Auvik Reviews

I used to work at a managed service provider, and we needed a network topology mapping solution and discovered Auvik. So, we tried it out, and then we used Auvik until that MSP was bought out. I left the MSP world and became a network engineer at Greater Nevada Credit Union, where I'm now.

We pretty much use it for topology mapping. We use it for mapping out the network and then monitoring the availability of the network infrastructure devices. There is also alerting whenever there are problems. So, we basically use it for monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting. We also use it for configuration management and automated backup.

It is a managed solution, so they handle all of the platform upgrades and all that stuff. We have got whichever version they have got.

It alerts us whenever there are problems, such as a site is down, an individual device is offline, or there are performance issues. So, it provides alerting and assists in troubleshooting when there is not a site-wide or a network-wide issue.

When they started it, Auvik was intended to be an MSP-focused tool. So, you set up different networks in Auvik as if they are distinct entities or different companies. I've deployed Auvik such that it treats all of our different locations as different networks, even though everything is basically tied together in one big wide area network. The net effect here is that network discovery is so effective it discovers all of the same subnets over and over again across all different networks that I have configured in Auvik. It normally wouldn't be a problem in an MSP world because those networks are not connected to one another. It is kind of an annoyance for me, but it really just kind of highlights how effective it is. Its discovery mechanism is very effective. I haven't had too many scenarios where Auvik didn't discover a particular subnet. It mostly just boils down to whether or not we've configured the network correctly so that something isn't just like a hidden Easter egg. 

Prior to Auvik, we weren't tracking any kind of KPIs relative to the network, performance, uptime, etc. There wasn't even the ability to do that because there just wasn't a solution in place. Now that we've implemented this platform, it has given us the ability to do so after our IT organization reaches that maturity level. The ability is there, and the data is there, but we're not there yet. So, it has given us the ability to track those kinds of KPIs. Beyond that, given that we are a 100% Cisco network, it very simply tracks contract status, support status, and all that stuff. I can very easily run a report and confirm the software and the firmware version that all of the devices are running to make everything consistent and get all of our switches and routers on the standard software version. We're approaching that templatized network look. It is one of the things that I could have done manually. I could physically log in to every device and figure out what they're on and then go through the upgrade process. Now, it's a little bit more simplified because I can just run one report and see that everything is on different versions. I can then standardize the version across the board.

It automatically updates our network topology. There are certain things that we have to do as dictated by the NCUA. We are a credit union, and the NCUA is the federal regulatory body that oversees our operations. When we get audited every six months or so, the NCUA basically has a long list of things that they check. They'll say, "Are you performing configuration backups of your network devices?" I would say that we do, and they would ask me to show it to them. For that, all I got to do is bring up Auvik and say, "Here's the device. Our entire network is managed by this platform, and here is an example of a configuration backup for a particular switch. Here is every configuration that has changed since the platform was implemented." Directly above that pane in the browser window is the topology. One of the other things that they ask about is if we have network topology diagrams to which I say that we have but not in the traditional sense. Once upon a time, most folks just manually maintained Visio diagrams of how the network was physically and logically connected, but you just can't rely on those because of the network changes. In a network of this size, probably not a single day passes when I don't make a configuration change. The help desk folks also go and deploy a new workstation regularly, and Auvik automatically discovers those new devices and automatically updates the maps. So, it is a living document at that point, which makes it useful because it is always accurate. I don't have to manually go in and add a new device. 

It has decreased our meantime to resolution primarily because I'm notified of problems much quicker. Previously, if there was a problem, a user would call the help desk to look into it. If the help desk wasn't really sure about what's going on, they escalated it to the network guy. I then looked into it and said, "Oh, I see." Now, instead of that, I'm getting a notification from the tool at the same time a user notices a problem, and then I start looking into it. By the time the help desk hits me up, I'm like, "Yeah, this should be good now." So, in that capacity, it has definitely improved the meantime to resolution. It has probably cut our resolution times in half.

It helps us to put out fires before people/end users even know there is a problem. There have been some scenarios where it has alerted on things, and there was no perceived impact by the end-users. If there was a failed power supply in a switch that maybe had redundant power supplies, we would get a notification that one of those power supplies has died. We can then proactively replace that failed device before the spare tire blows out, and the network goes down.

We're a credit union, and we've got an online banking website, ATMs, ITMs, etc. We have another department that handles all of those member or customer-facing technologies. Previously, if there was a network outage somewhere, it used to be that they were basically unaware of it until they started getting reports that members are calling in and saying that the e-branch is down, and they can't log in to the e-branch. That team does not use Auvik, but I have included them in the outage alerting. So, they get an email when a branch goes down, or there are problems. They don't get notifications for high broadcast traffic, but when there are obvious problems, they get a notification. For example, when a site goes down, we know that the ITMs aren't going to be working, and they're going to get notified at some point by members, but Auvik would have already sent them an alert saying that the XYZ branch is down. So, they can already anticipate that there are going to be ITM issues because the whole site is offline.

It provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. These are just compulsory administrative tasks for the stuff you rarely need, but if you ever need it and you didn't have it, you're in a big problem. It does the automated backup, and it does it so reliably that I've never manually managed configuration. If I was doing that manually, it would probably take five minutes per device to do a configuration backup. Across a hundred devices, it would be 500 minutes a month. So, it saves me a fair amount of time. It also saves me needing to employ somebody to do a very repetitive task. This is what technology does. It replaces dumb functions so that humans can go and do things that are not so easily automated. The device configuration part also saves money, but the only reason that it saved money was that it was something that we weren't doing before Auvik. We were not spending money to backup configurations because we were not really backing up configurations. So, it didn't really replace anything. It just implemented something that needed to be done but wasn't being done.

It enabled us to consolidate or replace other tools. We got rid of the managed service provider and saved approximately 100K a year, and it replaced SolarWinds and Uptime. Uptime was another platform similar to Auvik, but it was nowhere near as feature-rich. We're paying around 17K a year for Auvik, and SolarWinds and Uptime combined were probably in the neighborhood of 25K a year. So, it has saved around 8K a year.

It is useful for configuration management and automated backup. It is one of my favorite features because it is low-hanging fruit, and it is easy to accomplish, but on a network where we've got infrastructure devices in hundreds, it is an arduous task to keep on top of. Auvik does it all automatically, so that's probably one of my favorites because it is important, and it just does it automatically. I don't even have to think about it.

It is incredibly easy to use. That was one of the things that helped motivate. We were basically told that we couldn't use SolarWinds anymore, and we had to adopt something new. I already knew Auvik, but considering that I'm the only network engineer here, the simplicity of the platform was important so that the rest of the IT team could use it to find information. It was important to have an interface that was intuitive and the information that was accessible and usable by folks who weren't networking nerds.

Given that you can deploy it so quickly and so easily, its time to value is very quick. I can start getting meaningful information out of it almost immediately.

Sometimes, we get requests for exporting a map of the network. I can export a map, but it exports it as a PDF, which is basically just like a drawing. There is no context. When you're looking at the map, you can hover over things and you can drill in devices and see all kinds of information, but when you export it to a PDF, it is just like a flat image. It is a picture of it, and if you don't know what you're looking at, it doesn't necessarily make any sense. This may be something that has already improved. The exportability piece was one thing that was kind of like a gripe, but it is not all that important. If NCUA wanted to see proof that we have network topology diagrams, I can just show them the tool. Worst case scenario, I can give them read-only access to log into our Auvik tenant, and then they can see for themselves all of that stuff.

Currently, with Auvik's support, I'm troubleshooting some of the information gathered on Cisco devices through SNMP V3. Auvik is not able to pull some of the important information that it uses to draw the map, which is kind of shocking because it is Auvik. So, it is their platform, and it is monitoring Cisco devices, which are obviously very prevalent in the world. Auvik is having a hard time gathering such important information over SNMP V3, which is a networking standard, and on super popular device brand and model. They're actively working with me on that piece. It seems that network device management using SNMP V3 could use a little tuning.

I probably started to use it in 2016 or 2017. 

It is very stable. There were occasions where I got a notification that Auvik failed to pull a device for its configuration information to see if there was a change, and then, it'll magically resolve itself after 15 or 20 minutes. So, there were some instances that made me wonder why that happened, but, generally, it has been very stable. I don't know if I've ever seen an Auvik outage.

It is super simple to scale. To add a site, we deploy all of the equipment. After the equipment is deployed, I deploy a collector at that new site, and we're off and running.

The only folks that use the platform are in the IT department, but we've also got another department in the technology wing of the organization. This department handles all of those member or customer-facing technologies, such as online banking website, ATMs, ITMs, etc. They do not use Auvik, but I have included them in the outage alerting. So, they get an email when a branch goes down or there are problems. The cybersecurity team also uses it a little bit, and we also have our systems engineers, who actually manage the server infrastructure. There are probably about 15 users across those different roles.

It is being used everywhere across the entire network. There is nowhere to really increase its usage. As things change, they may warrant increasing its usage. There are probably some opportunities to increase the use with TrafficInsights and things like that. 

Aside from the ticket that I'm working on right now, I didn't have to reach out to them too much. So, the jury is still out, and we'll see how they do on this. They haven't given up and are still looking into it. So, for now, I would give them a solid eight out of 10.

When I joined this organization, they didn't have much for monitoring the network, but they had already purchased SolarWinds licensing. When the SolarWinds breach happened, we got a kind of edict from the NCUA to discontinue any relationships that we might have with SolarWinds. So, I said, "Okay, not a problem. I know Auvik." We adopted Auvik, and we've been using Auvik since then.

Its initial setup was very easy. The configurations were already in place on our network devices to allow management over SNMP. All it took was to deploy the tool and then give it the necessary information to begin the network discovery. After that, it just started populating information. So, it was very easy.

Auvik doesn't use anything in terms of how it interacts with the network. It doesn't use any proprietary stuff that you really have to learn. It uses the same protocols that everything else uses. So, there wasn't any complicated platform-specific stuff that we needed to get in place to make it work. Deploying the tool is as simple as installing software or spinning up a virtual machine. It took us about a day. It was very quick.

Its setup was much quicker than other solutions because you don't have to set up the front-end. All you got to do is deploy little collectors. You don't have to set up the interface you interact with or set that server up. That's usually the part that is a real pain because you have to spin up your own servers, and you got to install the software and give it enough resources. The interface is clunky and slow, and you've got to tune the virtual machine. That's obviously applicable to any hosted service, but that was definitely a contributing factor to the speed and the ease of deploying it. It was like everything is there, and you just got to start plugging your information into it and let the collectors discover and plug it in for you.

In terms of the implementation strategy, with Auvik or network monitoring tools, we, sort of, have two different approaches. The first approach is that we can deploy it so that one collector or one group of collectors monitors the entire network, and we have one map that shows the entire network. Prior to working at GNCU, I was working at a managed service provider, and GNCU was one of our customers. I had done a lot of project work for GNCU, but they were not a managed customer. So, we didn't deploy our toolset on their network, and therefore, we didn't have any visibility. However, in order to do some of the project work that I was planning for them, I needed that kind of information. I needed topology, and I needed to know subnets and things like that. So, we temporarily deployed Auvik back then into GNCU's network. We just deployed the collector, and let it discover the entire network. We gave it about a day to go and do all that discovery and draw the whole map out. After that, I kind of realized it was clunky because the map was so big. It was detailing the network that spans around 30 different locations. 

Another approach is to break each site down into its own network instead of doing one big network map. This is the approach that we followed when we implemented it at GNCU back in December. In this approach, each site is its own customer, which made the map for each site much smaller. It also made it much easier to navigate and see the things that we wanted to do. So, in the end, this was the approach that we ended up using. It is nice that you have that option instead of having just one way.

In terms of maintenance, it is like a platform. We don't maintain anything there. The only thing that we do is that when we make changes to the network or deploy a new device, we need to go in and make sure that Auvik discovers the new device, and it is able to log in, make a backup of the configurations, and start pulling it over SNMP. The platform itself requires zero maintenance.

In terms of the impact of this level of maintenance on our operations as compared to other solutions I've used in the past, with SolarWinds, when a new version came out, we had set it in a way to kind of automate it to an extent. When an update was available, we would upload it manually, apply it, and make sure that everything was working. It wasn't overly arduous. There were patches, modest updates, and stuff like that. For full version upgrades, a lot of times, it was easier to just deploy a new server, install the new version, and then get it set up. We don't have to do that now. It is almost like a thing that you used to do back in the day before SaaS solutions.

We implemented it ourselves.

We have not done an ROI. I also cannot quantify exactly how much it has saved because I don't remember exactly what we were paying for SolarWinds, but it is similar to what we were paying for SolarWinds. When we were using SolarWinds, after we had got it deployed and configured the way that we wanted, we probably wouldn't have ever gone back to Auvik, despite me knowing it and liking Auvik. That's because we had already made the investment in that platform, but then the breach happened, and we had no choice. So, there wasn't a meaningful saving in switching from SolarWinds to Auvik. 

Prior to me coming on board, GNCU had kind of outsourced the network part to two different organizations. One of those organizations just did the monitoring and management piece. They were charging us about 100K a year for that managed service. By implementing Auvik, we basically duplicated what they were doing, which has a very measurable impact. I didn't have access to their platform, so I needed something that I could use to monitor and manage the network. So, by getting rid of that managed service provider, we saved approximately 100K a year.

Their licensing model is basically per managed device. You pay X amount per managed device, and managed devices are limited to switches, routers, firewalls, and wireless LAN controllers. So, the only things that we pay for are our switches, routers, firewalls, and wireless LAN controllers, but there are orders of magnitude more devices that Auvik manages that we don't pay for. It also manages servers, workstations, and phones. Auvik will gather KPIs from anything that is connected to the network if it can be managed via a standard like SNMP or WMI. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Auvik doesn't nickel-and-dime. SolarWinds nickel-and-dime you to death. Everything has a different license, and you needed that license for every device, no matter what it was, down to even the interface level. It was ridiculous. Auvik does it monthly. So, it is per device and per month with the option to pay annually at some percent savings, which is what we do. We pay annually right now. It is something like 17K dollars a year.

Auvik might have even been a little bit more expensive than SolarWinds, but that was only because we had not added some of the things that Auvik did to the SolarWinds licensing. So, eventually, the SolarWinds product probably would've been a little bit more expensive if it was like an apple to apple comparison in terms of features.

I had checked ThousandEyes. I had also checked Cisco DNA Center, which was more costly, and the network was just not there yet. Some of our devices don't support management via Cisco DNA Center. So, we were not there yet. Someday, I'd like to be able to get there, but for what we needed, Auvik was just the easiest answer.

I would advise others to check it out. It doesn't hurt. They give you a two-week free trial. You can kind of just say that you want to try this, and then, you try it. There is no haggling back and forth with sales. They give you access to the platform for two weeks. For us, I had done the trial just to get it implemented, and then, they extended the trial for us free of charge for another two weeks so that we could get all the approvals in place to adopt the platforms and start paying for it. They make it super easy, so try it out.

The automation of network mapping has enabled junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks, but it is not because of the tool. It is because of the proficiency level of our team. We don't have junior network staff. There is just me. Our help desk folks are our junior staff, and it is just not in their wheelhouse yet. It goes back to that organizational operational maturity. We've got like the help desk that helps the end-users, and then we've got the engineers who deploy and are kind of like that highest escalation point. It kind of goes from zero to 60. They check something out there, and the help desk will get a ticket saying that it must be a network thing. It just comes right over to me. I'll try to use those opportunities as a teaching opportunity to show, "Hey, log in to Auvik, and then you can see here that the device is online. We've got some other monitoring tools that we use as well for workstations in virtual infrastructure to see that it is not a network issue, and here's how you can dig through Auvik to see it." It increases the proficiency level of our staff. The tools kind of assist with that change and with them improving. A network engineer can tell the help desk guy until he is blue in the face about how things work, but when you have something to kind of visualize, you can look at metrics and performance indicators. It, kind of, helps in providing a little bit of context to the topics that I'm talking about, and then, they can, kind of, use those things. So, the proficiency definitely is improving, and the tool helps with that.

We have not used the TrafficInsights feature. We have a cybersecurity team, and they have a tool called Darktrace, which is TrafficInsights on steroids. It has got some AI or machine learning built into the platform, and it does some really gee-whiz stuff. Because of the presence of that tool, I haven't gone into configuring TrafficInsights yet. It is on my list of things to do because it is just convenient to have all of your data that you might want to access available in one window, as opposed to having to log into another device and learn how to use another device or another tool. So, eventually, I'll get around to that TrafficInsights so that the information is available.

If there is anything that Auvik has taught me, which is also one of my general rules of thumb, is that when something is not working as expected, it is not necessarily a problem related to that thing. For example, if it is a problem that I'm having with Auvik, usually it is not indicative of a problem with Auvik. Similarly, it is not necessarily a problem on the network that is impacting users. It tends to point to something not being configured correctly on the network. It kind of highlights our own mistakes.

For an advanced network operations center, Auvik is very easy to use and super easy to deploy. It is intuitive, and its features are very useful to an extent. When it comes to a more advanced network team, there are things that Auvik doesn't do. Doing those things would make it awesome, but they would just make the platform more complex and probably less easy to use. So, for the fundamentals, Auvik does a fantastic job. Once you go beyond the fundamentals, Auvik still does a pretty good job, but there are some things that I would not be surprised that the platform will never do. That's because it is not intended to be Cisco DNA Center. It is intended to be a broad platform that supports everything to a degree. 

For an unsophisticated or a very small network team, I would give it a nine out of 10 because of ease of use. A managed service provider is a good example because the folks who consume the product are not network specialists. They primarily used it for backup, mapping, KPIs, and assisting in troubleshooting. For mid-range organizations, it is a solid nine. For advanced networking teams, it is probably a five because it is not going to give you all the information that you want. It is not going to do all of the things that you might want it to do, but the things that it does, it does very well.

We are using it for monitoring and troubleshooting. It is cloud-based, but the collectors always have to be on-premise. We must be using its latest version.

It automatically updates your network topology, which has made any kind of troubleshooting or planning way more efficient. To make sure that everything is up for you, every 15 seconds, it checks for a device to be online and any network element to be up or down, and every minute, it checks for your other devices, such as your PCs or IP phones. It does a subnet scan every 600 seconds to see if thresholds are being pegged or have fallen off in certain levels. If you don't want to have so much ping traffic on your network, you can change that to whatever value you want. All that is customizable. It kind of becomes something you depend on when you're looking for a device. If I want to find out where a device is plugged in specifically, Auvik is the first place where I would go to check if I can see it there. Earlier, if I'm looking to see where a device is, I used to check my windows DHCP server and look for an odd or new IP address that had appeared. In Auvik, I can filter the map based on a device, subnet, or VLAN, or I can see all devices that are plugged into a specific switch, which is really convenient.

It has significantly decreased our mean time to resolution. In the past, sometimes, it took us a long time to come to the conclusion that this is the problem. When trying to go through the troubleshooting steps to know what the problem is, when Auvik has that information for me, troubleshooting is significantly quicker. I don't have to go through an entire department and look at their connections to see how they're impacted and then decide that everything they have in common is this switch. Auvik is able to tell me that this switch isn't online anymore. I can then say that we have a problem with a switch, and we're working on it to kind of calm folks down.

TrafficInsights dashboard is one of the first things that I log into every day in Auvik. Before going with Auvik, I tried a different solution for it, and that solution was just terrible in comparison. It only permitted five interfaces for traffic insights, and if you wanted more than five interfaces, it costed more money. It was just completely unreasonable. Auvik doesn't limit you on the number of interfaces for traffic insights. I get a better idea of the type of traffic on the network through Auvik than anywhere else. I can look at the type of traffic through my firewall monitoring, but I'd have to go a lot deeper into the protocols and ports that are being used just to see what's going on in the network.

With Auvik, if I look at traffic insights, I can get a good graph of how much traffic is happening at specific times a day. I can lay out the type of traffic and break it down based on the applications. I can then filter from there. If I'm seeing that we have a lot more web traffic or media streaming traffic, I can look a little bit deeper and see the exact applications, such as Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok. I can then see who is watching Netflix. It makes it a whole lot quicker than watching my firewall because I'd have to filter by a domain or IP address to come to the conclusion that someone is watching Netflix on the network. In Auvik, based on the filter, I can get all devices involved with that conversation to Netflix, which is a really nice feature. The other menus within TrafficInsights allow you to keep it all relative, so you're not resetting or recreating those filters. I can just filter based on Netflix and see who are the top users. I can see who is using Netflix and on which laptop they are using it.

The TrafficInsights feature helps in improving our overall network performance. It allows for me to look at a month's worth of time, and then I get an idea of what's the normal baseline. It helps me in getting a good baseline for expected backups because I can see when the backups are happening and how much traffic is related to backups. So, I can see when things are normal or abnormal. For example, when media streams are a little high, that's abnormal, so I will look into it a little bit deeper. It helps with this kind of stuff, and if there is any kind of impact on overall throughput for other users, I get to nip it in the bud right away, which is valuable. 

The out-of-the-box device configuration backups save time and money too. With Auvik, I can see the configurations even if I have them saved on the file server or something like that. If I got a protected share that has configuration backups, being able to deploy that configuration or even save that configuration as a text file from Auvik is a time-saver. I am not paying for the other product any longer just because Auvik handles that. Previously, I would have been paying for both. If Auvik couldn't do that, I'd have to pay for two products, so it saves money, but more importantly, it saves time. I don't have to spend so much time going switch by switch.

The best feature is the support access. Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom, you push it, and you get connected with a support agent. They can see your internet. They help you out, work with you, and answer your questions right there. I don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and try to explain anything, which is a great feature. I can get someone in less than a minute, which is really helpful.

It is very simple. It is very easy to learn how to navigate, and their knowledge base is a good resource. 

It is an SNMP-based platform. It can communicate with almost any device that you're trying to monitor, such as a switch or a router, through SNMP. If you're trying to monitor Windows machines, it uses WMI. It gives you a good layout of the sensors for a lot of devices. It can generate alerts based on if the fans are working, CPU is hot or highly utilized, or RAM is highly utilized.

The Syslog feature is also really valuable. I don't have to go into each individual box, so I have it all centralized. Everything is in one pane of glass. When I first started using Auvik, they didn't have the Syslog fully deployed. It was a beta. Now, it is fully deployed, and it is a great feature. Auvik really relies on SNMP in order to give you good information about a device, but our IP phones, for instance, don't support SNMP. With a phone pointed towards Auvik for the Syslog info, I can see the stats within Auvik, whereas before, I would have to go into the phone server and the phone to get an idea of what's happening with that phone. So, if someone is telling me that his phone keeps restarting or has bad call quality, I can go to that phone's Syslog within Auvik because even the phone itself doesn't store that information. Our phones only show the last six reasons for a reboot, and if someone is saying that reboot is the issue, then that's not good enough. You want to look for a pattern. You want to look for what might be happening internally on the phone. For that, you would have to go into the phone server and then get down to those logs. If the log info is already sent to Auvik, I don't have to go into the phone server and then write up a command to filter it down to just this little tiny query here. I could just look at that device, access the log info, and get what I need, which is very valuable.

It also gives you a live or close-to-live topology map. So, you can get down to things. For example, if all of a sudden a machine is really slow during the day for someone, or they lose connectivity, you can check out the machine baseline by name or by IP. When it is on a switch, you can check the port it is on and get the logs on that switch to see if there are any errors being generated on that port. So, it is just a lot quicker than going into the switch's interface. You can get information on the device via Auvik without going into each device separately. You can get a log, but you can't do any configuration changes. You can just get information on the devices, and then if you see that you need to make a configuration change. If you want, you can also tunnel in through that or do it externally. The ability to launch a console session to your switch, router, or any device that you're monitoring (if that device supports it), or launch a browser session through Auvik to that device is a nice little feature they have. You can interface right there through that single pane of glass.

It backs up my configurations for me. For the routers, I have a cloud-based subscription, and it backs up my configurations every 30 days. So, I can see the changes that were made, and then I can do an A/B comparison of the configurations and identify exactly what was changed. I can even redeploy the configurations from within Auvik, which is pretty handy.

I liked the Teams integration that exists in Auvik. We have Office 365, and I can create a channel within Teams where my alerts from Auvik pop up in Teams so that I can see a feed of different alerts. I have a feed of different levels of alerts such as emergency, critical, warning, and informational that are generated in Auvik, and if I'm not viewing the tab in my browser that has Auvik, and they pop up as alerts in Teams on my desktop. I might have a ton of tabs open, and if I am not viewing the tab that has Auvik, these alerts will pop up in Teams, and that'll get my attention. It also has the ability to send a text alert. It is indirect, and even though it comes to you in SMS or MMS format, Auvik sends it to an email address, and you can get around by using your MMS email address based on your service provider. So, staying informed about the environment when I'm not directly looking is definitely a valuable resource for me.

One of the great things about Auvik is the shared collector mode, which is useful in an environment that has more than one physical location. We have 15 different locations, and I can have all of those locations pointing to one collector. So, all these locations are sharing this one collector, and I can get a map, which is way out on top of the map that you would see in Google maps, to see all my locations. I can see alerts on that map for any of those 15 locations. I can zoom in right there to the location, and from there, click on it. It is really handy.

They don't let you customize the dashboard, which is like the homepage of Auvik. There is one feature that I don't use that's on the dashboard, and it is for SSL VPN services. The way it is designed is that if you have a separate, dedicated SSL VPN appliance, they can see that. I'd rather not have that take up any space on my screen because it never is going to populate with any kind of information. I'd like to move some things around on the dashboard, but I can't do anything like that. I know that they don't plan on doing it, but if they could open the dashboard just a little bit and allow us to customize it a little bit, it would be incredibly helpful, but it is not something that I feel I'm truly missing.

I wish they did have a few more integrations, and I'm sure that they're going to have more coming down the line. It was last month when I had a meeting with them, and their goal is to just kind of make it as universal as possible. So, they take some customization features or limit some customization features just because they feel that if they make it something you can customize, it might make it less universal. You can use their integrations with other applications. It integrates with the popular RMM solutions, and that's great, but when you are viewing Auvik through that integration, there is no way for me to limit or control how Auvik sees a location. So, I can't just have it default to a certain view. If you're looking at a specific department, I can't have everything automatically filtered down to that specific department. I'd have to go through and add those filters for Auvik to do so.

Most of the issues that I have had are related to the dashboard and wanting a bit more customization available through the dashboard because that's where you'll spend most of your time. Auvik is on the dashboard, and you can create and save these filters, which is great, but if I were to filter the map by all switches, the information below doesn't reflect the filter. I have to select the device within the filter, and then it starts to show the results. I can then see the dashboard of that device. If I were to filter by switches, I would like my top device utilization to only show me switches from my alerts and anything related to my map filter. That was something I asked about in one of the meetings with Auvik last month, and I don't think they have any plan to expand the dashboard anytime soon or at all. So, that was a little bit of a letdown. So, I am adjusting my workflow to fit the product and its abilities, but it really makes sense to me to expand it over time within the TrafficInsights dashboard. If I filter by my access points, then it should only show me the information related to my filter.

Another limitation, which is probably still under customization, is related to the reporting features. It doesn't really give you the ability to customize reports, create reports, or schedule reports. Adding those kinds of elements to it would really take it over the edge. It has some built-in reporting, and you can generate a report based on just a few things. You can do 10 reports that are built-in, but you can't create a report, and you can't customize a report. You can export the reports. It is designed that way. I would like to be able to create and schedule some custom reports. There should be the ability to do a temporary report. For example, if I am monitoring one or multiple devices for a week and I had the map filter to these devices, I'd like to be able to just quickly generate a report to be able to see how this device communicates, or how these devices are communicating over the course of a week. Such a feature would be really good. Reporting is the main thing that you're looking for in a monitoring system, and Auvik falls short there.

I probably have to look through the knowledge base to see if it does exist, but I do not believe there is a way for me to set a threshold for certain types of traffic. For example, when media streaming gets to a certain percentage of network traffic, I get an alert. That's why I'm kind of in it all the time. It is one of the tabs that I have open, and then I just take a look and see what is a little high and then zoom in.

Auvik doesn't deploy firmware upgrades and things of that nature. I don't know what would be required to allow them to be able to handle firmware upgrades for all these different devices, but it is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors.

I have probably been using this solution for a little bit over a year.

It has been incredibly stable for me. They do maintenance just about every weekend for adding new features or just cleaning some bugs up.

The whole ability to add more locations is really impressive. I know that people can have multiple collectors, but for me, I just have one collector and 15 sites sending information to that one collector. I can expand if I need to add more devices at a location or add a new location entirely. I can even reduce, which is great.

When I first set up Auvik, during that trial, I was seeing everything from one site. After a discussion with the guys in support, they recommended that I basically change the mode of Auvik to be a shared collector and make the other locations sites. This way I can just look at one site at a time, or I can come to the main dashboard and see all the sites from a bird's eye view. I can just continue to expand or compress based on my needs and preferences.

Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom that you can click to connect with a support agent. You don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and explain anything. You can get someone in less than a minute.

They've been great. All of my questions have been answered, and any issue I've had related to a feature within Auvik has been resolved for the most part.

The other product that I was using was a product created by the manufacturers of the devices. It was something that I thought would be perfect for the devices, but it wasn't. Auvik is superior across the board in comparison to that device. The only thing that Auvik doesn't do, but the other device can do, is deploying firmware upgrades and things of that nature. It is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors. I was using a vendor product for certain devices, and it wasn't reliable and viable.

I was involved in the initial setup of Auvik at my location. It was straightforward, and I was surprised by how much information Auvik can give you. The way they deploy is the smartest way to deploy anything. You go through that trial period with them where you'll give it all the time to gather the information about your gear. When you're actually talking to the guys, they give you a demonstration of Auvik in your environment related to your gear and the information Auvik will use, which is very important. 

Before we got down to the purchase, I wanted to see information related to the gear that I actually have, and that's important for anybody. I didn't want to see the hypotheticals of if we had a specific gear. Instead of deploying it in my environment with the belief that it is going to be great, and then realizing it is not compatible with this, I wanted to know that first, see it, and then decide whether or not that's going to be a deal-breaker. For example, I might get to know that Auvik is not going to show me information about the access points that I have because the manufacturer's access points don't have a feature that allows Auvik to see that information.

In terms of the duration, we gave it a weekend. There are different methods for using Auvik, and you can spin up a Linux box and install Auvik that way, or you can use their appliance. Based on your environment, they have their recommendations, and then you just let it sit for some time while you configure all your devices to communicate with Auvik. The setup configuration took me half a day. I had to make sure that I had the traffic all permitted through the firewall, the switches and routers were all set up to send information to Auvik, and SNMP communication was all good. After all that was set up, I just had to wait for Auvik to gather the information. I come in on Monday, and I saw all the information Auvik gathered about the network topology and other things over the weekend.

Comparing Auvik's setup time with other solutions, I haven't seen better. Auvik does the work for you. I spent half a day setting up the SNMP information and entering whatever credentials I needed to enter into Auvik for the WMI communication. After that point, you'd have to kind of trim it down. You have to say that I don't want to see the subnet because it'll scan everything. When you give it the information to look at your route, it'll be able to grab any route that your router can see. If you're not concerned with the public WiFi that you might provide and that your router might handle, you can just eliminate that from the map. You just say don't scan the network, and this way, you're only looking at the data that you want to see, which is really handy. So, in terms of the setup time, it is about how fast you can get into your devices and how quickly can you enter the credentials into the devices that you manage.

Its pricing is very reasonable. We had looked at other solutions where you pay based on the amount of traffic that was filtered through and analyzed. With Auvik, we pay by a billable device. For one of the locations I have, one network element would likely be a billable device. So, every billable device has a network element, but not every network element is a billable device. If I have a location that has 50 network elements, then maybe 30 of them are billable devices. PCs, VoIP phones, and access points are monitored at no charge. 

You pay based on billable devices, and that is very reasonable. You can control that to a certain extent and make a device unmanaged, but you don't get the benefits of Auvik being able to collect all of the information to make it useful. It'll tell you that this is an unmanaged device. You might know it is a switch, but it is not giving you any switch information. 

When you make a device managed, then it is a billable device. It is important to the whole cost of trying to replace your devices or expand your locations. You have to consider the cost of that switch. You have to think that if you are going to buy a switch, it is not just the price of this switch; it also becomes something that's billable in Auvik. Would you buy another switch, or would you replace the switch and buy a bigger switch? Auvik just continues to collect the data and continues to give you traffic insights, Syslog, and all other features that you want. It is worth it.

There was one other solution that was evaluated in terms of install, deploy, and configure. Other ones for which I had seen demonstrations weren't what I was looking for. They could do things similar to Auvik, but they weren't what I was looking for at the time.

When you're doing the trial, the trial is using your info. I would just say at least do the trial and see what it shows you and really explore all of the sub-menus. If you're looking for insight and alerting based on thresholds and health checks, it is definitely something worth looking at. It might take you some time to configure devices to communicate with Auvik, and then just let it do its thing and watch.

It is a little difficult to say whether Auvik helps us in putting out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. If you are at your computer and your switch goes down to which it is connected, you're going to know at the same time I get to know, but I will know what happened. That is the kind of fire that it helps me put out. When I'm not looking at Auvik or any kind of monitoring system, if your switch goes down, you would come up and tell me that you don't have internet. I won't know why you don't have internet until I go in and see that all people don't have internet, and that switch is offline, but Auvik will let me know if there is an outage right away.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of 10. The only thing that keeps it from being a 10 is just the lack of some customization in certain areas. That has really been the main limitation for me. It is not that big a deal, but that would just get it right to a perfect score. I find it very valuable in terms of how quickly you can set something like this up and how much information you can see within your network from a single pane of glass. I still open up my other monitoring tools that are built into the devices, but I don't really view them as much as I view my firewall monitoring in Auvik. 

It has got a lot of use cases, but in my opinion, it's probably the best full-stack network monitoring management and alerting platform that's out there for routers, switches, firewalls, and non-server infrastructure.

It makes it a lot easier for our IT teams to have visibility into remote and distributed networks. Once you get your IT team members used to it, when you're having an issue, for example, while trying to SSH to something, they will go to Auvik first just because they have the geographic map, and they have these little dummy-proof exclamation marks. So, there might be an issue here. The way Auvik portrays the network from the outside looking in is like being Zeus on a little cloud. We can see what's going on with all our devices which we couldn't see before without having to log into each device individually, or we had to use a diagram that we made when they were set up and refer to that. Now, we have a live reactive changing diagram that allows our network guys to go straight to the actual device that's causing the network issue somewhere in this region and start troubleshooting that right away versus having to troubleshoot three, four, or five devices in that general area blindly, and then, eventually getting to the device they need to work on. It has saved an insurmountable amount of hours of network outages and down networks. It has also reduced our response times. We are able to get that information really quickly, and we don't have to go back and forth. What used to be a four-hour fix is now done in 30 minutes.

It has been great to allow our teams to focus on high-value tasks and delegate low-level tasks to junior staff. It has been great just because of the integration with our PSA ticketing system and the way we can set triggers, priorities, and levels of urgency with notes and all the other cool features they have there. It allows us to route tickets appropriately and then, they already have little checklists that pop up for common alerts that say, "If it's this and this, try this. If not, escalate to senior staff." It has sped that up quite a bit. Often, there's a lot of noise, and by getting the alerting down right to where there are actionable incidents that come in, it has sometimes added a little extra time for the tier one guys because often there are just too many alerts. You have one device that brings down a whole network, but you get alerts on every single device that's inside that network, whereas you only need to know the one. Sometimes, it's not easy from the face value to know which specific device it's until you get used to the tool and the customer.

Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date has helped save us time and money. We don't miss a lot of the warranty and inversion roll-ups, and some of our commitments where we have to do quarterly upgrades of the router, switch, and firewall environment. They are the kind of upgrades that aren't done automatically for anyone because you can't do those in the middle of the day. So, our ability to track assets, models, versions, and even warranty expiration dates, which they pull from public databases automatically for you, is invaluable.

They allow for integrations into their platform via API with PSA tools like ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Automate. They have a lot of add-on integration and plug-ins for a lot of the big names and IT RMM stacks commonly used in my industry space. These integrations are absolutely valuable. With the integrations into ConnectWise, we are able to automatically create and close tickets across systems. As alerts and new information comes into Auvik, when an issue or a trigger that was alarmed has been resolved, and it detects that it has gone away, based on our threshold, it can talk back to our ticketing system and auto-close it and send a notification. It's phenomenal. You don't have to wait on an email to go to another email, and then that email creates a ticket. It's very useful.

The network visualization is great in terms of overall intuitiveness. They couldn't do any more than doing a coloring book with pop-up pictures and coloring stuff. They made it easy for you to know where to look. They guide you to the right place. I always use the term Windows 85 just because they tried to simplify it so much and make it so easy that it became difficult for people because they are used to doing more steps. They're like, "Wait, that can't be right. That's all I had to do? There have to be more steps." Some of the things are hidden in plain sight, but when you find it once, you're good. The diagrams and the groupings of the sections are very down and out. Like Merkle Tree, they are easy to navigate, and then, they have a lot of cross-referencing hooks inside those sections of the UI that lead you back to the next expected place you'd want to go after making a change in that section. It's nice.

The monitoring and management functions or the out-of-the-box functions are fairly easy to use. When you need to tailor an onboarding for a customer who wants different triggers and conditions for alerts that don't come out of the box in their default alert set for certain device types, you can make it happen and create those, but doing so isn't that easy. Luckily, Auvik support is usually the best. They respond very quickly. You can message them right on a chat. You always get someone who knows what they're talking about, and then, they get you in the right direction. From a user perspective, customizing it's not intuitive, but it can be done with their help.

Its asset inventory is amazing. The only thing that they're still lacking is the ability to make it easier to import assets into their system when onboarding. Other than that, exporting and pulling data that is set up in Auvik is very easy, and it has made QBR with customers and things like that a lot of fun.

So, there should be more custom reporting options when importing or exporting. It should have better data ingestion capabilities, and we should be able to import more than just a CSV. They should also improve it in terms of customization for customer tenants and reporting and onboarding options for migrating from non-Auvik systems or no network monitoring systems into Auvik. It's still a very manual process even with the discovery. The onboardings are probably the longest part.

There is a hidden or unspoken bottleneck that I would like to see improved. When there are 800 to 1,000 devices in one subtenant, that is huge performance segregation. Generally, you're not going to have a lot of customers that have that much, but the solution is to create different sub tenants and such, but it's more of a hassle than it's worth. In the future, I would like to see if they could find a way to break through that bottleneck for the namespace tenants or for the customer tenants to where I could have all the customer network devices in one tenant. They could even be sectionalized inside the tenant, or there could be a way to mask the US1, US2, Customer-1, Customer-2, or whatever namespace in a way that they all also show up in the same portal tenant customer organization, and they all tie into our PSA tools with same API integration. I would like to see that happen. That's been the biggest hurdle for our enterprise customers and deployments because when you're first doing discovery and you start scanning, it starts pulling in everything like printers, computers, phones, and all the stuff you don't need. It adds up to 1,000 really quickly, and then the UI or refresh rate on the tool cripples drastically. That's the biggest thing, but it's not something that can't be overcome either by the options and suggestions they provide as of today. In those kinds of situations, it just requires a little bit of extra work to set up the additional tenants and get everything integrated.

I've been using it for about five years.

Its stability is great. 

I couldn't speak on their actual infrastructure because of the hosted solution. So far, I've seen just massive fast scaling from their infrastructure side just based on namespaces alone. I haven't seen any limitations personally other than the bottleneck I have, but that's not a limitation when there's a solution to create satellite tenants that will talk to each other for the same customer. If that were to continue on, I haven't seen anything that would stop me from creating unlimited 1,000 device namespaces per customer all tied into the same functions of their stack.

I would rate their support a 10 out of 10. It's like they look out for me when I message support. For the last five years, every time I messaged them, they sent me the best guy they had, or that's the experience I've had. I have had nothing but a great experience with their support. I never had to get them on the phone either. It has always been through the chat, which is amazing.

Positive

We only use Auvik for routers, switches, and firewalls or just the network. We don't use it for any servers. We use a combined stack for that piece. Before we moved to Auvik, we used to use two extra tools, and then Auvik replaced those two. Now, we're just down to using two main tools to manage the entire customer infrastructure. We got Auvik and ConnectWise Automate.

In the past 13 years, I've used SolarWinds, NetNat, and Kaseya Traverse. We have used a good handful of managed service provider-focused tools. I used LabTech's very limited network monitoring management tool before they got bought and the name was changed to ConnectWise and ConnectWise Automate, but essentially, LabTech was the same tool as Automate. Anyone in the MSP business over in Houston was either using the Kaseya RMM tool or they were using LabTech's RMM tool to manage their customers. They mainly excelled at just workstations and server management, but they had some limited network functionality or network monitoring and management that you could do. Outside of that, this is the first one that would do it all. Usually, you had to get a vendor-specific one. You'd be doing a bunch of different vendor tools. You'd have a Cisco tool, you'd have a Fortinet tool, or you'd have a SonicWall tool. Each one of those tools monitored and managed just that class of product. It's nice to have one that does it all.

In terms of comparison of Auvik's cloud-based solution versus other on-prem network monitoring solutions, the only thing they have is collectors. They got the collectors, and all they do is that they relay information via HTTPS back to the AWS. AWS does all the magic with the databases.

Deployments are extremely straightforward. My response would be biased because I have been using it for a while, but I don't see anything that someone who doesn't use it regularly might see as a problem or hurdle. I've worked with the support and used the tool so often. So, I know the little caveats where if something is wrong with the way it's talking to a device, if I wait 30 seconds and set the device to unmanaged and then set it back to managed again, I can reset it and reconnect the service. So, it's super easy. Their level of support is quick and very knowledgeable because their support doesn't work with any non-technical people because all of their customers are IT teams. You could probably log into a tenant, and if you have no idea what you're doing, just pop in there in message chat, and you can probably have them walk you through it at a fast enough rate to get you up in line and managing the day-to-day tasks for the customer in that tenant portal in just a matter of a week or less, depending on the size of the network. It could be a matter of a couple of hours.

We have our own process. We streamlined the onboarding process. We took the bits and pieces out of the Auvik documentation that we found to be more relevant and valuable during the initial customer discussions. When you're dealing with a lot of customers who also have internal IT departments, you have to lay out a lot of different concerns, questions, and things that evolve around their specific operations that you just can't predict from the get-go. So, we have our own process where it picks out the protocols that are relevant, the level of permissions that we need, the service accounts that we need, etc. We set those requirements and expectations in our scope with the customer, and they sign off on it that they get us this information within a certain timeframe. That helps speed up the process out of the box. Assuming everything is perfect and we have all of the access and all the keys to the kingdom of someone we're trying to deploy out of the box, we should have no problem deploying it very quickly. That's because all the credentials that we need to manage those devices are automated by an Auvik service account for logins, remote sessions, and SNMP. If all those are plugged in before we deploy the collector, and as we deploy the collector, it does all that magic for us. That's the automation piece involving connecting, discovering, pulling information, and wrapping everything together.

I got a new guy who works with me now, but for the last three years, it has been solely me deploying Auvik for every customer and internally for our operations as well. I deploy it, configure it, and then I hand it off to Ops to maintain it, and they handle it from there. 

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require much maintenance. In the past few years, there were some instances where they couldn't automatically update collectors from certain versions to certain versions when you passed a certain point. So, you just have to go in and update or just redeploy collectors for customers, which is due to the nature of how they are set up. You could have one that just breaks. You can spin off a brand new one in less than 30 minutes, and you're back to where you were before.

Every time we onboard a new customer to provide our IT services, there's a kickoff call that just says, "Hey, we're doing this." Auvik provides us the ability to perform discovery as soon as we have keys to their infrastructure.

There has been a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). From incident to resolution, it has probably cut that time down in half for the operations side.

The prices change based on your partnership with them and based on the bulk amount that you buy and the account rep you're talking to. It depends on negotiations and the number of customers you have. 

It's absolutely worth the money. I would probably charge more if I were them. They don't charge you for anything that's not a router, switch, or firewall controller, or a network device. So, you can throw anything like servers and ESX hosts. You can throw network storage and all that stuff in there, and they have functionality in there for you to build out, monitor, and manage those as well, which you don't get charged for. You only get charged per device for a switch, router, or firewall, which is nice. You can have a collector for a customer, and it's just a minimal fee for the tenant. It's pretty neat. You can deploy as many collectors as you want to talk to that tenant for the customer on the fly and do discoveries. We also handle some emergency requests such as, "We need to figure out what we have on our network because we got ransomware, and we need to make sure all of our devices and all of our assets have the new antivirus. We're supposed to have 6,000 devices, but we're only showing this many." There have been times when we've literally just used the tool for discovery on a customer to collect a full report of assets and then used that to fix another whole different type of issue and provide solutions for more revenue to additional projects for that engagement. We use it ad hoc. We use it for month-to-month management of infrastructures. Now, we use it for discoveries and emergency projects where we need to collect a lot of information very quickly when we don't have any other IT at the other end to provide information on situations.

When I got hired with Computex, now Calian, they hired me because they didn't know what to do with Traverse. I made the decision and met with the engineering team. I was certainly 90% of the reason for the decision for them to move away from Kaseya's Traverse tool to Auvik's tool. I made that decision when I came on because I had a lot of background in it, and they had an acquisition where they had that tool for half of their businesses they were providing IT for, and then, they had Traverse. I convinced them to get away from Traverse because it wasn't a good tool, and then we moved over to a tool that did what we needed.

I had to do a lot of training. I had to host a lot of training and calls and some webinars for our NOC team, but once we got a hang of it, we were able to display it while the customer was at our NOC. We could display the active live network monitoring diagrams on our dashboards with all our other systems. It gives everyone a warm feeling when they can look over and see what's going on.

I would advise first figuring out what you're trying to accomplish. If you are trying to ad hoc or duct tape other tools, rethink. Auvik performs and shows the most value when it becomes your sole tool for all of your network monitoring and management and alerting. If you're trying to ad hoc, duct tape, or throw in just for a feature or a filler for another product, you're just going to run into more headache. You only need Auvik to manage all of those things. If you're looking to Auvik for server management, workstation management, it's possible, but it's not built for that. So, make sure that it's for network devices only. It's not really designed to manage storage and hypervisors and remote access. It's not a day-to-day help desk support tool for you to hop on to user workstations and troubleshoot from that standpoint.

If you want just another monitoring solution, Auvik can do it, but Auvik's magic is the fact that it's a full stack. It's not just monitoring. It's full network management, remote access, and preventative maintenance. It's a full RMM tool. So, if you're looking for strictly an alerting tool for your network, you'd be wasting some very well-engineered features on the product by going with Auvik just for that. 

Its ease of use isn't too important for us, but it depends on the kind of use because we have layered access and levels of skill sets that are allowed to do certain things in it. From a broader perspective, 90% of the engineers that work for a managed services provider and 90% of the guys on our support desk aren't going to be there changing anything. It's just going to be the project team that sets it up, onboards it, and configures it. Once that process is standardized for us, there are only minor tweaks, based on the customer type, when we set up new clients. It becomes pretty streamlined. The only time that the ease of use helps is in the beginning when you first start using the tool itself. Once you've been a partner with Auvik, you've onboarded a few customers, and you've dug your way in and out, and around it, and you do a couple hundred after that, it's not as relevant.

It hasn't helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. They don't have much automation in the platform itself. The only automated thing that they do is to monitor conditions, and then the routing of the alerts, who they go to, and how those are handled. In terms of automation of maintenance on the network, there isn't any function like that in Auvik that I'm aware of. It's mostly just analytics monitoring and a remote access tool.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik since 2015. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They didn't evaluate any other product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Auvik a 10 out of 10.

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're in the healthcare industry and in our organization we have what we call a "backup machine" to be used in emergency scenarios. Should there be a brownout or internet service provider disruptions or any major catastrophe, we can move digital charting to paper charting for a certain duration of time. We have the Auvik probe installed on those backup machines, and it sends feedback back to the main Auvik dashboard where we monitor such things as ISP latency, devices on the network, and certain network elements like switches and access points.

We also have a probe sitting in one of the servers in the data center and it performs a similar function, helping us review our network infrastructure within the data center and to see where potential bottlenecks are, at what times of day, and to analyze trends.

We use it for basic troubleshooting as well because you can see everything on the network within a particular facility. At sites that don't have Cisco Meraki within the building, we use Auvik to isolate which ports' devices are connected to and for general troubleshooting. If, for example, an uplink port on one of the switches goes out, we can see, "Oh, that was port 26. Please switch it to port 25." We can duplicate configurations from one port to the next port and make sure that the facility is up and online.

It's been a very useful tool for us.

We can automate alerting systems based on certain criteria. For example, if a switch is undergoing high CPU usage or access points show high CPU or memory usage, we'll get the alerts for those and address them accordingly.

Auvik also sends us a text message whenever one of the internet circuits goes down, as we have a main fibre circuit at every building and a coaxial backup. That helps us ease the burden in switching over the necessary connections or the tunnels back to our centralized data center.

In addition, the network discovery capabilities are very insightful, coming from our previous situation where we had absolutely nothing. They have made us aware of certain switches within certain parts of the building that we may not have known existed. They have also helped because in our industry we're built by acquisitions. Oftentimes, we find an acquisition has an IDF and MDF in a particular building. With Auvik installed, we might find there are two more switches around that building. Sometimes these switches can be in the ceiling, but even being able to isolate what port they're connected to, disconnecting them, and finding where these items are has been extraordinarily helpful to us.

The solution has ultimately improved the response time of our help desk team when troubleshooting issues. It has also helped to identify older equipment when doing a refresh. We've been able to find 100-meg switches and old Cisco switches that are in places that we didn't anticipate they would be. We have also been able to isolate key pieces of the infrastructure within a building, pieces that needed to be replaced to provide a more friendly user experience.

Another benefit is that the automation of network mapping enables our level-one network specialists to resolve issues directly, and frees up senior-level team members for more important tasks. Our level-ones have read-only access, but that allows them to see the different topologies, see where things are connected, and then help facilitate a solution, either remotely or with the help of onsite personnel. It's kind of like having Cisco Meraki insight without actually having Cisco Meraki. While we only use Cisco Meraki gear at our HQ location, which provides us a high level of insight within one portal, Cisco Meraki is fairly expensive and it's not something that we can afford to put into every building. Auvik provides us with all the features that Cisco Meraki might have to offer within one pane of glass. 

The solution also automatically updates network topology, although it requires SNMP to be enabled on a particular network device. So when we're provisioning things that are going out, we have to pre-program that information into the switch and make sure everything is compatible. But once it's in place, it provides us the same level of insight that the previous network device did.

Also, in the cases where we've used it for resolving issues, it has reduced our MTTR. We're using it more as an insight tool. We don't have a lot of network-related issues within the environment, but in the instances that we have used it for resolution, it has helped us resolve the issues a lot quicker, on the order of 40 percent quicker.

It helps us to put out fires before end-users even know there is a problem, especially when it comes to internet service provider latency on a particular circuit. It alerts us to high bandwidth usage or increased latency and allows us to flip the connections from fibre to coax in anticipation, and then dispatch a fiber technician to resolve the issue on the primary line. All that can be done without any user noticing an impact at the facility level.

We use Auvik's TrafficInsights feature in the data center, but not the facility level. TrafficInsights is really the most beneficial within the data center because that's where high bandwidth is going and that's where it's most important to know exactly what's going on at all times. It shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, and with the projects that we currently have on our plate, that's incredibly important. We're currently transitioning data centers right now, and being able to isolate what traffic is going where and what's taking up the most bandwidth helps us put in certain traffic shaping rules. If something were to potentially impact at the facility level, we can get ahead of the curve and make the appropriate changes as necessary.

TrafficInsights also helps show where our system is experiencing performance issues, because we're using fibre optics within the data center as the backbone for everything. Whenever we're moving virtual machines, it helps isolate which ports are experiencing the most usage. We correlate the ports that are used to the host machines themselves and determine what virtual machines are reliant on the host that's using the most bandwidth, and we then see what services are impacted from there. TrafficInsights enables us to prepare ourselves to minimize end-user performance impact. We make changes based on what we see through TrafficInsights. It's a useful feature for doing exactly that. It allows us to maintain a steady level of performance within the data center.

There are also the automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups which have saved me quite a few times. The ability to back up a configuration from a firewall and have it housed in one central location where we can get the backup config and restore it to a new device, should a firewall or a switch blow out, decreases our restore time significantly. We don't have to figure out which rules, traffic shaping, or port-forwarding were on the switch, or what was on the firewall. We confidently know that the backup being pulled from Auvik is the most recent one.

Typically, before we had Auvik, when a firewall went out, it would take us a full day or a day and a half to turn around another firewall, to make sure it would be plug-and-play. With Auvik, that time has been reduced to a few hours. That's what it takes to procure the actual equipment and get it sent out, because we just pull the backup, restore it, and send the equipment out. No one from our networking team is then working, via tickets, to discover what was on the device previously. It's all in one place. If it's local, we have the building up and running within two hours of equipment configuration.

It's hard to say how much the device configuration backup saves us because every scenario is different. But if we're paying someone $45 an hour, instead of 12 hours of their time we're only using four hours of their time.

The alerting feature has been a very key piece for us, especially in the data center because we manage it ourselves. It gives us special insights into how certain projects and migrations are impacting the center of our operations, out in the field. Within the data center, we have an RDS farm that all the users from the facility connect to. Whenever something may be slow, we can look at the alerting and it helps us troubleshoot whether the issue is at the facility level or at an infrastructure level.

Also, the audit logs it provides are very detailed and can be tailored to our needs within the organization for things like management audit logs and user activity. The TrafficInsights have been really helpful.

The deployment of the probe onto a particular device could be improved. That usually requires one of our level-two people to step in from the help desk team. It would be much better if it were a click-and-go deployment. What I would like to see in particular is the ability to download an MSI builder for a probe for a particular building. We would simply double-click and install it onto the machine and have it work. Having to roll through with the entire API key is a little time-consuming.

I have been using Auvik for about two years now.

We've never had issues with it until recently when we started to see a lot more maintenance come up because the dashboard might be unavailable. But its uptime is about 99 percent.

Scalability is dependent on cost because they charge by network elements. In some of the nursing homes we handle, it's very cost-effective because they only have three switches, a firewall, and about 20 access points. But in larger facilities that have three or four IDFs, it becomes a little bit more costly because you have the additional switches and access points.

Since we don't have a lot of networking issues within the building itself, Auvik is being used as a general guidance tool, and to help the level-one help desk technicians troubleshoot a couple of things a little bit quicker, figure out where items are attached, and help the onsite maintenance director swap a cable or something of that manner. Our use of Auvik will be expanded based on acquisitions. If we bring on a new nursing home, we'll configure all the equipment into our network ahead of time and it will be plug-and-go. We'll just pay for the additional licensing for the network devices.

The first couple of times that I tried to get in contact with the tech support, they were very responsive. With every third-party vendor, wait-times can vary, but the tech support has always been good. I have recently noticed a little bit of a slower response time.

One thing that would be nice would be for them to reach out to us once in a while to check in and see how things are going, rather than only being reactive. A little bit more of a proactive approach would help. Outside of that, I haven't had any issues with their support or their customer team.

Overall, I would rate their tech support at nine out of 10.

We used to use OpenNMS for WAN connectivity purposes but with Auvik we were able to replace that. As far as backups go, we used to use an in-house-built solution for automating an SSH protocol into the firewalls and doing manual backups from there. But that took time to maintain. Auvik has consolidated those two things in one place. And the additional features of network insights for an entire facility is something that we didn't previously have. Auvik is saving us $3,000 to $4,000 per year in licensing costs.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. From start to finish, it took us about five days to have the entire environment up and running. We're a fairly small team. For organizations that have more dedicated team members, such as a NOC team and a server team, it would probably be a lot faster. But we were all filling in for those roles.

Our implementation strategy was simply to make sure that we had the different sites built out within the Auvik collector, entering in the IP information for each site, and then installing the probe facility by facility.

There was a time where it was a little confusing to get set up, but Auvik really helped to bridge that gap in knowledge by providing training to our end-users, meaning me or someone on our help desk team. They gave us more in-depth information and helped us to really understand the product features and to ensure that we were using everything to the best of its capabilities within our circumstances.

We have 10 users of Auvik: three system administrators, two level-two help desk technicians, and about five level-one help desk technicians. As a cloud-based solution, once it's deployed, unless we're making certain IP schema changes, it doesn't require much maintenance at all from our staff. On occasion, a backup machine needs to be replaced and we have to reinstall the probe. But outside of that, it's really click-and-go. The Auvik probe will pick up on a new subnet too. It's all available within the dashboard itself. You can literally turn off the old subnet and turn on the new one and begin scanning those elements just like they were before.

We did it on our own.

We've seen ROI in terms of the time that Auvik has saved us in the instances where we've had configurations that needed to be cloned, for example. I don't want to say the product is stale, rather it's insightful. You get from it as much as you want to get out of it. For us, the insights, manageability, and troubleshooting go a long way because we're saving man-hours.

When it comes to time-to-value, the setup time is fairly easy and the network discovery is very helpful. 

Because we had nothing previously, it's a very valuable tool. Having everything in one place, enabling our teams to react faster, decreasing the time to resolution, as well as identifying weak places within the infrastructure—it's hard to put a value on all that it gives us.

It has saved us a considerable amount of money, given that everything had to be done manually before, such as FaceTiming with a member of the facility and trying to get a physical view of a particular issue. Just having a central pane of glass that easily identifies various pieces of information goes a long way. We're saving tech time which can ultimately then be better spent supporting the organization and end-users. As far as infrastructure planning and rip-and-replace go for certain network technologies, it's provided much better insight and we can plan for which network switches actually have to be replaced. There are cost savings there because if we've got gig switches here and we're only looking to replace 100-meg switches, we can really drill down and know what we need ahead of time, going into a particular building, when we redo some infrastructure.

The solution is billed per network device, so there are devices that are not subject to billing in your environment, such as dumb switches because they have no higher reporting protocols. If you do have those, Auvik won't report on them in the same way. It won't give you port-based or traffic-based analyses.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We initially looked at SolarWinds and, thankfully, we didn't go with that product. Its setup time and configuration were pretty extensive and we never fully finished it after putting about 10 days' worth of time into it. As much as I'd like to say some good things about SolarWinds, it really wasn't for us because of the lack of communication and support that I got from them in helping to set things up. Ultimately, we steered away from that product.

The biggest pro for Auvik is its ease of deployment. It was as easy as I've personally seen a setup of this type of solution to be. It has an abundance of features and functionality. The only con is that the install is a little bit more tech-intensive as far as time goes.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Auvik is that every organization should have something like this. From our perspective, it isn't very expensive, although in smaller organizations it might be considered more of a luxury. But every luxury has its benefits. All the aspects it helps us with make it phenomenal. It's definitely a "need," not a "want."

I would advise making sure you have a very good, thorough count of the SNMP-enabled devices you have within your network. Also, be cognizant of whether you have any non-managed switches because you can't really get visibility into them. 

Also, make sure that you have full control over your network elements within the environment. We had a couple of switches that we had to factory-reset to get back into them, because there were lost credentials. Assuming that your infrastructure and your documentation are good, you really shouldn't run into any terrible issues. If you're sound on documentation, credential handling, and credential guarding, this tool will be very easy for you to implement. And if your infrastructure is pretty sound and everything is consolidated, this will be a phenomenal tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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