Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

Its main use case is network monitoring, specifically for some of the essential elements of our network. It monitors more, but we're really after those essential elements.

We were able to track down a couple of misconfigurations that were minor but we had missed. We now have a much stronger, clearer understanding of network health at a quick glance, and we're quickly able to diagnose.

It provides a single integrated platform. That was one of the reasons that we ended up checking it out. I had too many network elements, and I couldn't monitor it all from one place.

It has affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks. 

Automatic alerting is probably the most valuable. Its network visualizations are fairly intuitive. It's pretty straightforward. 

The setup was not difficult. It was time-consuming. It took a little time to get it set up, but once it's all set up, it's pretty simple.

I'd probably like a little bit more mapping functionality. It gives me a visual overlay of the way that one network segment links to another, but I can't adjust it. Everything is at an equal distance, which makes sense, but I'd probably group some of the things closer and further as it reflects in reality, but I can't do that right now on their system.

We've been using it for about six months.

They're very good at alerting us to weekend maintenance. It seems to only be weekend maintenance, so I think highly of their stability.

We only have two sites, and neither of them is huge, but so far, the scalability seems just fine.

I've contacted their tech support. They were fantastic. I'd rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I did previously use a different solution. I had tried a similar competitor. I cannot remember the name of it, but I wasn't happy with it. Once my year expired, I decided to not keep it.

It was very straightforward. It was time-consuming but not complex.

We were able to use elements of it immediately out of the box. VLANs, some of the fine-tuning, and some of the more minutia definitely took some legwork, but immediately out of the box, some of the elements started popping up. It was pretty cool to see items popping up right away.

To fully deploy the solution, it took a couple of weeks, but that was not a couple of weeks of only focusing on that.

When comparing the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solution, it was faster in terms of time, but the cost was higher. However, it was worth it.

We did it all by ourselves. It was just me. I probably spent two or three days of full-time work doing it.

It is deployed at multiple locations. In terms of maintenance, there is a collector that runs on our server. I don't know if I'd call it maintenance, but it is somewhat dependent on at least one piece of hardware staying up here on our campus.

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution. 

I appreciated the way Auvik's pricing scaled with the size of my network. We're a non-profit, and they gave us a non-profit discount. I didn't do an exhaustive comparison, but I felt their pricing was pretty reasonable. I'm a cheap guy when it comes to spending in a non-profit, but I did feel that what I was getting out of them was a good value for my dollar.

I've tried prior applications. I had been trying to find one single method. We went for Auvik because of the good support and good sales. They did a good job at sales, showing me the system, and walking me through things. They were very responsive and good at follow-up. They took good care of me.

I'd advise being aware of all of your VLANs and making sure that the server you're going to run or the machine you're going to run the host on has proper access to all elements of the network. If you have separate segments, it's not going to catch those things. So, you may have to open up some pathways from various VLANs back to whatever server you're running this on.

We haven't done a ton of automation, but it looks like it could help to reduce repetitive low-priority tasks through automation. Similarly, we haven't utilized device inventory much from them. I suppose it would be network device inventory. It wouldn't be endpoint inventory.

In terms of comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus the other on-prem network monitoring solutions, I'd probably consider it to be a hybrid. That's because there is still monitoring software that has to run here, but the GUI is all in the cloud. It's similar, and it's nice, but it's not life-changing.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance.

Auvik is a monitoring solution for our infrastructure. We needed a tool to monitor the network, tell us when something is down, notify us when resources are low, and functions like that. 

Auvik has helped us become proactive rather than reactive. We immediately know when something is down, so we're not finding out from users calling to complain. Auvik has made it easier to get the information we need. It's a significant improvement over our previous solution, which was completely useless. 

It automates tasks like obtaining the switch configs. I no longer need to go into the switches and manually download the configs, then save them in a certain spot. It's a time saver.  The configs are automatically updated and saved in the cloud, so if something were to happen on-prem, we can log into that portal from anywhere and get our configs back.

It's a great solution for that. We don't have to worry about what happens if we get wiped out. We'll always have our switch configs in the cloud. It also helps keep our device inventories updated because it's automatically scanning, but it hasn't saved us much time because we're fairly small. 

It's easy to get the information I need. I don't need to hunt for it or run queries to get it. It's fairly important to have a single interface. I don't want to check multiple places to see what's going on in my infrastructure.

When credentials are rejected, I'd like to get a little information about why in the error message.

We've been using Auvik for nearly two months.

Auvik is stable. It's good.

We previously used OpenManage Network Manager from Dell EMC, but we got rid of it because it was too large and cumbersome to utilize effectively. It was pretty awful. It was on-premise and unwieldy. Auvik's cloud-based solution has been great. 

Setting up Auvik was a piece of cake. This was an absolute breeze to set up compared to my last solution. We had the last solution for three years, and I don't think it was fully set up. With Auvik, I installed the collector, pointed it at my networks, and away it went. There was nothing to it. The network map started to populate in less than an hour. It was probably less than 20 minutes. 

Auvik is fair compared to LogicMonitor, which I used before OMNM. I think it's a good price.

We looked at LogicMonitor. It was super pricey and wasn't as good of a fit as Auvik. Auvik does more for less money. Auvik has all the features that LogicMonitor has for half the cost.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. It has been fantastic so far. I recommend Auvik for its ease of use and the information that you can get out of it. The price point is also fantastic.

We're a managed services provider using Auvik to monitor our clients' infrastructure. It is part of a set of tools that keeps us informed when something goes wrong, and we use it to build network maps. You can get an idea of what's happening on-site even if you're unfamiliar with the client's setup.

Sometimes it's the only thing on the network. It's competing with Ubiquiti if we have a Ubiquiti network. Not all the time, but sometimes. 

Auvik allows us to react faster to issues, so we're able to keep our SLAs. 
Depending on the issue, we're reducing our troubleshooting time to within 20 to 30 minutes. Some of our clients have one-hour SLAs, so that's an important turnaround.

We have much better visibility into our clients' networks, which is helpful when we're troubleshooting. When issues go wrong, we're more present. It helps us automate some low-level tasks. For example, it closes tickets on its own. 

The fact that Auvik is a cloud-based solution is crucial because we're primarily a cloud-based company monitoring multiple clients across several sites. The cloud functionality is handy because we get visibility across distinct companies all from one location. 

Monitoring is probably the most active asset Auvik does for us. If a particular device on the network goes down, we have that granularity to see which network element is causing the problem. 

The integrations don't give us too much trouble. It all works with Auto Task reasonably nicely. Once it's set up, it'll close out in Auto Task too, which is great. The network visualization is excellent if you build it out and tweak it, so it reflects the truth. You'll get most of the picture if you let it automatically populate. Once it's built out, the network map is decent.

The network visualization is pretty intuitive. There's not too much going on with the network map there, and you understand what a network looks like. I think it's pretty straightforward.

Auvik doesn't communicate very well with Ubiquiti devices and will incorrectly flag facets as down. Compatibility with Ubiquiti is my biggest pain point with Auvik.

I have been using Auvik since I joined this company in July 2022.

I haven't had any issues with Auvik's stability.

Auvik seems fairly scalable. It works for all of our clients, ranging from 10 devices to a few hundred. It works well for small to medium-sized businesses. 

I give Auvik a solid seven out of 10. I might rate it eight if the Ubiquiti issue wasn't always bugging me. It tells me Ubiquiti devices are down when they're not. I recommend giving it a try. If you are trying to track multiple sites and multiple clients, it's worth a look.

The primary use is for notifications and alerts, but also to get a feel for the network because I can see it all on a map, and it looks nice. We don't only use Auvik. 

To paint a picture of our environment, we deploy Auvik for some of our clients, and some of them own multiple facilities, so we have sites for them. Within our company, different individuals have different access levels, some with read-only. We also give some of our clients read-only access so they can see their network if they are curious.

We are an IT company, so notifications and alerts are essential for us. We can preempt problems because the solution alerts us before the customer even contacts us, so by the time they call, we already have information and an ETA on the fix for them.

Auvik affected our IT team's visibility into remote and distributed networks globally. Everything we do is remote, including initial onsite setups, and we can see how a network looks from the perspective of a nice-looking map. This visibility is important because it helps us see the network more clearly and provides a more physical feel instead of just seeing numbers and settings. Having an actual map of the network components and connections helps significantly.  

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik; it's a beneficial product, and we use it daily. 

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR) because the solution allows us to begin troubleshooting very quickly.  

The extensive personalization and customization options are great because it lets me do a lot. I can set up different permission structures, assign various staff members read-only access and others full access, and customize my notifications.

Auvik's UI is beautiful. 

The solution's monitoring and management functions are relatively straightforward; with ten being the most difficult, I'd rate Auvik three point five or four. This simplicity is important to my organization.    

Regarding Auvik helping to visualize the network mapping, that's one of the features I love most about it. It shows the network on such a simple level, with the firewall on top, the switches, types of connections, devices, and so on.  

Auvik has excellent integrations with other solutions we use. 

A feature I'd like to see is a stat breakdown of our networks at the end of every month, showing package drop rates for each network and so on. For example, this data delivered in an email would be a good feature.

I've been using the solution for four to five months. 

Ten out of ten, we've never had an issue with the solution's stability. 

Auvik is highly scalable. 

I've never needed to contact technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward, largely thanks to Auvik's knowledge base. They provided an excellent knowledge base, exact instructions, and courses, which made the process very simple.

Deployment of the solution to a site requires one staff member, and the process includes the following:

• Installing the connector on a local device.
• Getting it signed in with the SMPP protocol.
• Creating the sites and the multi-site.

Following the deployment, we monitor notifications; no other maintenance is necessary.

Auvik assisted us with the initial deployment. 

I rate the solution ten out of ten. We don't use it to control every aspect of the network, but I'm satisfied with what we use it for.

Auvik is the solution for those looking to monitor their networks. It's incredible; my advice is to go for it.

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.

We initially got Auvik to monitor our network devices and equipment mainly for outages and that sort of issue. We have integrated its alert system and email-to-text solution from a local New Zealand telecommunications provider so that our IT staff can get text alerts to their phones. It's quite handy because you're not constantly monitoring your email. So for our different alerts, we get texts now as well as part of that. It might be on the weekend or something like that, and you're not sitting there monitoring your emails, so texts are a bit easier for our on-call IT person to get a text, and then they can check out what's going on.

One of Auvik's services we use is TrafficInsights. It's reasonably new and wasn't around when we first got it. We can feed all the logs into there to see what connections are going and where things are connecting to the environment. It's pretty useful from a security perspective. For example, you can search and see when a specific IP address might have come into your environment if you need it to do an audit or a review. We generally use it for audits or checking where certain things are connecting from around the world. It's a good security feature we can use when we're worried about a device talking to a particular IP address. We can see how long it may have been talking to that. We haven't actually used it for network bandwidth as such.

Auvik also acts as a config register, connecting and pulling the configurations of switches. It's good to have that stored there. If we need to restore or roll back to a particular config, those are saved somewhere else in addition to saving it manually before we make changes.

Auvik has definitely saved us time. You don't have to go to a room somewhere and figure out what's under what. It's scanned, so it shows you everything, including what interfaces are hooked into what devices. If you didn't have that, you'd need to go into a room to look at a fizzled connection and find where it plugs into. Auvik has decreased our average time-to-resolution. For example, if we have an internet outage in our office. In that case, it shows that an internet connection has gone offline and tells us when we've got a failover internet circuit with different providers. 

In the past, we wouldn't have even been notified if we swapped over to one of the other internet connections. When troubleshooting, we know right away when something isn't working or hasn't come up online. We can see which connection is active or current and which is offline. I can't say precisely how much time we've saved using Auvik, but from a year's perspective, I've probably saved a couple of weeks' worth of time. It's reduced the amount of time I spend manually performing tasks like documentation, mapping things out, and troubleshooting. Auvik's features help us address issues before they become a problem for our users. For example, we have a resource usage alert that pops up when there's a sudden increase so we can jump on it. We can stop a non-essential service from taking up a lot of resources and could potentially freeze the server or device. It saves a lot of time addressing the issue after the fact while preventing potential impacts and outages.

It includes automated out-of-the-box device configuration backups for most things, including most generic Cisco functionalities. These have also saved us time. Before I joined the company, they had a separate service for that. They were paying for something else on top of other solutions. Having that all in the one system saves time as well. You don't have to worry about doing it manually. When we make changes to devices, it automatically rolls over to the next one. You can have a log of the dates and times when it changed, and you can set up notifications for when the configuration changes. You can investigate if it changes when it shouldn't have. Without that, you wouldn't even know it has changed without looking at it, but then I don't think you would anyway.

Our team is pretty small. We only have a small IT shop within our business, but we still have our services with Auvik. It makes it easier for them to fix problems quickly without trolling around and finding other documentation. They can jump in there and see the alerts on that map, giving a bit more information. It saves the rest of the team from constantly having to look at the networking.

Auvik is easy to use and provides us with an abundance of information. It can show what devices are connected to the network and the specific interface that it's connected to, saving us a lot of time. It's helpful if you're trying to troubleshoot and the documentation isn't a hundred percent up to date, like if you take over from someone else, and there's no documentation about how a specific device connects. If it's in Auvik and the network is set up, you can jump in there and find what it's connected to. It even maps it out for you in a pretty little diagram at the top. 

It's comprehensive. You load up a network, and it picks up pretty much everything. That makes it easier to use without having to do too much pumping. In terms of discovery, we only use it for certain things, such as our network gear and our servers. It picks up everything. You do have to do a bit of filtering and some tie-up to make sure you're not seeing stuff you don't want for your specific use case, but that comes down to what different people use it.

Auvik is constantly scanning automatically in the background, and if there's a new device in the network, it'll pick it up. You have to make sure that you have credentials or the right port sector so it can pull the correct information. It may be able to see the device, but it may not necessarily get the information from it.

TrafficInsights has helped us identify and troubleshoot performance issues. When we're doing maintenance, you can monitor it live and ensure that the performance isn't being affected too much. If it is, we can pause and decide to reschedule when there's not so much going on. With TrafficInsights, we can view the information and do something with it. In the past, we couldn't easily find that information. We'd have to dig through individual policies or logs, like on a firewall, for example, whereas it's now all in one place. That made it easier to be able to view that rather than clicking and moving between multiple places.

Auvik could have better compatibility with more devices. The devices that we're using are essential within our network infrastructure. It would be great to access the full range of features that some of the other ones do, such as the device configuration backups and the configuration change alert. But there are always new devices coming out, so they have to work through getting the compatibility in the first place.

It makes too many attempts to connect to devices when it's online. You want real-time alerting and that sort of thing, so it has a lot of active connections going on behind the scenes. It creates quite a bit of talk on the network when it's connecting to a device. When it's trying to connect to one for the first time, it tries all the credentials you have saved within your credential library, and that isn't always ideal. If you're on the device, you can see that there have been a lot of failed login attempts because it's just trying another credential that it shouldn't use.

We've been using Auvik for about a year and a half.

When we need Auvik, it's there. There is quite a lot of maintenance that goes on behind the scenes. We get alerts when Auvik is unavailable due to maintenance, but that's also a good thing in cybersecurity threat environments these days. Being in IT ourselves, we know how important that is. 

It's simple to scale up because you can add a whole network or office environment into it quickly. If you don't need it anymore, you can delete it. It's very scalable.

I would rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I've opened a couple of support tickets when we've needed certain things. They respond pretty quickly. We've also had chats with them throughout the setup process. The account managers have helped us get questions answered or pointed us in the right direction.

Positive

Before I joined the company, they had a PRTG system, which is similar in terms of the overall goal. But I had Auvik, which is a lot easier. It's all there. As long as you've got the network and a user to connect to something, then you're basically on your way, and you don't need to do much with the collectors either, which is the thing that talks and you install it and make sure it can talk to the right places on the network. You pretty much let it do its own thing. 

Ease of use and functionality were probably the main things that made us switch. PRTG is a product that requires you to set up a lot of things manually. There wasn't specific device compatibility. It was just standards, whether it was the way a device connected or the protocols through which it is connected to the device to pull the information. Auvik sets things up and has specific compatibilities with devices and a much nicer view to see the information that the old product didn't have.

Setting up Auvik is straightforward. It has decent documentation and specific instructions on how to configure it to work with compatible devices. You're not trying to follow some document for a completely different device and apply it to your device. There's lots of information to use to help you with that configuration process as well.

I can't say precisely how long it took to set up, but you can get a whole network mapped out pretty quickly. I've set up a few offices around the country. It took me a couple of hours to get everything fully monitored and plug the information in. To set it up, all you do is check a network, scan, and get some credentials. That takes less than an hour. Then you're just waiting for the information to start going in. With other products, you sometimes don't even know where to start, to be honest. If I were trying to do the same thing on another solution, I might end up spending an extra day on it for the same sort of setup, whether that's a whole office environment or setting it up from scratch.

We did the implementation ourselves. In the first year, there was a local reseller who sold it to us, but they didn't help us implement it. We have a four-person team for everything, so we take turns doing different things. In terms of maintenance, there isn't a lot we need to do on our side. Once we've got it set up and doing what we need, then there isn't a considerable amount. The only time we need to perform any maintenance is when we're setting up new equipment. On the other side, Auvik does its maintenance. So we'll get emails about them completing maintenance and the service availability and that sort of thing.

It's hard for me to estimate the return because I don't know what that service costs, but Auvik has replaced the separate service we formerly used for device configuration as well as our old network monitoring solution. I don't know the difference in cost between Auvik and our old solution, but Auvik saves a lot of time, and time is money. 

I'd say Auvik's price is reasonable. I don't know how much we paid for the old one, so I can't compare the two. But I think it's a good value, considering all the time saved and the information you can get from it. The license is billed according to the number of network devices. It bills you based on a few specific types of devices, like switches, routers, and other network devices. We're not even using all of our device allotment at the moment. I think Windows servers and machines and that sort of thing aren't counted as part of that licensing. We aren't charged for servers, I believe. We have a virtual environment, so all of our servers and virtual machines within that aren't part of that licensing scheme.

I think they were looking at about three solutions at the same time. They did a few trials a couple of years back. I can't remember which ones. I think there was a Solomon solution. They decided to go with Auvik because of all the information it displays and the ease of use. 

I'd probably give Auvik an eight out of 10 at the moment. We're still waiting for them to become compatible with all of our devices. If they had that compatibility, I'd probably rate it nine or 10. For those thinking about adopting Auvik, I would say go for it. 

My advice is to put time into setting up the alerts because that's one of the best parts about it. If you have those alerts set up, it's going to save you a lot of time. You don't even need to go into Auvik to investigate. With that notification, the process comes a behind-the-scenes method for resolving those alerts. You should have a plan so your IT team knows what to do when one of those alerts is triggered.

I use Auvik every day for everything. I can remote-terminal in, meaning I can be anywhere and jump in from my phone and make any changes I need to on switches.

We have some pretty large energy overhaul stuff going on right now. They're changing out all of our lights and adding big solar panels to all the parking lots at all of our school sites. It's nice being able to use Auvik to jump into those switches and change the VLANs when they need different sensors put in. Having that service is invaluable.

Auvik lets us know about problems before others find them. There have been some instances where I didn't set up an alert correctly, but as soon as I fixed it, it started giving us a heads-up before we got phone calls about the issue. That's the biggest advantage of having it. We don't get those calls nearly as often anymore.

The automation of network mapping frees up my time. I'm the sole network guy. We have some technicians that intermittently have an interest in networking. I have given them basic access to it so they can get in and see the maps, and they get the alerts too, so that they know what is happening at their assigned sites. Suppose a camera is down somewhere. They can go into Auvik because I have it set to hold devices for 10 days. They can see where it was connected and we can check the switch and see what the issue is.

Auvik also updates the maps almost instantly. Within about 30 seconds they're updated.

And in terms of reducing MTTR, we went from having nothing to having something. We would sometimes go a week or a month without knowing about an issue. I am able to track things down faster and implement solutions for things that I would otherwise have had no idea were even a problem in the first place.

The solution provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups, as well. As soon as it starts scanning, it copies the running config on all the network hardware. I'm able to go in and restore them if I need to, but there's no setup for that feature. That has saved us time, absolutely. You can use that same panel to check differences. For example, when there's a configuration update, you can pull the backup and the current running, and run them together and it will highlight any differences.

The most valuable features of Auvik are the alerting and monitoring. Those functions mean it easily more than pays for itself. I have it integrated with Slack with multiple channels set up for our IT office. When just about any part goes down that I have assigned in the alerting portion, it will let the right people know within minutes.

It's also straightforward to use. That was one of the reasons I went with Auvik. It has a little link tree on the left side and you can pretty much navigate through the whole system. It's MSP software. Each of our school sites is set up as if it were a separate client. Each has its own webpage, and I can drop down the menu on the left and change to any school site to see its whole page. It's as straightforward as it gets.

The network discovery capabilities are pretty good. You do have to go in and allot permissions to scan separate subnets. If someone doesn't know what they're doing, they're not going to know how to get it to discover the networks. As long as you know what subnets you're supposed to be scanning, it's as easy as clicking a checkbox and hitting "Scan."

It would be cool if they came out with an app, but running the browser isn't bad.

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

The stability is great. They're really consistent in sending out notifications about any maintenance windows or updates that they're rolling out. 

The only time I've had a false positive from Auvik is when our VM has gone down, the one that's running the collector. That will cause a bunch of things to pop off here and there. But I've cleaned that up on our end.

There was recently an issue with logging in, but they were on top of it within minutes and then they had a whole status web page about it. I can't complain at all about the stability.

Because it runs from a VM collector and it's fast, I could add another site if I wanted to and it would take me minutes.

In terms of increasing our usage of Auvik, we have a site that's running from a different ISP and I'm having issues remotely managing it. As soon as I'm able to get that straightened out, I'll be adding that entire site to our service.

Their technical support is awesome. They're proactive. If there's anything going on, they let me know by sending me emails. And if I ever need to hit them up, they're super quick. We have a designated rep and she's pretty responsive.

They recently added an idea portal. If I come across an idea or something that I want them to add in, I can throw it in there. Users then up-vote or down-vote ideas and Auvik chooses to implement them or not after that.

Positive

We had SolarWinds and then something happened to our database, internally, that we were using to manage it. We then went to having no monitoring at all for about two years. When I took over, we got with Auvik. So technically, we replaced all of SolarWinds' services with Auvik.

The setup was really straightforward. When we were doing the proof of concept, I went through their resources and got their certification by following their courses. And I pretty much did the entire deployment by myself, with a little help from their sales rep. But it was super straightforward. It took about 10 minutes.

The setup was super easy compared to others that I've done. With Auvik you're just putting a service on a VM. Depending on how large your network is you might need more VMs or more services running, but that's literally it.

And as a cloud-based solution it requires zero maintenance.

The time to value is great. We were up and running within an afternoon.

They charge for switches and some networking hardware, but everything else is free. In our environment there are a lot of things that we aren't billed for by Auvik. We're almost one-for-one on students. APs and cameras are shown by IP address in Auvik. It doesn't tell you exactly what that device is, but it does tell you there's something there and where it's connected in the maps. You can monitor any workstation using the service. If you can name them it makes it a lot easier to keep track of them. Intercom systems are included as well. All of those devices are not billed and we have thousands and thousands of those kinds of devices.

We had to look at other options. We checked out SolarWinds and we also evaluated NinjaRMM and PRTG. The latter teamed up with NetBrain and together they do network automation ticketing.

SolarWinds and NinjaRMM were significantly more expensive, although they did do more. But they were more server-related and covered more of that end. Auvik is more network-centric and checked more boxes, in terms of what I was looking for, than the others.

Give Auvik a shot. Do the demo. It doesn't take long to do the proof of concept. And during the proof of concept they give you access to their resources so you can go in and do that Auvik certification. The most important part of that is being able to go through all of their material and really see what they're capable of. During the demo you can dig deep.

I love it. I use it every day, multiple times a day.