Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We rely on Auvik Network Management for a comprehensive network solution, utilizing it to monitor the health of all our devices and maintain up-to-date backups of their configurations.

We implemented Auvik Network Management to streamline onboarding new network devices across our global network. It also provides proactive alerts for outages, allowing us to address them before they impact users. Additionally, Auvik facilitates swift restoration from backups if an issue proves unsolvable.

Auvik and SaaS Management complement each other well. The Auvik portal's single pane of glass interface provides a seamless user experience, allowing us to easily switch to the SaaS product. While their data may not be directly integrated, these two separate products offer valuable functionalities. SaaS Management helps identify shadow IT by tracking user sign-ins to company accounts, and Auvik excels in network backup and monitoring.

Organizations using Auvik with a concern about shadow IT across various groups can leverage SaaS Management for efficient discovery. This tool provides insights into user account sign-ins and application usage, giving you a more comprehensive view beyond just the network monitoring capabilities offered by Auvik.

Auvik boasts a user-friendly interface that organizes information by office location, allowing for quick access to individual sites. Additionally, a global alert portal provides a centralized view of issues across our entire network.

The network map and dashboard provide a near real-time view of how our network is connected, with about 90 percent accuracy. It's a big improvement, especially since it's automated and now supports switch stacks, allowing us to see not only if there's a stack but also how many members it has within the map itself.

Auvik's user-friendly network map automatically lays out our entire network, allowing us to quickly click on any device and delve into its specific details for in-depth analysis.

We saw the benefits of Auvik almost immediately after deploying it. Once we set up SNMP, a requirement for the software, and entered the discovery credentials, we were able to roll it out to multiple offices. Within days, we had all the locations monitored and backed up.

Auvik has significantly improved our ability to resolve network issues quickly. By allowing us to examine alert logs for potential precursors to outages, and to determine if the problem is widespread or confined to a single location or device, Auvik significantly reduces our mean time to resolution.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and resolution. We are able to use that saved time to work on other projects that we are trying to roll out. 

Auvik's most valuable features are the combined monitoring and backup functionalities. With strategically placed collectors worldwide, we can proactively address potential issues through real-time monitoring and email alerts. Furthermore, Auvik's backups ensure data recovery even in the case of unforeseen circumstances.

I would like Auvik to offer an alternative method for backing up devices that don't support or have SNMP disabled, since currently, SNMP seems to be a prerequisite for any functionality in Auvik. This would be helpful for legacy devices that might not be compatible with SNMP.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two years.

Auvik Network Management is stable because it is a SaaS service.

It is easy to scale Auvik Network Management in under 30 minutes.

Auvik's technical support has been generally helpful, although we haven't been able to find a solution for managing our older devices that lack SNMP compatibility.

We transitioned from BackBox, an on-premise backup solution, to Auvik, a cloud-based SaaS platform. This switch not only simplified data management with cloud storage but also provided network monitoring capabilities that BackBox lacked.

The initial deployment of Auvik was easy. We set up a couple of sites for POC and for a lot of the locations, we used the same SNMP credentials so it was able to discover it all and start monitoring within a few hours.

The deployment took a few months to complete because we had multiple locations globally to roll out and it was not the only project we were working on.

During the initial POC and testing phase, we received assistance from an Auvik onboarding technician. Following this, we were able to independently deploy the solution to our other locations.

Auvik Network Management is moderately priced.

I would rate Auvik Network Management nine out of ten.

Auvik does not require maintenance from our end.

Ensure you have SNMP credentials and a dedicated service account for TACX prepared on all your devices. Most companies likely already have a service account available. However, for Auvik to monitor and back up your devices, create a separate service account with read-only access specifically for Auvik.

We primarily use the solution for traffic insights or traffic monitoring. It's for network management. While we're also using it for managing some of our network devices, the main reason for this was traffic insights.

The network map can provide a full network visibility or maybe just partial - it depends. For me, for my use case, it gives me plenty of visibility and also sends me alerts. I can set up different alerts based on enterprise system utilization and things like that. For my use case, it does pretty much everything I need it to, and it can do a lot more than I'm using it for.

The traffic insights are excellent. It's amazing how it works. There are really well built features on it. It's not a very common feature that you see in a lot of these network management tools. It's a game-changer. 

The setup is amazing. Most of the work is automatic. You just set it up, and then it just does its own thing.

The interface is pretty straightforward. The dashboard is there. There are some advanced features as well. 

They walk you through everything. If you need some help with something, like, navigating or something, they'll help. They provide ongoing support. If I need to find out anything about any feature, I can just set up a call with them, and they will walk me through it. 

The ease of access is pretty straightforward. I had used the solution in the past, but not as much. Maybe just to check a device's status here and there, but not to the point of deploying and using it heavily. However, then I found out about the traffic insights and the other features they offer. We bought some licenses internally and deployed them to our team sites, and now I use them much more. It's not very intimidating. The navigation and layout are easy.

The network map gives a real-time picture of the network. If you have a network set up right, it gives you a nice overview. 

The map I use is usually when I'm deploying a new site. That's when I try to make sure everything is there. I get a real quick overview to make sure everything is adapted - instead of going down into inventory and going through each single line item. Instead, I can just look at the map. 00:08:53 Speaker 0

I saw the benefit before implementing it when I was doing my research. Auvik was one of the very few solutions that had the features I was looking for. That's why I signed up for the trial. Immediately, I knew it's what I was looking for. Once you sign up for the trial, they send you an invite for a call to go over everything.

The meantime to resolution has improved. Let's say you have just one source of visibility on your network where you are relying just on your controller or something like that; then, of course, it will take a lot longer to get to the issue. Auvik shows all the nodes or all the devices online, and it makes it much faster to resolve these issues. 

Auvik allows me to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution. The setup is especially well thought-out. You just create a site and install a collector, and it does most of the work. It searches for networks and asks if you want to add them.

It sometimes lags, especially in larger deployments. There's a little bit of an issue there where if you're trying to open the Auvik network map, however, for the most part, it's pretty straightforward. It works pretty well.

Recently, I have noticed they are having some issues with the cloud instances where it was causing some issues. It could be more responsive.

For traffic insights, if there is a way to export or automate exports, that would be something I would love to see, especially in the traffic insights. 

I started using the solution in November, 2023.

I'd rate stability eight out of ten. We had an issue earlier this year, however, other than that, it's been solid. 

I'd rate scalability ten out of ten. It's easy to add more sites. 

I've called technical support twice. Both times, they were pretty responsive and knowledgeable, and they resolved my issue immediately. The engineers are great.

Positive

I've used a couple of alternatives, including PRTG. There may have been better performance, however, nothing provided the amount of insights. You can really narrow down the data.

The initial setup was really easy. They have a nice knowledge base as well. It's really streamlined. They also have device-specific configuration help as well. If you want something particular, they have guides for that.

In our case, we're using a lot of Ubiquiti devices, and they have a knowledge base specifically for that, which allows you to see more information. There's documentation for Cisco, for Juniper, et cetera. 

I handled most of the deployment myself. We're often adding sites and for the most part, we can have a site done in less than half a day. It might take an hour or two to get it up and running. If you have a bunch of sites to do, it will obviously take longer. 

The pricing is great. For some organizations, it may be expensive if they're managing every single device. However, it's priced pretty fairly.

Part of it is modular, so you can make it as extensive as you want, and that depends on how much management you are doing. If you are managing a lot of devices for CI,it can get expensive. They only charge for managed devices. Any critical device I'm managing, I'm paying for. However, I'm only managing physical devices on my sites. I'm not managing non-critical devices. 

I'm a customer.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Auvik is our main network monitoring platform.

We were struggling to monitor our network hardware for uptime, bandwidth usage, and errors, all while managing firmware updates and configuration changes. Thankfully, Auvik solved all these problems for us.

In our VMware environment, we use a virtual appliance for Auvik. This appliance acts as a data concentrator, collecting information from all our network hardware. The collected information is then uploaded to the cloud by the virtual appliance.

Auvik's network map provides a close to real-time picture of our network.

The network map is user-friendly, though initially, the text can be a bit difficult to read due to its spread-out nature. However, zooming in and navigating different sections allows for easy readability. Thankfully, all the objects are clickable, providing instant access to detailed information for each one as needed.

I took advantage of Auvik's 30-day trial, and within that timeframe, I became thoroughly convinced of its benefits.

Auvik has significantly improved our mean time to resolution. Before using Auvik, troubleshooting network issues could take hours of investigation to pinpoint the problem. Now, with Auvik's features, I can typically identify the cause within just a few minutes.

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

The most valuable features for me are network monitoring and alerting. This means I automatically receive an email notification whenever an issue arises, eliminating the need to wait for users to report problems.

There's room for improvement in the interface. While we only have one location, logging in presents a world map designed for multiple sites. This unnecessary extra step to access the information I need could be eliminated by offering an option to disable the world map view.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one year.

Auvik Network Management is stable. We have not had any problems.

While our current environment handles our needs well, Auvik's easy scalability allows us to seamlessly expand into a larger environment in the future. The multi-site dashboard lets us manage everything from a central location whenever we're ready to grow.

The technical support responds within 24 hours.

Neutral

At my previous company, I relied on a combination of SolarWinds, Lansweeper, and an open-source tool for IT asset management. While Auvik offers a more user-friendly experience compared to these free options, it doesn't provide the same level of detailed functionality as SolarWinds.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The deployment took a couple of days. One person was required for the deployment.

Auvik helped us deploy the system remotely. The on-site process itself was very straightforward: it involved downloading the software, installing it, and then entering information into the interface.

Auvik holds its own compared to other contenders. It's priced fairly, avoiding any underestimation of its value. What truly sets it apart is the per-network device licensing structure, with additional device monitoring included at no extra cost.

I would rate Auvik Network Management nine out of ten.

Minimal maintenance is required.

I am an MSP and I use Auvik to monitor my client's networks.

When we experienced network issues, we simply lacked the visibility to understand the underlying causes. Auvik provided us with much-needed visibility into our network, enabling us to effectively diagnose and resolve problems.

We are using Auvik's SaaS platform with an on-premises connector.

Auvik provides an intuitive interface that is easy to use. The user-friendly interface is helpful when troubleshooting network issues. Auvik alerts me if something being monitored goes offline, allowing me to track it down. Additionally, there are various locations where I can access different pieces of information, enabling me to review audit logs or alerts. This feature is quite helpful.

Auvik's network map and dashboard give us real-time visibility into our network.

Utilizing the network map and dashboard provides a straightforward approach to gaining real-time visibility into our network. While the network map may contain a wealth of information that necessitates further exploration, the ability to visualize the network in real time without the need for Visio development is helpful. With the proper configuration, the network map dashboard provides full network visibility.

Auvik helps minimize blind spots and provides an additional resource for monitoring and tracking network performance. Proactive alerting is crucial, as it's often preferable to have a system notify me of issues before users do. While not always possible, Auvik enables me to be proactive in addressing network problems.

Auvik has helped reduce our mean time to resolution by 50 percent.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on resolution.

The most advantageous feature is the ability to back up the configuration settings on switches and routers. This has been immensely helpful, and I am proficient in utilizing Auvik's premium network monitoring service, Traffic Insight. It provides comprehensive network visibility. Furthermore, I appreciate its integration with my ticketing system, Autotask.

I'd like to see some enhancements to Auvik's network map, including the ability to focus on specific areas without viewing the entire map. This would allow for more granular analysis and troubleshooting. Additionally, introducing security-related features would be beneficial. For instance, implementing abnormal traffic detection would alert us to unusual network activity, potentially indicating a security breach. Furthermore, incorporating baseline snapshots would enable us to compare current network behavior against a standard reference point, facilitating the identification of anomalies. This could be achieved through simple checkbox controls.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

I would rate the stability of Auvik nine out of ten.

I use Auvik for small businesses, and it scales to meet my needs.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We had been using ConnectWise, but it did not meet our needs. When we informed ConnectWise support that we were switching to Auvik, they acknowledged that Auvik was a more suitable solution.

The deployment wasn't as straightforward as I had anticipated, but it wasn't overly difficult either. It required careful attention to the instructions and a thorough understanding of the installation process, making it somewhat more complex than initially envisioned. I would rate the complexity of the deployment five out of ten. I completed the deployment myself and it took a few days.

Auvik's pricing is generally reasonable. However, I have occasionally encountered discrepancies between my expected and actual billing amounts. I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact cause of these variations, but I'm unsure whether they stem from additional service inclusions or unexpected price increases. The lack of clarity regarding my consumption compared to the pricing structure has been an issue. Despite not making any perceived changes, my pricing has fluctuated, and the company has denied any alterations. This has left me perplexed about the underlying factors.

I would rate Auvik ten out of ten.

I have Auvik deployed for multiple of my small to medium clients.

Occasionally, Auvik's automated agent upgrades malfunction, requiring my assistance. Maintenance is minimal.

I recommend Auvik.

We utilize Auvik for monitoring our clients' environments. 

It plays a highly critical part in our operations. A part of the product that we sell to our clients involves a service level agreement that we will respond to within X amount of time, and we'll monitor their environment for them. Because of that, this plays an absolutely critical function.

The collectors that they use are constantly connecting to Auvik to make sure that you're aware that it's active, it's running. You would think all of the other monitoring solutions out there do the same thing, and many do claim that, but most can't deliver that, whereas Auvik can. There have been many times when some of our other tools that are also monitoring things should be reporting that there's an outage at a location or a server is down or something like that, but that's just not the case. With those other tools, it doesn't even blip on their radar that the system is completely hard down and it's a big issue, whereas, with Auvik, the moment a collector disconnects, and it has been disconnected for the amount of time that we defined, it immediately alerts us and says, "We can't communicate with this machine." It's really handy. You can sell the feature all day long, but if that feature doesn't work, it's not a real feature. Auvik works. It's very reliable, at least from our experiences so far.

I enjoy it when it comes to visualizing the network mapping/topology for the organization. It doesn't just provide a network map. It gives us a global view, an actual Earth view, and it allows us to see where the devices are physically located, which is very handy. Especially if we need to dispatch something or if we need to compare a power outage to maybe a storm that's passing by, it gives us the map and visual of where a device is located. When you drill down into it, you can click on the actual nodes that are on the map and go down as granular as you want. You can see the actual network topology of the environment. It does a pretty good job of figuring out how it's all laid out. You've got a collector from Auvik that's sitting there, and it explores and discovers the devices. So far, I haven't seen an instance where it couldn't figure out the exact network topology. There's always this rare case where something gets kind of wonky in regard to how your server is set up. You might have multiple connections coming in or whatever, but so far, it has been able to define all that. That's something that a lot of people don't realize is normally a manual task. You have to break out Visio and start dragging and dropping a lot of icons, name it yourself, define the IPs, etc. Auvik does it automatically, which is just cool.

Our client environments are not a single vendor product. There are multiple vendors coming in from different directions. We deal in data systems, which is the industrial automation type of stuff that deals with wastewater treatment plants, water treatment plants, etc. Due to the nature of our business, being able to have an accurate inventory of what's at what site, what's the IP address, or what are the specs on a server is super important.

It provides an integrated platform for a few brands. It doesn't provide a fully integrated platform for all the brands and manufacturers out there. It's probably a little bit more skewed toward Cisco products, which we don't use a lot. It would be nice if they had full integration into Dell's tools, as well as VMware for Hypervisor and things like that. Having a single integrated platform would save us a lot of time across the board. Currently, we have to use Auvik for monitoring. It's probably the most reliable one that we have so far. We've used quite a few in the past, including Ninja, some Microsoft options, and several others. Everyone promises it, but far and few can truly deliver a single pane of glass experience. The Auvik tool gives us a single pane of glass for all of the monitoring needs, and then, if we need to drill into on a system-by-system basis and remotely manage the system and remote into a machine, we have to use other tools for that.

My favorite feature so far is the alerts section. We've got our main company at the top, and then all of our customers are underneath that. We can either filter by a single customer or one of their sites specifically, or look at it from the top down and see the whole picture. It's an easy way for me to be able to have a high-level overview. I can see the status of all of our sites simultaneously without having to really dig in and get super granular unless I want to. It gives that ability too, which is cool.

The functionality on a PC is definitely better than in a mobile environment. If you are logging in to Auvik on your phone or on a tablet, it's a little janky at times, but on a PC, it's fantastic.

If I could make a wish list of things that I would like to see from Auvik, I would definitely love to see more vendor integration with specific manufacturers. They've got that integration with Cisco, but it would be awesome to also have that with other major brands, such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. It should have integration with more vendors, and in general, being able to quickly and easily access vendor-specific tools from the portal would be amazing. A real-life case scenario would be that we know that Dell servers have iDRAC cards on them, which allows for remote control and a remote KVM keyboard, video, and mouse functionality. It would be nice to be able to have the direct link baked in and be able to quickly just say, "I need to remotely manage this machine," and then you can just click, and you're in. In regards to VMware, VMware is one of the top three hypervisors for virtualization. It would be awesome to be able to quickly and easily identify that this is the VMware cluster, this is the ESXi server, and this is a vCenter. We should be able to quickly and easily log into consoles and remotely manage things as needed from there. This kind of functionality for the Cisco products is baked into Auvik right now, but it doesn't exist for other manufacturers. It's one of those things that will happen as time goes by. They need to make sure that it's embedded and done properly and that they're working with the manufacturers directly, instead of trying to duct tape a solution.

The other improvement would be more on the software side of things in terms of understanding that patch management happens and vulnerabilities are security patched all the time. There should be more direct integration with Microsoft updates. Pretty much everyone uses Windows, and being able to easily identify that there's a patch pending, and maybe even be able to push it, would be awesome.

My direct experience with Auvik has been since August.

In terms of full stability, which also includes their response to security issues, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

The sky's the limit. There don't seem to be any actual limits on the number of collectors that you're able to deploy. We started out at 40, and we're at 63 right now. It scales easily and effortlessly. So, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

It's decent. It's a little difficult to get a hold of them sometimes, but, overall, it's not bad. Comparing it to the big three computer manufacturers, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, they fall in Dell's mid-tier level support. It's pretty decent.

Positive

We use multiple tools. We went for Auvik because of its dependability. We have to have a reliable report as to what's up and what's down. Ninja is great on a surface level, but it doesn't update live. It has a periodic updating process. You don't really know when it's going to update next. You would expect it to be live, but it's not. Having accurate, live information was the reason why we started with Auvik.

This isn't just a one-application show for us. We've got Auvik. We've got Ninja, and we've got several other tools that we use for monitoring to cover redundancy and any spillover situation. By far, Auvik is the cleanest. It's the most up-to-date. It's the most accurate. Ninja, for example, is a decent competitor against Auvik's platform. Ninja reports things, but the information is very clustered up and very hard to read and discern. Once you get used to it, you're okay, but on your first experience with Ninja, it's horrible. Auvik is very clean. It has that modern look and feel to it. Anybody who uses modern apps and web apps is going to be able to quickly and easily figure out his or her way through it.

The most important thing when comparing Auvik versus other competitors is that we have found Auvik to be the most reliable. It will report when things are out. It will report everything based on how we have it set up and defined. This reliability is very important. Ninja is great, and as a team, when we were using only Ninja, and we weren't utilizing Auvik at all, Ninja would report things, but it wouldn't always report that live, up-to-date view of what's going on. You might have alerts saying, "Oh, it's out." You're like, "No. No, we cleared that alert. Why is it still showing that?" There's no real easy way to discern how to clear the alerts if it just doesn't detect it automatically, whereas Auvik is always up to date. It's always communicating, and if it ever drops that communication, it immediately notifies you, which is awesome.

The alerts that are provided to us correspond and correlate directly to the SLAs that we are selling and promising to our clients. So, in the event of a full outage or whatever, it gives us the ability to quickly and easily identify that there is an outage at this site, and it's this device that is currently causing the problem, or we haven't had any communication for X amount of time to this IP address. We are then able to say, "Okay, this is a high priority because it's affecting outage, and it's affecting the service for our client," whereas, something like when disk-based utilization is 80% has a high priority, but it's not a major issue. Auvik allows us to quickly and easily prioritize types of incidents, for example, outage versus 80% storage. It allows us to clarify whether something is an incident or not.

I was not involved with the setup, but I was involved in the sourcing and options. That was me working with the company, before I actually worked with the company directly, and looking at all the different options that were out there. Auvik seems to be the one that made the most sense. In regards to the setup process, I can see that the general setup itself as an administrator is not difficult. It takes 15 to 30 minutes on average. You can add in some videos to watch if you want to figure out how to do something or whatever, and you're probably going to be up and running within about two hours.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It does that itself. It updates its own collectors. You have to just install the collector. Once that's installed, it'll update itself. Outside of that, it's a web or cloud tool. It's software as a service. So, they handle all the maintenance and things like that on the backend from there.

Being a cloud solution, the always-on communication between Auvik and its collectors gives you that real-time status, and it's amazing. With an on-prem solution, if something goes wrong with your equipment, that's going to cause issues. If you're doing it even in your own private spot or even public cloud or whatever, you're having to control that kind of infrastructure, environment, and things like that. It's one of those things that annoys people when they see that there's going to be an outage for a tool because of updates, maintenance, and things like that, but Auvik has been always on the spot making sure that we're aware, "Hey, heads up on this date at this time, maintenance on these machines is going to be happening. These are the things that will either function or non-function. These are things that are going to be changing and so on, so forth." I've also seen several instances where they responded to a security threat, and they did that really quickly. Our outage time on that from Auvik was measured in minutes. If we were doing that and hosting it ourselves, even though we have a decently-sized team, we don't have the time to do all that kind of work. Monitoring and maintaining all that is amazing with the whole cloud option.

It's hard to measure what it's providing. However, considering the cost that we are paying in regards to what we're getting out of it, it has easily paid for itself within the first few months just based on our current deployment environment. We have to have accurate information. We have to know when something is up and down, and if it's not, we break SLA, our service level agreement, with our clients. If we do that, we have to pay money to our clients because we broke contracts. One broken contract is going to cost us five grand, and this prevents us from losing that, so it's awesome.

There is a reduction in our mean time to resolution. When we were using just Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware that there was an issue until Ninja just had an update. Now, we're aware within the timeframe that we assigned, which is 15 minutes, that communication has been lost. We give it a couple of minutes to make sure that it's not just an internet blip or whatever, and then we're able to quickly attack it. With Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware until a customer calls us to say something is broken. It's time lost in regards to the fact that we should have been aware of it before the customer even had a chance to pick up the phone and do that.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about price, I would say that it's the cost of doing business. It's just the fact that it's going to cost something. The amount of money that you're spending on these tools is a fraction of what you would be paying for an individual to be doing the same thing live as a person. I believe that our bill is somewhere around the $600 range per month. We're monitoring about 63 machines. Most of them are servers. So, $10 to monitor it for an entire month is amazing. You couldn't get somebody in India for that cheap.

We definitely evaluated other options. We use Ninja in-house, so it was one of the first things that we originally evaluated. We also evaluated ConnectWise and a few others. It was not very difficult to pull up a list of the competitors and look at them all. We originally had decided on Ninja because it was something that most people knew about, but then we're like, "Yeah, it's great when it works, but it doesn't always work." That's when we started looking at the other options, and we landed on Auvik.

It's a newer company on the horizon. They're still developing features. You can tell that. So, if a feature that you are wanting isn't available, give it time. It'll probably come.

It takes a little bit of time to get used to. When I first started, back in August of this year, I was getting my feet wet with Auvik as a tool. I had heard of it, but I never really personally used it and experienced it. I've been in my IT field for well over 16 years, so it's not like I'm not capable of understanding how to use something. One of the things that come into play is understanding that the default view that you see is like a zoomed-out version. Being able to traverse that, being able to go back and forward, and understanding where you're at in the tree takes a little bit of time to get used to and follow.

On top of that, there's the reporting functionality below it, where it's reporting alerts and things like that. At first glance, you're like, "Oh, everything's fine. There are no alerts," but then you realize that you are only looking at the last 15 minutes or the last three hours or whatever. You need to understand that there's that little date field midway on the right side and of purple color that you choose to select the date range that you're looking at. It will automatically redraw and redo things based on the selected range, and you can drill down into whatever system you're connected to, which is really cool.

We haven't experienced much automation so far. Right now, we're using it just as a reporting tool, but it's something that we're looking at doing. Outside of that, it's just reporting and doing the network discovery and watching for outages and any types of alerts. The process of doing that is kind of pseudo automation just in the fact that that's what Auvik sells as their core option or whatever. As a reporting tool, it's great, but so far, we haven't really dug into many of the integrations or functionalities past that.

It hasn't helped our team focus on high-value tasks while delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because, in our environment, we're all equal peers. We all have our own specialties, per se, such as networking versus storage or VMware versus Hyper-V, but, in general, we're all of the equal stances.

As a solution for monitoring and things like that, it's awesome, and I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We use Auvik to monitor net flow within our primary core switch and firewall. We look at the health and traffic flow alerts from our wireless access points or switches.

We don't use any of the automation features. Our company uses Auvik strictly for managing alerts. Auvik acts as a dashboard to give us oversight and a sense of the overall network health. We don't do a lot of troubleshooting within Auvik. It's more of a documentation and dashboard tool that lets me see all the problems and drill down.

We only have one location where we're using Auvik, but we're expanding to a second location under construction and being rebuilt. We'll eventually have two more locations. We want to monitor multiple sites and how they interact because we use SD-WAN between the sites.

We previously had multiple solutions, and implementing Auvik has saved me a lot of time because I'm solely responsible for the infrastructure. I probably save an hour or two daily on my morning run-throughs, so it has saved the company the equivalent of a part-time employee each month. 

In addition to saving time, we get better traffic insights. We can look at the entire inventory from a networking standpoint. It lets us see all our pieces and what's online, like a network topography. If somebody submits a ticket about internet issues in one of the areas, I can check that area to see how many other things are affected. It makes troubleshooting smoother. You can more effectively triage a problem because you have more information in front of you.

Auvik keeps our device inventories updated. We pair it with our asset management platform to double-check if things are discovered that haven't been asset-tagged. We want to see if the things that are live on the network match what we have in our asset management platform.

Auvik also helps me delegate. I can see alerts on the endpoints that are not necessarily licensed, but it gives us traffic insights. I can message the person at the help desk, "Hey, I noticed we're having Wi-Fi issues in this area. Can you check the staff computers on Ninja and see if anybody is having any issues?" They can go in remotely and communicate with the staff to see if they have noticeable issues. Is it an advisory thing we're seeing or something deeper that must be solved on the network side? Maybe it's on the endpoint side?

Keeping our devices updated helps me take the pulse of each device. We use a remote management platform like an MDM, but then we also use ScalePad as a cost and inventory platform. Auvik tells us if all these things are up and running. There are three of us on the team, and each tracks inventory differently. Whenever we do annual inventory, we pull MAC addresses and devices to see what's in use and the usage rate. It helps a lot at the end of the year. Inventory takes an hour instead of a week.

Auvik helps us get ahead of the curve, so we can see many potential issues before they become problems. We'll get alerts for particular items before getting a ticket. In those cases, we can say, "I noticed you've been having some issues with Wi-Fi and sporadic connectivity. Is your computer okay? Are you having issues?" 

It depends on the person, but most people don't like to complain and don't want to go into the trouble of sending in a ticket or anything like that. When you can get ahead of that and reach out to them, it's a great value.

I like Auvik's mapping. Your home dashboard has a map view where you can see potential issues on the endpoints. If an AP or switch has a problem, you can drill down into those to see how it's affecting the endpoints.

The monitoring and management features are straightforward. Getting everything configured is a little tricky, but it's easy once everything is set up. The management is highly intuitive. It has tons of little tools you can use for your hardware. You can monitor network traffic, device health, and lifecycle management within an easy-to-use dashboard.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform that covers everything. We are considering adding our primary servers to get utilization stats and different telemetry from our primary hosts for our on-site VMs. Having all the features on a single platform is crucial. We use many services and platforms, and it's convenient to log into one dashboard and see everything from a bird's eye view.

It's super easy to use. Everything is easily mapped out. If you've navigated any website, it should all be intuitive. It's easy to lift a pane and see all the general areas. As you click into each site, you can drill down into each area you want to see.

People who don't dive as deep into the infrastructure as I do can go onto the site to see the dashboard and get a sense of the network's overall health. I don't need to push out reports and share alerts constantly. I'm the only one getting those, and the other team members can see from a bird's eye view whenever they're looking into things or trying to troubleshoot.

I would like a Power BI-style dashboard that you could show to a non-technical person with metrics like the number of devices accessing wireless, the amount of internet, total issues resolved each month, etc. 

Those kinds of features would be nice, but that's more of a feature for executives. Many platforms are adding these features because they understand in-house IT staff need to deliver those reports to management.

We used Auvik with our MSP for a time. It was an account through somebody else. This month, we started using it as the primary account. In total, we've been using it for a year and a half.

We haven't had any issues. I've been able to load the website from any location without any lag or delays.

One reason we chose Auvik was its ability to scale for multiple locations. It's effortless to scale by adding different locations. We have it at our headquarters and plan to add our Central Austin location, then go from there. Within the organization, it's easy to build out and add.

We used Meraki's built-in monitoring platform because we have a full Meraki stack. We used the topography and alert systems there, but it lacked many features because you're only seeing the network side. You don't see any of the devices. You could see some insights, but Auvik provides much more clarity.

I like Auvik's secure cloud-based solution and the ability to check the dashboard no matter where I am. If I'm remote and looking at multiple sites, I don't have to worry about VPN connections. I don't need to worry about opening the ports. It's huge for us to see everything from multiple sites.

Setting up Auvik was straightforward, but sometimes you forget the passwords when setting up SNMP or Syslog. We had to go back and look for passwords, but that wasn't Auvik's problem. 

It was simple to deploy Auvik right out of the box. All we needed to do was get our SNMP credentials and input the subnets I wanted to scan. I deployed it by myself, and it took less than one day. I probably spent about four hours on it.

After deployment, Auvik hasn't required any maintenance. The only thing that I've had to do is change the password for an SNMP credential if I got it wrong, but that's about it.

We saw immediate value from Auvik. I think it's brand and device agnostic, which is incredible. The time to value was almost instant because we could see everything. We didn't have to go onto a Netgear portal, a Meraki portal, Azure AD, Intune, RMM, etc. We can see everything on one dashboard. The time to value was the time it took to implement: less than a day.

Auvik is much simpler to set up and maintain than my previous solution. It's night and day. Dealing with multiple platforms and solutions was unwieldy. Time is money. Having everything combined is a value-add and saves a lot of money. We no longer need to outsource this and have somebody monitor it. Bringing all the monitoring in-house saves us $2,000 a month, easily on top of all the other support hours we've saved.

Auvik's pricing is spot-on. It's one of the better values I've seen. 

I tried Netskope and SolarWinds, but they were both somewhat clunky. At times, things can get over-engineered. It's like a lousy buffet where all the food is mixed in. That's what I feel with some platforms.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you're thinking about implementing Auvik, I recommend watching videos online before deployment. Watch the videos for ideas and attend demos so you can ask questions ahead of time. 

We deployed so easily because all the questions were answered before we started. We did our research and watched videos when we were checking out Auvik. Auvik was at the top of our list, but we looked at other solutions and didn't find anything that came close. 

We are an MSP that monitors various customers' infrastructure, including firewalls and switches. We use Auvik for monitoring and creating network diagrams. Our environment consists of a data center with VPNs for each site we monitor and manage. 

From the data center, we have a probe where we can access every device we manage. We authenticate in the cloud and access the monitoring on-prem.

The network visualization Auvik provides is critical. The only clue we get as an MSP is, "My internet is not working." Getting alerts that separate all these services and companies helps us pinpoint the correct location of the issue and saves time. That increases customer satisfaction because we can resolve their issues quicker.

Auvik saves lots of time. The network mapping and diagrams make it easier to do inventories and check the lifecycle of devices. You have to spend time configuring things the way you like. It does an excellent job of monitoring, but I think it takes more time to tailor to your needs than other monitoring systems.

Auvik's auto-detection feature is something I haven't seen in other monitoring systems. We can keep track of our internal device tables to map the devices on the network. The diagram saves us a lot of time. Usually, our new customers don't provide much information about their networks, so we need to spend a lot of time logging into every single device, going into the CDP and LLDP, making nodes, building diagrams, and adding more information. Auvik does it instantaneously.

When we can recognize what devices are connected in the table, we can easily find out, for example, what networks are passed through the devices, which is also very useful. Otherwise, we would need to download the configuration and start building our database of networks. It provides a simple way to look at many devices and subnets.

I've been finding some features difficult. It might be because I'm used to PRTG, and Auvik works differently. When it comes to monitoring a simple IP address, Auvik makes it a bit harder and more complex because you have to create a service inside the site. It's not just creating a sensor and having it ping the device. You need to go to the site and create the service. 

The service must be created from either the device or the ping cloud. When you create many services because you need to ping or monitor several IPs, it can be challenging to find all the services because you have to go into the services. Once you are in the services, you must search for the main item. Inside the main item, you see the services. It's a little bit harder to work with.

With PRTG, you open the main website, and all the sensors are on the main screen. It's more intuitive. Auvik's technology is better. The design and functionality are more practical, but it's more expensive as well. But I think it's easier to use PRTG without any training because it's more intuitive. Auvik is not that intuitive. I had to open several cases to figure out how to create a ping sensor. Sometimes, you can't modify them as you like. You have to create it this way, and there are no options.

I don't think you can modify the names of the services. After discovery, you must create it repeatedly because you can't modify the conventional names. For example, if you're looking for all the sensors from this specific ISP, we can name the sensors by site, ISP, and IP address. It's easier to manage because I can ask it to give me all the IPs from Comcast. It's not one site. It's all over the place.

While Auvik provides everything in a single interface, I don't use it because it's slow. From Auvik, I can SSH or HTTP a device, but I'd rather use Putty or mRemote because I'm old school. I open mRemote and have all the devices on one site. From Auvik, I have to open the platform, authenticate it, search for the site, and search for the option. It takes more clicks, and if you're doing it every day for several devices per day, I would rather use mRemote to connect to the devices remotely.

Network visualization can also be complex. If the network follows the rules, it makes a good diagram. However, an ISP might sometimes be connected to a switch connected to three other switches in a row, like a daisy chain. For some reason, that's where the provider connects at the last mile. In those cases, Auvik makes fancy diagrams that are not very intuitive. Auvik makes excellent diagrams if you have everything structured with the firewall, core switch, distribution switches, and access switches. We don't use the device inventory feature. Instead, we rely on an Excel sheet. We can't add every device to Auvik because it is costly.

I have been using Auvik for a little more than two years.

It is highly stable.

Auvik's scalability is excellent.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. I've contacted them a few times. You can reach support quickly through chat. Maybe the chat doesn't have much access to the device, but it would be nice if I opened the chat from my session and they already had my information and configuration. Maybe they don't do it for privacy, but that would save some time.

Positive

I previously used PRTG but switched to Auvik when I joined this company. I don't know why this company uses Auvik. It could be because Auvik has more design. It has more features running, and they are built-in, so you only need to figure out how to configure it. Once you post the credentials necessary to get information about a server via WMI or SNMP, gaining more insight from the devices is very useful. 

I haven't seen WMI on other monitoring systems. I might not search for it, but I know Auvik does it. We haven't used it, and I believe it doesn't charge for the servers or Windows machines. If you want to monitor everything, like computers and network devices, Auvik might be a better deal in terms of features and pricing. I'm monitoring every computer and network, which might require many sensors. I understand that Auvik will monitor the Windows devices for free, if I'm not mistaken.

Auvik saves a lot of time for network discovery and device inventory by getting the information from the devices for networking.

I'm not on the procurement side, but I understand that the license is based on devices, not sensors. If you have 10 switches and one firewall, you count per device. You'll have 100 devices if there are 10 sites with the same setup. I think it's much more expensive to monitor 100 sensors in PRTG. 

The pricing is monthly per device. Some other monitoring systems charge an annual license, giving you a set number of sensors, like 1,000  or 2,500. This is what I've been seeing, but I'm not the one who purchased the solution. 

If someone is concerned about price, maybe Auvik is not the right solution. If they're genuinely worried about the cost, it might be better to use an open-source or free network monitoring solution. If they want to invest in something, maybe the second step would be something like PRTG. Companies with a lot of resources might try SolarWinds. 

I wasn't involved in the decision-making for Auvik. I believe it was more of a management decision than a technical decision. For managers, Auvik is an attractive solution. It might be less attractive from a technical point of view, but it looks fine to them. It has a fresh design, great graphs, excellent website design, and nice integration features. Maybe it looks better than other options from a sales perspective.

I rate Auvik seven out of 10.

We're an MSP, and we use it to manage our customers' networks.

The industries of our customers vary. They are from healthcare, manufacturing, finance, education, etc. It's mainly used to monitor switches, firewalls, ISP connections, and Wi-Fi, such as controllers, etc. It does do some additional monitoring on workstations and servers, but we don't rely on it for that. It's just not what their bread and butter is. So, even though it does that, we don't really focus on that.

We have an MSP portal for accessing all of the different customers. Auvik has an integration with ConnectWise which we never used. We just log in directly to the Auvik portal whenever we need something with Auvik, but they do offer an integration with ConnectWise that we don't take much advantage of.

Switching to Auvik has helped with two main parts. One of them is with time, but we also had difficulty accomplishing what we're now able to accomplish with Auvik. We had several applications that have been replaced by Auvik and several different panes of glass that are all now just in one place. Previously, sometimes, one of those panes of glass had an issue that we didn't find out about until we realized that we missed an alert that should have alerted us. With Auvik, there's the ease of deployment, the reliability, and the consolidation of everything together. That has been huge. It has saved hundreds of hours over six years.

It provides clear visibility into our customers' networks and reliability. I can't stress this enough, but reliability is so key for an MSP. If you're in-house, you have a lot of eyes and involvement in all the different systems, but when you're an MSP, there are many times when you're not going to touch or look at a system unless there's an issue. It may go months like that. For example, we had a switch that died at a customer. I had a level-one tech take down a replacement switch. I logged into Auvik, pulled the configs that were running on the machine, and sent them over to him. He terminaled into the new switch, pasted in the full config, and the customer was back up and running. My tech was on-site for about an hour or less, which included taking out the old switch, moving everything over to the new switch, and programming the new switch. That's incredible. We saved our customer's downtime. We saved ourselves working time on this issue. It was also easy. It was a breeze.

Planning new projects is a breeze now because we have one place we go to. We see all the current network configs. If we're doing a switch upgrade, we see every port that's used on the switch. We see exactly which VLANs are assigned on each port. We see all the configs very easily on all different switches. We can filter on the network map by device type. If there's an issue where one machine is not connecting, we can easily trace which switch it's plugged into. We can trace which uplink it's supposed to go to. We can trace it all the way back to the data center, and very easily, we can track down where the issue is. I rave about Auvik.

It has absolutely helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. We had to install several different platforms and configure several different platforms for each customer. Now, it's one software that we have to install. We do some basic configuration and enter unique credentials. We just configure it once, and it applies to every single customer. It has significantly helped in that regard.

We're not a global company. We're just a national company, but it has helped with the visibility into every one of our customers' networks. It's a total game-changer. It was something that was a significant struggle, which we had ironed out. We had a system that was functional, but it wasn't the best system in place. Auvik has been a game-changer.

Its automation had an effect on our IT team’s availability. They're not as busy with it. They don't need to check up on it as much. When there is an alert, it's very quick and easy to verify, remediate, and check if it is a false positive. We get to know:

• What exactly was the issue?
• Do we have a real issue on our hands?
• What are we going to do about it?
• What's the plan of action?

It has cut our time dealing with a network issue. Now, we probably spend between 20% to 30% of our time, or even less than that, dealing with any network issues. Similarly, it has cut the time by 20% to 30% when it comes to checking on the alerts to see what's going on. Previously, we would've spent a lot more time on that, but now, it's so much easier to remediate an issue that we spend 20% less time on it. Something that would've taken a whole day now literally takes an hour and a half. The whole thing is remediated.

We've been able to significantly cut down on the amount of network expertise required because we don't need every level-two tech to be able to understand the networks, configure the tools, and troubleshoot if something didn't quite work. We cut that down significantly. We just have a couple of people who are network experts, and they are able to handle the full load of what's going on because of the access and the visibility that they get.

It helps us to keep track of the devices that each customer has. There is an incredible export feature using which you can export all the information into a spreadsheet. It does a very nice job on that.

The network map is fantastic. The backup of configs is also valuable. It does SSH into each network device and retains a copy of the configs on the machines as well as the change logs. So, when something suddenly stops, you can compare the configs to see what happened. You can do a side-by-side comparison of the configs to see exactly what changed. That's fantastic. The alerting is great. We get email alerts from them. Those are my favorite features.

It's incredibly easy considering the power and the capabilities that it has. For a tool that can do this much, it's crazy how easy it's to set up and manage. There are some very powerful tools out there, but they also take a lot of configuration, tweaking, and setup. Auvik is quick. It's a breeze. I can have level-one techs setting up a lot of things. I can script out the deployments, and it's done with a few clicks. We can get it up and running, go into the customer's tenant, and just have whoever's setting up the different devices enter the credentials into the portal, and it runs. It's great. This is one of the best MSP tools that I've used. When I factor in the ease of use, the power and capabilities that it has, and just how useful it is, it wouldn't be an exaggeration at all to say this is the best overall MSP tool that I've used. Its ease of use is critical. One of the biggest things with running an MSP team is to make sure that your team can easily use the tool without needing to have a ton of training. That's what MSPs are all about. We can occasionally have a complex tool, but then there's going to be a limited number of people who are familiar with it, which is going to limit our ability to manage it. It's huge for an MSP to be able to have a tool that a tech can use with minimal training.

I didn't find the UI, especially for the network maps, to be so intuitive. Navigating the network map was not so intuitive. It has been awesome for visualizing the network mapping/topology, but it took me a little bit of time to get a hang of how to use their network filter interface. It's not complex. It's just a user interface issue where you realize, "Oh, okay. That's where that button is." It took me a little bit of time to get the hang of that, but that was years ago. It's not complicated. It's just that I wasn't expecting a couple of UI items to be there, but once I realized where they were, it worked great. So, once you know where what you're looking for is, it's just amazing. It's user-friendly. It doesn't have a steep learning curve. Its learning curve is similar to or smaller than any new software that you're adopting. There is a little bit of a learning curve, not super steep. 

We use a lot of Aruba networking products. I know that over the year and a half or two years, they've significantly improved their integration with Aruba products. They can just improve it a little bit more. 

For the last year and a half or so, I've had other people doing a lot of R&D. So, I know that they've come up with a lot of improvements. I felt that for a while, a lot of the improvements weren't things that we cared about. It was good to see that the company is continually trying to grow, expand, and improve its product, but we didn't really feel a lot of improvement. 

We have a few other networking tools. Some of them are specifically for managing Wi-Fi. They have some great features where they give specific recommendations based on the network traffic they're seeing and based on other customers that have had similar issues, or even just by looking at your own data that they're gathering. They give AI-based recommendations on how to improve the network. Auvik could have something like that. It gives us excellent visibility into the network, but if there is a way to include some remediation tips that are digestible by level-one and level-two techs, that would be great. That would be a huge benefit because we still need our level-three network engineers to look into any real network issue. A lot of times, it does feel like this is something that could have been understood by an AI. It could have been an alert such as:

• There's a network loop here.
• We are detecting this device has a mismatched VLAN or something like that. Do you want to look into this?
• Can you confirm that this is the appropriate config, or should it be changed? 

Some sort of remediation-based focus would be awesome. They could just expand the feature set to things that would help us further. These are the things that we would care about.

I have been using Auvik for about six years.

It has been great. I have zero complaints about it. They notify you if there are upgrades that are taking place. The notification is very good. It has been very smooth and very good.

It has been so easy. Once we have the software configured, it's more or less copy-paste for every additional customer that we add. Of course, there are some things, such as credentials, that are unique to each environment, but that's it.

The number of end users that are affected by Auvik could be up to 7,000.

Their support is very good. They also have pretty good documentation. They're easily available by chat and pretty knowledgeable. Every time I've had to reach out to them, it was a pretty smooth experience. I hope it stays that way. I feel that so many companies start off like that, but then a couple of years later, you can barely get through to anyone. It has been great so far, and I hope it stays that way. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. I have no complaints at all. 

Positive

We previously used different solutions, but they weren't direct competitors to this. It was more like we had to cobble things together and through ConnectWise or some other tool, set up our own ping service that would run and then alert us if it doesn't check in for X amount of time to see if the network is down. We had a different solution that would take backups of the configs, but it wasn't a live solution. It wasn't that we had a direct network monitoring competitor that we used. We had to use several other solutions out there to make up for all the different functionalities that Auvik now provides.

It was straightforward. It did take some time, as you would expect for a tool with such power and capabilities. It took some time, like every such tool would take, but overall, it was probably less than what you would expect considering what the capabilities are. So, it was straightforward and simple. It wasn't complicated. It didn't take a lot. You spend an hour on the phone with them. They'll walk you through all the different places where you'll configure everything. If you compare it to ConnectWise's RMM, ConnectWise's RMM is probably five times or even more complicated than this. You need an expert for that, whereas you don't need to hire an expert to handle Auvik. You can handle it all on your own.

We implemented it on our own. We had just one person for deployment. It started to be implemented several months before I took over, and there was just one person. When he left, I took over the full management and handling of the configuration of the tool. Since then, I've delegated it to another person, and he just handles it himself. He checks with me occasionally if there's something he is unsure about, but that's been almost nonexistent. One person should be enough to configure it for a bunch of places.

In terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight. It rarely needs tweaking.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. We have also seen a significant reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). It's one of my favorite tools. When I go to trade shows and talk to people, I feel that it's just the easiest sell because it's so easy. There's no, "Oh, well, you have to choose which features you want, and we like this." I literally have so little to quibble about with this.

It was worth every penny that we paid for it. It's not necessarily the cheapest. I don't know what its current price is. I haven't been involved in the pricing part of it for a couple of years. I know that a couple of years ago, it was a bit pricey, but it saved us many times over the cost that we were paying for it.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that I understand the initial concern, but just look into it and do the math on how much money this can save you. It's a drop in the bucket.

I wasn't the one who researched it originally. The director of IT started implementing Auvik about six months before he left, and then I took over. I did look into a bunch of other ones because I always keep an eye on the market and what the vendors are offering. Occasionally, we have to change our solutions. So, we're always looking to see what fits our needs the best. In six years, I haven't found anything that has made me seriously think twice about swapping it out for Auvik.

To someone who is just starting out with Auvik, I would advise having a plan of what you want to accomplish with Auvik so that you can configure it properly right off the bat. You should know what you want to accomplish, what type of alerts you want, and what type of things you care about. It'll make your life so much easier because you can then just go and configure it very easily, instead of trying to figure out what you're trying to do while configuring it, which was some of what we did. We didn't quite know what it was capable of, how reliable it was, and how much we wanted to move the functionality over to Auvik versus using the current system. Once we did get past that point of having a clear idea of what we wanted from Auvik, everything was a breeze.

It has been such a game-changer in our network management. I can go on and on. It's one of the most awesome, incredible tools that I recommend to everybody. I have not seen any other competitor tool that even comes close to what they do. To me, it's just a no-brainer. Especially if you're an MSP, or if you have a complex network to manage, just get Auvik. It's going to make your life so much easier.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It's one of my favorite MSP tools to use and talk about. It's incredible.

We use Auvik mainly to monitor switches and firewalls but also use it to monitor VMware. We also utilize the extra monitoring that Auvik provides for desktops.

Auvik gives us better insight into devices and helps us troubleshoot better because we can compare configurations. Auvik also gives us better and faster alerts on devices. If a client has a switch that's down, we tend to be able to find out and react to it before the client has to reach out to us, which is always a great benefit.

When internet connections are down, we can find out quickly, especially after hours or over the weekend, and can make sure that everything is working before the staff come back in to work for the day. We can make sure that everything is back up and running. The number of alerts and the granularity of the alerts mean that we can pinpoint on a particular switch the specific port that is causing the issue.

The other great aspect that has come in handy a few times for us is traffic monitoring. We can see if someone's internet connection is running slowly and see exactly where the traffic is going. We can zero in on what the traffic is, which user is using the traffic, and what switch it's going through. The information that Auvik gives us helps us troubleshoot, which is a lot of what we do. Auvik has helped us make sure that the company continues to run efficiently.

The most valuable feature is that it will back up the configuration and it will keep multiple copies of it. If a change is made to the configuration by someone else in my company, for example, and something goes wrong, I can bring up the previous configuration and the current configuration, and it will show me exactly what's different. It greatly reduces the time it would take to troubleshoot because I can pinpoint exactly what was done. I can then either change whatever it may have been or roll back the change.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions are easy to use. For certain devices, switches, or routers, you have to make sure that SNMP monitoring is enabled on the device. Once it's enabled, Auvik is extremely simple to use. I've worked with other monitoring software in the past, and it has taken weeks to configure all of the alerts and get everything monitoring the way we want it to. With Auvik, once the device is capable of pushing the logs, it's simple. Auvik also has many out-of-the-box notifications that are pre-built and that automatically monitor. Setting up a switch or a router is simple and quick.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform and two different ways to install it. If you have VMware, you can put an appliance right into your VMware for monitoring. If you have a Windows server, you can install the agent, and it crawls the network and finds everything easily. Having a single integrated platform is important for our organization because we don't want to have 10 different programs or applications and have to go through each one to differentiate which one is using what and where. We want to be able to have one central location where we can find everything we need.

Before we switched to Auvik, we used three or four different applications to monitor different functions. Some were designed to monitor VMware, some were for desktops, and some were for switches and firewalls. Using multiple products was a pain, and none of them actually had as many features as Auvik does now. We have saved quite a bit of time by switching to Auvik. We have central alerts, and we have functions pre-built now that we truly understand what it takes to get a new client configured. We just added a client in the past few weeks, and all we had to do was throw the agent on a machine, let it figure everything out, and put in the passwords for the devices into Auvik. That was it, and Auvik took care of everything else. It definitely saves a lot of time, especially in terms of the configuration of the monitoring.

We can visualize the network mapping/topology of our organization with Auvik. It's really nice that it breaks it all out. When we have clients that have 40 or 50 switches across multiple buildings, the map will be very large. In these cases, it's very difficult to zero in on the map; however, we will still be able to pinpoint which devices are connected to which switch. If a particular switch is down or having issues, we'll know exactly which segment of the company is going to be affected by that. We'll know if there are network loops because certain things are interconnected.

The ability to not have to try to manually figure out where everything is and just be able to pull up a map and identify a switch that is connected to it is great. It makes creating a network map for new clients much simpler. If we go into a new client, we can run Auvik for 24 hours, and then it will bring up all the switches and all the devices connected to the switches. It will show where the firewall is as well. It has definitely taken away the time spent creating the network maps, which were never one of my favorite things to create in the first place.

Auvik helps keep device inventories up to date for us, especially with regard to switches, routers, and firewalls. Even if we're the ones who put one of these in, we don't necessarily have to go write down the serial number. We can get it configured, put it in, and then go back into Auvik to make sure that it's being picked up and monitored. We can also check whether we have all the information right there for us so that we can get everything right out of Auvik. If the switch gets replaced and it goes directly to the client, we don't necessarily need to see the switch because we know we can pull out everything we need right from Auvik to update our inventory of the devices for that particular client.

Having a stronger inventory and the flexibility to more easily find particular aspects allows us to delegate certain low-level tasks to junior staff. Because we can pinpoint exactly where particular devices are easily and quickly, we are able to delegate more high-value tasks such as important firmware updates so that patches are done as quickly as possible. It makes it much simpler because we know exactly which clients need the update. We can use Auvik from the portal to remote directly into that device to apply the firmware that we need.

Having Auvik keep our device inventories up-to-date takes away the need to have someone dedicated to recording that information or keeping the information up-to-date. We can just log into Auvik and get it. It's much faster, and we're not wasting time on doing something that, although is very important, takes away from us having the ability to do other much more important tasks.

The time-to-value is worth every penny. The speed at which Auvik alerts us when there are problems with switches or firewalls, or when switches or a segment of a network is down is worth it in and of itself. Then, you have the added benefits of VMware monitoring at no additional cost, configuration backup, and log storage. The cost of Auvik for the amount of time that can be saved and the ability to look good to a client because you're on top of everything is well worth it. The amount of time that Auvik has saved us is certainly worth its cost.

We have definitely seen a reduction in mean time to resolution. Auvik is very quick to alert us and give us the information we need based on the client and the switch. We can log into the Auvik website and get more information so that we can be more on top of things. There have been several times when we've had a switch go down on the client in the middle of the day, and we have been able to reach out to them to let them know that the switch is down and that we're working on it before they even realize that the switch is down. It allows us to get to a problem much faster and also helps us to look better to our clients. Prior to Auvik, if there was a problem we typically found out when the client reached out to us. The client typically would find out within 10 to 15 minutes that there was a problem and then reach out to us. So, it would probably be 15 to 20 minutes before we would know about the issue. Whereas now, we know about an issue within three to five minutes, so we're on top of it. Auvik has cut down our time by 10 to 15 minutes.

The biggest area for improvement is the speed of the website because it's not something we host. Each of our clients hosts an agent that gathers the logs and pushes it up. The website can be slow to click around in or click through.

One other area for improvement is a central location to figure out what devices are not having their configuration backed up or are not monitoring a certain item. Right now, you have to click into each switch, router, or firewall and then just make sure that all of the boxes are checked for backup and monitoring. This, technically, should already be happening as soon as a switch is installed. However, for auditing reasons and to verify that no one missed anything, having one place where you can click and see a list of all the switches, what's missing, and which switches are not doing what in the realm of backup or monitoring would be great.

I've been using it for three years.

The stability is good. Auvik is hosted on AWS, so if AWS is having issues, then Auvik will as well. However, the few times that I have remembered them having issues, they have been resolved quickly. We've seen no ill effects from any of the times they've had issues.

It appears to scale very easily. We have small clients and large clients, and Auvik handles them all very well. It doesn't seem to have any issues with any changes we throw at it.

Auvik's technical support is great. We don't have to reach out to them very often because we don't have that many issues. However, the handful of times that we have reached out for assistance with configuration they've always been easy to work with and helpful.

Technical support staff even reach out to us periodically and ask if there's anything that they can help us with. Auvik's support has been top-notch, and I'd give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used a ManageEngine monitoring solution for monitoring switches. It may have come a long way by now, but the downside at the time was the sheer time it took to get it to monitor what you wanted it to. It did not have a configuration backup or the ability to check configurations and what was different between two particular configurations.

We had a big client we had just taken over who had quite a few switches and devices on the network, and we figured that it would be the perfect time to give Auvik a test run. We really liked the fact that Auvik would monitor, back up configurations, and map everything out.

We wanted the ability to retain logs for more than 15 days, and Auvik implemented the ability to push logs out to Azure or AWS for retention. You can get your own bucket of storage, connect it, and keep logs for as long as you like.

One of the reasons why I like Auvik's cloud-based solution is that it's easier to get alerts. If an on-premises network monitoring solution goes down, it's much harder to get alerts, whereas the cloud solution can tell you that it's down because it can't see it. You may get a false alert that it's down, but it's better to have a false alert and look into it than it is to figure out that it's a true alert. Alerting with a cloud solution can be a little bit better than that with an on-premises solution.

The other aspect that's nice is if hardware crashes on-premises because of a ransomware attack, for example, and I have my logs stored in a cloud solution such as Auvik, I can still get to those logs to figure out what happened or how the attacker got in and do some forensics work. Whereas if the logs were being stored on-premises, I would probably have lost them all.

The initial setup was very straightforward. You have to go into Auvik, create a customer, get the agent to install, pop the agent onto a machine, and give it credentials so that it can scan. You let it run for a little bit, then you add your SNMP credentials into Auvik so that it can log into the devices, and you're done.

You can do more configurations to make sure that the backup feature is turned on or enable traffic insights for each switch. These are just a couple of clicks on the mouse. The initial setup and onboarding of new clients have been simple and quick. We've never had any problems.

We implemented Auvik out of the box. The network mapping started to populate within 10 to 15 minutes after the collector was implemented. How long it may take to truly grab everything depends on the size of the network, but typically, within an hour you will have a pretty solid understanding of the network via the map. If you were on-site with a new client, you could install the agent with their approval and have a meeting about the different aspects of what you're going to do for them. By the time the meeting is finished, you would have a pretty strong understanding of the entire network and what devices are out there.

We deployed it with the help of someone from Auvik.

Given the types of alerts and the different aspects of Auvik, I think it's worth the cost that is associated with it. I don't think the cost is terribly high. The infrastructure is the core or the backbone of a business. If it goes down, then the business stops. You have to decide how much money you're going to lose if your network is down and you can't figure out why for hours or days versus what Auvik would cost you a month.

If you want to evaluate Auvik, give it a couple of days at the minimum. If you have any questions, reach out to their technical support. Ask them how to do things and how things work, or watch some videos on it. Auvik has a lot of functionality, but don't get overwhelmed. Look at each one separately, spend some time on each one, and just give it some time to sink in and see what it can do.

Overall, I would rate Auvik at ten on a scale from one to ten.

We have several different physical sites and we run our own network. Auvik has some exciting capabilities for aggregating Syslog from switches and having remote console administration across geographic locations. The solution puts a common off-wall in front of switch management but also makes it easy for us to go in and make changes.

We use the solution across multiple locations and departments.

We use Auvik where we have the most pain points because it's a charge per device brought online model. We use Auvik in a smaller proportion of our infrastructure, around 30% of our architecture.

Auvik provides a simple way to view the current configuration and to view the network monitoring status checks. Auvik allows me to work in a bigger team with a large number of different circumstances happening at once, and share a common source of truth and management platform. It is more of a teamwork tool and a work-from-different-location tool than anything else.

We get more benefits out of Auvik than other solutions depending on specific job roles in the team. The main value of Auvik is the reduction in communication gaps that makes it faster to respond to issues. Our incident response no longer relies on someone logging into a SolarWinds platform or getting a Syslog agent on our system to collect our logs. We no longer rely on someone having to configure a pipeline alert or the SMTP email relay working in order to get an email that wasn't checked. Auvik doesn't do anything that I can't get from a variety of other tools or modified solutions but it does it all in one website that works well.

In terms of instant response, we get alerted about issues faster and with fewer spam alerts. Previously, we didn't configure our alerts as well as we could have. When there is an issue, Auvik identifies it for us and that saves us time. We have proof of network performance, in any case. The ability to quickly run tests and show logging allows us to see if an issue is because of something on our network or from external causes beyond our control.

We purchase other companies or partner with them at different times and work with them in various ways which require us to onboard or allow people to access certain areas on our network and Auvik makes it easier to manage. The solution allows us to have a visual network representation and streamlined demo space of some network features, and we can let people play in a sandbox.

The solution reduces the amount of time we spend on onsite visits, eliminating the travel time and setup time for inspecting the network. Auvik allows us to manage the network remotely in a matter of seconds without the need to leave the building which correlates to more time for other tasks.

Auvik's UI design helps visualize the network mapping and topology of our organization because it provides a nice modern experience, in terms of usability and can be used with any modern browser. Unlike some other solutions with outdated interfaces, Auvik utilizes an appealing dashboard to show us our network and lets us drill down deep.

Our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally has been good to date using the solution, but we are not a large company and we have a limited number of sites.

The solution's ability to access our networks remotely has correlated with time for our IT teams to focus on other tasks. Our engineers can save over three hours of their day compared to having to deal with an issue on-site.

The remote console administration stands out as a valued feature. I haven't found another relatively easy and versatile product that is all-encompassing. 

Using Auvik's monitoring and management functions is easy because it is a web-based app. The charge models are based on the number of core network devices we have. We have virtual machines and various items that our charges are based on such as adding a switch or a firewall. We are not charged simply because we have a virtual machine running. We get more visibility into what we're running compared to other solutions. 

The solution's ease of use is the reason we bought it.

The solution can provide a single integrated platform depending on what we want the platform to do. Auvik provides more of an integrated teamwork network management platform than anything I've previously seen. The solution does nearly everything and it does it in a convenient, easy, and accessible way compared to my past experiences with other solutions. Auvik's user experience is very nice.

The solution's intuitiveness of the network visualization is strong and we don't need to spend much time to find it useful.

Auvik's ability to keep our device inventory up to date is a convenient feature.

Auvik can improve by increasing the tech file management capability.

In the past we had a Git server where we made changes to configurations, allowing us to push the changes, and depending on the system, we had the ability to convert the information down to a text file but if there was a problem, we could quickly revert it back. I would like the ability to version control Auvik configurations and potentially automate them by having a type of Gitflow system.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

The solution is fairly stable but at times can drop off, or we have collector issues, or there's various service-related downtime. Auvik has a status page where we can check for uptime issues.

I don't worry about the scalability of the solution because it is quite a broad, scalable, and modern platform. 

I previously used open-source solutions that were built at home. I don't know of another solution that is a strong competitive, multivendor, that plays in this space, which is why we ended up using Auvik.

Until July 2021, our organization had a SolarWinds contract, but when the global hack happened, we had to reevaluate what we were using for monitoring and management.

The initial setup was not complex. All we needed to install were collectors and we were able to start network mapping the same day. The deployment was handled by a small team. We have different offices and sites but it does not require a significant amount of time to implement Auvik and get it running on the equipment we need. We need someone that has the ability to use computers for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have found Auvik improves our ability to complete tasks more quickly and improve responses internally. We're not planning on canceling the solution. We find that Auvik is improving our ability to manage remote sites, and we like using the tool.

Auvik charges based on the number of network devices being used. The pricing is fair as long as we are getting use out of the solution.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We still use multiple applications, but Auvik has taken over a lot more of them and has also taken over areas that we just did not have applications to manage before. There is a nice network flow and analytics information. What we found the most interesting is, if we onboard or offboard a team member, our ability to manage switch configs, check in on issues quickly, and do some Syslog searches, can all be done in one place, behind one login, one permission set making it a lot easier to manage tasks on a daily basis.

I'm not sure how much of Auvik's automation capability we've really leveraged or how much the solution specifically has. We have some existing systems in place and we use Auvik more as a network monitoring and remote management tool. I don't believe the solution has fully supplanted some of our existing practices. We use Auvik as an additive layer that's super helpful in terms of incident response, client engagement, and making our lives easier.

Auvik provides discovery capabilities based on Mac addresses that can help keep device inventories up to date. We don't use the solution for device discovery and I am not sure how accurate it is. I find the solution very helpful in terms of getting visibility into what the network is doing and what's on it.

We selected Auvik based on a number of factors that made sense at the time including, their charge model which is based on network devices and COVID affecting our locations. We didn't go through a full vendor review process the same way that we usually would and looked for a number of competitors. We saw that Auvik was affordable and fulfilled a business need.

To anyone that is comparing network monitor solutions, but is concerned about pricing, I would advise the amount of time we saved with the solution was worth the money spent. 

I am a big open-source proponent. I've contributed to open-source solutions and used a lot of them. Most of the time open-source solutions are some of the best solutions that we can have. In some cases, there is a clear deficiency versus a commercial solution. Sometimes it's worth paying for a service, a product X because it saves the company money or it meets a compliance or insurance requirement. 

Business reasons can overrule other reasons. One business reason could be that we need a network monitoring, management, and remote administration capability platform so our engineers spend less time traveling between data centers to complete tasks and debug logging systems. Engineers are fairly expensive employees at the end of the day, between health insurance, salary, and vacation time. The business would be more profitable if those engineers were more efficient at their job. 

Auvik can benefit the organization through the reduction of staff required by minimizing the time it takes to complete each task or allowing those engineers to spend time on more useful tasks. Auvik is a helpful product that assists a company that is trying to remotely manage sites across different areas with a team. The solution adds an orchestration layer to that. Auvik adds an application on a modern platform for the management of the devices that we're controlling and makes it less taxing and easier for us to benefit from that.

Auvik's cloud-based solution is convenient compared to on-prem network monitoring solutions.

We sometimes perform trivial maintenance on Auvik for user management in the portal.

I recommend the solution to others. Auvik is a useful platform.