant way. And because it provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration for backups, for almost everything I have, it saves me time, a good 10 hours a month, and on the order of a couple of thousand dollars a month.

The most useful features are that it allows me to see and monitor my entire network solution in one place. I can see if everything is up or down and whether I have any issues. That single-pane aspect is helpful.

In addition, so far I have found it to be super-easy to use. Since the setup and getting everything running, it has been really easy to use. Setting up collectors for the network discovery capabilities was super-easy as well. Once we did that, it pretty much took care of itself.

And the TrafficInsights feature not only shows me network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, but it gives me which device is using the most traffic. It ranks devices by which are using the most CPU, memory, storage, and it keeps those up to date, non-stop. Most of the time I just have the main window open and it literally shows me everything that's important. TrafficInsights will also show me when a certain percentage of capacity for a particular device or network has been hit. That has helped me a few times, resulting in an upgrade of a few services for network connectivity because we were using more data than would actually flow. It has helped improve our network performance. I have 11 sites, overall, and after analysis based on Auvik, I increased the bandwidth for connectivity to the outside world for two of our sites because they were using more traffic than we were able to put through.

So far, I haven't had an issue with it. But I could see where they may need to add some more integration pieces with different vendors. For example, API keys aren't available for certain vendors. While everything that I have works with Auvik and gets monitored by it, there are a few network items I have that I would like to see deeper integration with, but the lack of that type of integration doesn't stop me from doing what I do.

I have been using Auvik for about nine months. Technically, I've been using it longer than that, but I've been using my implementation for about nine months. Previously, I was using it through an MSP and when we dropped the MSP I purchased an implementation for our company directly.

So far, I've had no issues with the stability. It just works.

I would assume it scales pretty easily. While I have 11 locations, none of them are massively huge. The number of devices I'm looking at and monitoring is probably pretty small compared to most businesses, but it seems to scale pretty well when I do add things.

From the occasions I have used their technical support, I would rate it very highly.

We had quite a few other tools that we were using or trying to use, and Auvik replaced them. By not using those other tools it is saving us $10,000.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward for me, but I had used Auvik before quite a bit through my MSP. But even if I had never used it before, with their help, it would have been pretty simple. The ease of implementation, network scanning, and setup were all super-easy.

Our deployment took a couple of days. I can't even compare the setup time for Auvik with the solution we had, which was NetSupport Manager, because I never did get the other system running. It just wouldn't work. The implementation was very convoluted and buggy. It never worked even close to the way I expected it to and I just ended up dumping it before I could get it running. The time savings associated with the setup of Auvik probably saved me over $10,000.

And when it comes to maintenance, it doesn't take up any of my time. Since the initial setup of the collectors, I haven't had to do anything. All my equipment is done and monitored. If I add a piece, I obviously have to set it up to get hit up by Auvik. Other than that, I don't have to maintain anything other than do the normal maintenance for my servers, which is where the collectors sit.

I only used Auvik to help with the setup.

The time-to-value, for me, was almost immediate. Once we started implementation, I was able to start seeing stuff even on day one. And by the time we had it fully implemented, I was already seeing value out of it.

And if I compare the cost savings we have realized by using the solution versus its costs, we're on the positive side.

The pricing is pretty reasonable for what we get. It's billed by certain, core network devices that it monitors, but I'm not billed for all the devices it monitors. For example, wireless access points and small things like that, throughout the network, are not billed. They mainly charge for firewalls, routers, and switches.

I haven't seen any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I researched other solutions, but because I had already used Auvik and I liked what they had. That research was more, "Hey, what's out there?" but I was not really interested beyond that.

What sets Auvik apart is the ease of use. Once it's set up, it gives you that single pane. That's the first thing I look at when I come in the morning and it tells me whether I'm good or not.

Go for it. It's a really good solution. 

The primary use case is network monitoring.

One of the things that I like the most is being able to see what is connected to each switch port. If there are 300 switch ports, I can find out which port any given computer is connected to on the network, assuming it is physical. We then can label certain ports as uplinks, servers, or storage. It is easy to find where a lot of traffic is coming from because we can get to that individual switch level, which is a lot easier to do in Auvik than it is to do native in the equipment.

Remote accessibility of the network devices is the most valuable feature. I often have to log into switches and routers to make changes, and I can do so from any computer as long as I have an Internet connection. I don't need to have my laptop or a VPN. Auvik is faster.

Auvik automatically updates our network topology. The topology map is drawn in real-time. Seeing the network versus visualizing is helpful. With real-time and historical monitoring, we know when devices are offline or if there is high utilization, specifically with the SNMP monitoring and SSH monitoring.

Its network discovery capabilities are really strong. With the right access, it can detect additional networks, then scan those networks. 

It is easy to use, yet not easy to administer. If I am a technician, then I just need to log in to a switch or see what the network is doing and what it is connected to, which is very easy to do. If I am an administrator, then I have to maintain, clean, and label that environment. Auvik's utility in that regard is cumbersome. It is hard to find where certain things are configured. Also, it is sometimes hard to figure out why Auvik is doing what it is doing.

There is a weakness with the network discovery capabilities, e.g., if it has access to virtual machines, then it is picking up on networks that don't matter. These are private virtual networks on individual computers, but Auvik doesn't know the difference. So, it is constantly coming up with new networks that it thinks it needs to scan. In my environment, I have 250 computers with probably 100 people who are running Hyper-V. Each one of those instances is creating virtual networks that it is getting discovered, then I have to tell it to ignore it. I have never seen the ability to say, "Ignore the networks or submits that look like this."

Sometimes, the UX is difficult to navigate for certain aspects. For example, I like to keep the generic devices out of the topology, so I often will purge those, but I only want to purge the ones that are offline. In the managed devices section, although you can filter by generic device, you can't filter by up or down status. You can only do that in the device section, not the managed device section. So, I have to take a picture of the generic devices that are offline, then navigate to another area where I can actually delete these objects, then select them using a picture. I can filter in one place, but I can't delete. Then, in the other place, I can delete, but I can't filter the same way.

At this company, I have used Auvik for a year and a half. Prior to that, I would say that I used it for about three or four years.

The stability has been fine. I get notifications for network maintenance and there hasn't really been an issue with that.

It requires no maintenance.

The major limitation is the multi-tenant aspect. For example, if I was to put this in a business that had six corporate offices, which is a pretty big business, I wouldn't want all of that under one tenant. I would want that under separate tenants for each location, but there would need to be an eagle eye view of the six locations from a high level, and you wouldn't get that in multi-tenant.

Auvik for MSPs is great because you can segment/isolate the different clients. However, Auvik gets overwhelming when it is a big business with multiple locations, hundreds of networks, and thousands of ports. I think that would be difficult to manage. If you are talking 5,000 to 100,000 switch ports, then you are talking about a lot of networks with a lot of different viewings and protocols. There really is a limit. There is almost no support for any kind of routing protocol. Where there is the Layer 1 and Layer 3 bars that tell you if it is physically connected or Layer 3 routed, the Layer 3 router should really include things, such as, what is the routing protocol that it found or the ability to see a trace route of how it is routed.

Sometimes the technical support is really good, and sometimes it is just terrible. Some of the gentlemen and gals are extremely knowledgeable when it comes to networking. They know the product and are very helpful. Then, some of them don't really get engaged in the support. They will just send an article/link, like, "Read this and do it on your own." I don't reach out to support because I can't find an article or do it on my own. I reach out because there is something I don't understand or don't know how to do. Making sure that they understand what it is that I am trying to accomplish requires a conversation, and some are willing to get on a phone call and some of them are willing to. The ones who are willing to get on a phone call are the ones that I have the best experiences with.

The initial setup was pretty complex. The company that I work for moved out of an office where we had 60 to 70 switches. Now, we are down to about 12. Therefore, the setup was more complex back then, although we only had one location. Now, we have one location and one data center. The deployment took four to six hours.

Auvik's setup time and automated network mapping and documentation provides time-to-value. It is very valuable in that sense. For a small environment, it rolls out for you very quickly, e.g., five minutes. Roll out the collector and let it do its scan, label one or two networks that are there, throw in the credentials, make sure it is identifying everything, and you are done. Then, it just kind of works. The amount of value that you get then in perpetuity to the relative installation is very high, but as a single IT company or an employee in a single company, that quick rollout isn't as valuable because I am only doing it once.

I did the deployment myself. I have used Auvik before, so I just set the collector using VMware OVA. I put a collector in our office, labeled the networks and set exemptions from the scan, and then just let it go. Obviously, I tried to enter all the credentials that I could at the time, but then I found I had to make modifications to group policy so the computers and servers could be accessed. So I probably just threw it out there and then added the credentials later. If I had to do it again, I would have put the credentials in first then threw it out there.

We are not making a profit on Auvik. It is an expense.

Although networking is only a small piece of what I am doing, it can be a time-intensive aspect. So, the time required is significantly less using Auvik than it is to manage the devices individually.

As an individual IP company, Auvik is a little bit pricey. It is a little expensive, but as an MSP owner, I have a small side business. So, I'm an Auvik customer in that sense too. In that, I think it's reasonable to pay $10 to $15 a device or less depending on the endpoint. For the amount of capability that it has, it is very reasonably priced.

There are devices monitored at no charge, such as:

• UPS batteries
• VMware ESX hypervisors
• Wireless access points
• Printers
• Dell EMC iLO cards.

I would probably compare Auvik to PRTG Network Monitor. I think Auvik is a lot faster than PRTG Network Monitor. I am not a very big fan of other solutions. I have never really tried them. 

Auvik gives us inventory. I don't think PRTG Network Monitor does that. So, I can integrate Auvik with our IT Glue cloud status, then we have an inventory of network devices that we don't have to manually create. It saves some time there. PRTG Network Monitor doesn't do that.

PRTG Network Monitor is easier and simpler to set up because it is not trying to do everything that Auvik is trying to do. Once you point it at a device and give it the credentials, it just starts monitoring. At the same time, it doesn't show the relationships between other devices; it doesn't show those connections. It is not an apples to apples comparison. 

We haven't had any SolarWinds Orion products. Now, we wouldn't buy that at all. Auvik is far easier than Orion.

My team members aren't really using it. The other guy is kind of a junior IT guy, and I think it is still intimidating to him. My boss is a higher level engineer, but he is too busy managing to do anything technical. He just relies on me to tell him if there is anything he needs. He mostly wants the solution for the monitoring. He wants to know when a hypervisor module is failing or a hypervisor server goes down.

If you don't put in the credentials, Auvik can't log in and grab those device backups. Once you put those in, then it is automated. It logs in and grabs the configurations. Although, Auvik doesn't support all devices. So if you don't think you have certain types of hardware, it doesn't do anything for you.

Networking has a high learning curve and Auvik lowers that learning curve. It doesn't eradicate or eliminate it though. You still need a pretty strong level of understanding of networking in order to understand the GUI visualization that it is presenting. Just like any other tool, the time invested is largely going to determine the quality of your return.

Auvik has a little ways to go, but I still highly favor it, so I would rate it as an eight out of 10.

Our use case is to monitor and maintain not only our corporate headquarters, but all of our remote sites and embedded sites across our company.

It's a SaaS application.

It has definitely helped us to put out fires before people even know there is a problem. It helped us to discover a lot of network problems with one of our buildings so that we could have it rewired.

We're a pretty small team, there are four of us in IT. I'm the primary network person and then I have a backup. Auvik does help him and other members of the team, and our developer. We all wear multiple hats, but we have our specialties. It helps everybody on the team when I'm not able to get to something, and somebody has a network issue. It helps everyone else to diagnose the issue if I'm tied up working on something else.

The solution has also decreased our mean time to resolution by at least half. We're able to very quickly see what's going on. We can see the connections within the image it shows, but we can also deep-dive quickly through the TrafficInsights and the logging. Even if you quickly go ahead and make a decision to reboot something to restore service, you can still capture logging and things that would normally be on the device, so that you can quickly figure out what happened. That helps with root cause analysis for after the fact so that you can come up with plans to avoid the issue going forward. That's the kind of thing we didn't have before. Before we'd have to make a quick decision regarding, "Do we troubleshoot this to figure it out or do we go ahead and just reboot it?" Nine times out of 10, that'll probably resolve your issue.

It's a network monitoring system, so being able to see things like the hardware lifecycle, if our equipment is up to date, if connections are broken, or whether there are physical line breaks, is helpful. We're able to determine connectivity issues. We can monitor pretty much anything that is network-related.

It's fairly easy to use out-of-the-box.

We also use the TrafficInsights feature and it has been a huge help to us. Using it, we can see interface utilization, both WAN-facing and LAN-facing. We can see what kind of bandwidth we're using and what is using that bandwidth: what type of application, what host is using it, and how long it's been using it. And the historical data of TrafficInsights is great as well.

With TrafficInsights, we can obviously tell when our backups are running, because we run nightly backups and hourly backups. We can see the performance utilization of our backup server. And we can also tell, end-user-wise, what applications end-users are using and how long they're using them for. And while we don't necessarily know what they're doing, at the same time we kind of do know what they're doing. We know what websites they're going to, so we understand how they're utilizing the internet connection.

When it comes to identifying where we are experiencing performance issues using the TrafficInsights feature, I'm actually working on that right now, for the comptroller of our company. It's mainly about trying to get her to call me when it actually happens so I can log in and see it. This is the first time I've used it to diagnose an actual connection problem.

Auvik's network discovery capabilities are pretty fast. The biggest thing is that you have to commit to SNMP. You have to turn that on so that you can get the layer below. From a ping perspective, it does a great job of discovering devices on the network, once you have pointed it at the right entry point. You have to commit to a few protocols to open up the network so that it will get to the levels below the surface, where you're actually pulling information, data, logging, et cetera. If you really want to manage the network, you do have to open up a few protocols.

It also automatically updates network topology. It has a great map view of everything so that you can see all the connection points and the health of a connection. You can say whether it's a ping or if you have the right protocols set up so that you can pull in information. It's very easy to quickly see, from a graph, where you need to possibly address setup issues. The other thing that is great about the highlighting is when you have unknown devices on the network. They will come up and you can quickly filter for them in a very easy-to-use table. That way, you can tackle if they really are unknown devices or if somebody is trying to do something they shouldn't.

It's rare, but sometimes the actual application itself can be a little slow. That's because of the amount of data that it is pulling from remote networks. That has been my only complaint with it and it's really not even a complaint. But if the speed of the application were to improve, it would help a lot.

We've been using Auvik since December, so it's been about six months.

They do really well with the availability of the application. When they need to take maintenance windows, unless it's emergency maintenance, which I've only seen one time, they always have a backup. That means it's pretty much available all the time. We've never had a problem with it going down, ever.

It's pretty scalable. It's always easy to add on another visible device. Depending on how you decide to set up your network, you're going to pull in anything that isn't a piece of that main entry point. From a pricing standpoint, that part's good. 

Their technical support has been crazy good. A challenge for us, if we wanted to consider leaving the product, is just how good they are. Not only were they engaged from the beginning—even as easy as it was—but they guided us through and showed us different tools. They gave us multiple workshops. And even after those workshops we've had quarterly follow-up.

They really want you to use the product. It's not even a partnership issue. Rather, you can just tell they love what they do. It's definitely one of the better relationships I've come across in the last 20-something years of IT. That made the decision to go with them really easy for us. We felt really good about it after as well.

They're also very open to feedback and to looking at what that can lead to in terms of development and enhancing of their product. They've done so much reaching out to us. We have nothing but great things to say about them.

They definitely work with us. They don't just say, "Here, we sold you a product." They want us to get the most out of it, and that's what changes it to a partnership-type relationship.

We didn't have anything before Auvik, and it's helped out immensely.

There are a couple of tricky things to set up. You've got to know the equipment that you're running, but once you know that and you work alongside Auvik and use their Knowledge Base, it's extremely easy to set up. We had ours up and running in a day and we had it fine-tuned in a couple of months.

As a cloud-based solution, other than troubleshooting, there's barely any maintenance on our side. A lot of it is just the initial setup, such as getting a site running, and even that doesn't take that much time. You can have a site up and running and loaded in 30 minutes or less, if you know what you're doing. It's very straightforward, very easy to use, a lot of it is point-and-click. Once you've set up a few sites, you tend to know it like I know the back of my hand. It's super-easy for me to set stuff up.

We worked with an Auvik technical engineer. They had a deployment roadmap that we followed, and typically, every other week we were going through the different features and functions. We would set up a meeting to go over, for example, setting up SNMP and SSH login and turning on TrafficInsights. They helped us tune it to the way that we needed to use it.

The time-to-value ratio, for us, was day one. We had nothing before Auvik, so as soon as we got the product up and going, we were already seeing the networks through the discovery services. After a session of a few hours, we started to understand the SNMP and how to set things up and pull in a lot more of the logging and alerting, detailed information regarding the traffic. Within two to four hours, on top of the discovery stuff, we were off to the races. We quickly discovered versions and where we were from an asset-management perspective. We could see older equipment that we had, and we were able to quickly target a hardware refresh. The time-to-value was almost instant.

It's great for small businesses, but when you start reviewing the pricing model, depending on how many devices, and what sub-devices you decide to pull in, it can get tricky as far as the pricing goes. 

For us, as a mid-sized organization, it works great. There are some functions and features that you might get from a Meraki or from SolarWinds that, if you have a more robust networking team or a security team, might be useful, and Auvik might get passed over for an enterprise-grade solution. That said, Auvik is phenomenal for us. It's great for what we use it for. It gives us a very powerful tool at a very cost-effective price point for our size of an organization.

We have 20 to 25 billable devices. In terms of endpoints, we at least have 250 machines and there are a bunch of printers that we've got alerting on, and other miscellaneous devices that are connected to networks.

The challenge might be for a more robust network, where you start putting in a lot of billable devices. There's going to be a point where this solution would potentially be more expensive than some of the enterprise solutions, just because of the billing structure. Auvik could potentially price itself out of large organizations because of how it does billable devices and lose out to solutions that not only have more robust services but that price things out differently.

We have looked at a couple of open-source, network monitoring solutions, but they weren't as robust as this. NinjaRMM was one of the solutions we looked at. We pretty much just chose Auvik and moved forward with it. 

The strength of Auvik, and many of the tools at its price point, are the out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities. Where Auvik pulls ahead is when you set up SNMP and you're able to scan the layer details and information from all the devices underneath. That's when you're really going to start getting more of the robustness it offers, whether it's TrafficInsights or it's the asset management that comes from having a network monitoring tool. That's definitely where it comes out ahead. Ninja RMM, for example, is just giving you a high-level inventory of what it sees on the network. It probably wouldn't give you much more than a Lansweeper or the like.

My recommendation is that even if you have network experience, their product is vendor-neutral, so pay attention to the way that they do things. Even though it is specific to them, it's very easy to get used to the way that they have everything laid out.

Take advantage of the training sessions and of all the meetings. Go through the certification course that they have and pay attention to the Knowledge Base. Everything that they have done shows that they actually care about what they're doing and what they like doing. They are there to help. They will bend over backward to help you.

It does configuration backups and it takes them automatically. I also do those on the side as well, manually. In the event that something does happen, it's always better to have a backup. We've got backups for everything. We haven't come across any issues where we've had to use the configuration backups yet.

It does its job well. I would rate it at nine out of 10. I'm a little bit more network-driven, so a lot of the things it can do are fun, for me. I probably enjoy it more than anybody else on the team. 

You can definitely tell that this solution is younger than some others. It definitely knows its niche. It gave us everything we needed, to the point where I could rate it an 11 out of 10. But if I start to look at SolarWinds and some of the other names out there, some integration capability to do all the clicks within the service would probably be the next improvement that I would want. But if you ask for those, it may price itself out of where it's at now, which is a really great spot.

I don't see us leaving it for quite some time for sure.

I'm a systems engineer, so I use it for troubleshooting and for doing research, like baseline functions like figuring out network layouts and things of that nature.

What I really use the most is probably the devices section. The map is very helpful to me as well in my role.

I use the dashboard occasionally, and for the purposes that use it, it's pretty functional. It's pretty straightforward to use the network map and the dashboard.

I do get network visibility. For my purposes, it was partial. I do have to dive in to get some of the visibility I require.

The benefits witnessed were pretty much immediate after we deployed it. When we deploy to a new client, the benefits show themselves right away.

Auvik doesn't necessarily allow entry-level technicians to solve tickets on their own. You do need a little bit of experience with it. That said, once you do, it's very useful for technicians.

The product has helped to decrease our main time to resolution by 50%.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution. It saves me time in that I could dive in and get some answers that I would normally have to go through a couple of other portals to get to. I could find information that I needed from multiple spots just by going into Auvik.

The solution's interface isn't the most user friendly, however, once you get used to it and once you get into the groove and have a little bit of experience, it's pretty nice. For a novice coming into it, it's more difficult. I was overwhelmed, for sure. The layout just isn't the most intuitive. 

I've used the solution since 2019.

I've never run into any stability issues. 

The product is scalable. I've never had issues with our larger network.

I've never directly worked with technical support.

I haven't used any other similar solutions. 

I am occasioally involved in the deployment, however, not very often. It is easy to implement. It doesn't take long at all to get up and running. It takes less than an hour. 

We have a networking team, however, usually one person from the team handles the setup. 

There is some cleanup that needs to be done occasionally. Sometimes, when devices are decommissioned, they don't properly remove them, so we do need to manage that.

I'm not familiar with the pricing or licensing. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I would advise new users to poke through the menus to familiarize themselves with it. When I first started using it and I found when people first started using it, it was a little bit overwhelming. That said, once you get familiar with it, it's a very helpful tool.

I am a network specialist. I use Auvik for troubleshooting where something may have gone offline. 

We utilize it for learning. We utilize it to do various levels of monitoring in terms of whether things are up, if a port is flapping, or if there is a configuration error. We also utilize it to gather data about things on various networks that we administer. As we have thousands of endpoints, it helps greatly with quick insights and with things that otherwise would take a lot of manual digging.

We are an MSP, and my focus is networking. By implementing Auvik Network Management, we wanted to gain a good stance on insight into the network. We also use it for troubleshooting, but it was not a problem to be solved to begin with.

I have a networking background, so I found Auvik Network Management to be a great product right from the start.

Auvik Network Management has been extremely helpful for entry-level technicians, especially those with no networking background.

Auvik Network Management has definitely reduced the mean time to resolution. Things that we would have had to dig manually are presented in an easy-to-digest and accessible format. We can access the information from the cloud from anywhere we are.

The visibility that it provides depends on how you manage it. If you implement it perfectly, you will have 100% visibility. If you understand the benefits and limitations of the various probes and SNMP that they use, it works well. It is exactly as good as your implementation.

Auvik Network Management does not allow us to spend less time on the setup, but it allows us to spend less time on the maintenance of the solution and issue resolution.

It is pretty responsive to whether things are up or down.

The conventions that they use for the various menus are not super intuitive. They make sense after you realize how things are laid out, but I have to do a lot of digging to find the things that I am looking for.

The map itself is a little clunky in terms of zooming in, zooming out, and moving around because you have to use the manual on-screen buttons as opposed to being able to click and drag. I know that it is just a front-end graphic implementation, but it is slightly clunky to move around the map. However, all the information is there and presented in a very succinct fashion. It would be nice to be able to move around the map a little better. There should be more convenience from the drag, scroll, and zoom standpoints. 

I have been using Auvik Network Management for half a year.

It is very stable, but the interface is somewhat slow.

We have a number of small to large deployments, so its scalability is excellent.

The support guys are absolutely phenomenal, but they are highly technical, and they also expect other people to be so. We are an MSP, so we move fast. If I call support, it is because I am looking for a quick answer. It is a good thing that they teach you how to fix it yourself or where the resources are, but sometimes, we are looking for quick answers rather than being educated.

They are extremely quick at responding. They are very good at that.

Positive

There is a tool called NetsTools Pro. It is a device, and it performs some similar functions. I have used SolarWinds products. I have used too many tools for network monitoring.

Auvik puts a lot of the features that were present in these other tools into one great package.

It is deployed on the cloud, and there are appliances present in all of our customer sites.

Its deployment was easy for me because I have a networking background. For non-technical people, it is easier than many solutions.

In terms of maintenance, it requires monitoring in terms of making sure that the credentials stay updated for the network probes. If nothing changes, it does not require much maintenance.

We did it all in-house. Per-client, one person can handle the deployment.

I believe we have a special arrangement with them because we, as an MSP, take care of some of their technical services.

To implement Auvik effectively, I would advise comprehending some of the fundamentals of network monitoring that is vendor agnostic. Have a basic knowledge of SNMP and how ICMP works. You should be able to pass traffic through various network firewalls and junctions, and you should understand the limitations and advantages of any network in order to implement Auvik effectively.

Overall, I would rate Auvik Network Management a nine out of ten.