Auvik Reviews

We mainly needed a tool for managing or monitoring our firewalls and switches. We do have other tools for general server environment monitoring and applications monitoring, but they are not as good for managing and monitoring firewalls and switches. We specifically needed monitoring and management of firewalls and switches for our data center environment.

It provided the ability to track down the changes in the firewall and the ability to have centralized visibility into our networking stack. We are able to compare and correlate functions from one environment with another environment, which is helpful when we upgrade the code or the framework in one location. We can compare how the stats were previously, and we get to know whether the new code is doing anything funky or if we are seeing any issues. It allows us to compare sizes that are running on the older code and sizes that are running on a newer code. We can see if there is any difference in the CPU usage, RAM usage, or the utilization of the firewalls themselves.

It's a single pane of view. There is a single dashboard, and you can add multiple sites and multiple users to it. You install collectors in different areas, but the management is from a single location. Everything is cloud-based. So, you can access and do monitoring from pretty much anywhere. The beauty of it is that if you have multiple physical locations across the continent, you can see the networking stack on one single page. This single integrated platform is very important for us. The most important factor for us was that this platform is cloud-based. If we were hosting it in a single physical location, it would have been hard to be accessible by other locations. Having it in the cloud and being able to see everything in a centralized location was super important for us because in the case of the old or other tools that we had in the past, or we still have, we need to log into a different tool or different console to see the information, and it's hard to correlate all of them in a single location. Auvik gives that ability. We can compare the states and the information from a firewall located in the east of the US and a firewall located in the west of the US, which is super helpful.

It is nice to be able to visualize the network mapping/topology for the organization. You don't have to do anything. You add the subnets and the VLANs you want to be scanned. As long as the collector can access those subnets, it is done fairly quickly. It depends on how complex your network is, but it can take less than 30 minutes to map everything and give you a visualization, which is pretty nice. Otherwise, it could take you hours to stay up-to-date with the charts of your networking topology because the topology changes from time to time. With Auvik, you can see every node, every switch, and every firewall. You can see how they are connected. You can visually see how your network is and what you have. The best part is that it adjusts on the fly. If I add a new switch, the topology would adjust, and the new switch will be there. If I take out a switch or create a new branch, it will automatically show that. It's really nice and easy for the day-to-day understanding of where you are, but it's also very important when you have a new network admin, and you need to get them up to the speed of your network. In the past, we had to pull out various diagrams and explain what we have and then figure out whether all the diagrams were up-to-date, whereas now, we can just show the dashboard, and they would understand that. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization. It's really intuitive. From what I was able to see, everything was correct. It's not that you get raw data and some visualization and then you need to work with it or adjust it. It connects everything. From what I was able to see, everything was pretty correct in the diagrams.

It has helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. Previously, we were doing daily backups of the firewalls, but now, we don't have to do that part. That has been a help. The automation of the backups was helpful. 

It has significantly improved the visibility into the networking topology. It can see the access points, and it can see pretty much everything on the network. It can detect servers and physical hardware as well. It has significantly improved our visibility. This visibility is not the most important aspect, but it's definitely important and significant to have this visibility and know what you have in the topology.

It keeps device inventories up-to-date. We can quickly search and find out the devices we have or check what we have. That part has been really helpful. Instead of tracking in an Excel spreadsheet, we can search the inventory in Auvik.

It has definitely saved time to do other tasks. Some of the daily tasks that we had to do are now done by Auvik. With Auvik, our team spends less time checking things, getting dashboards, and pulling up reports.

We have multiple applications and tools to manage and monitor various aspects of the networks. Auvik has saved us a few hours a week. When you have three or four different tools, you need to take information from each of those tools and then get some insights out. With Auvik, we log into a single location, and we get all the information. It has been time-saving for sure.

Few of the features are valuable. One feature that is the most valuable for me is that after we added all of our firewalls, every time we make any configuration change in the firewall, it creates a backup and retains the change history for months. We can see and find out when a change was done and what was the change. The best part is that if we want to compare the current config with the config from two weeks ago, the tool pulls up both config files and tells us what the difference is. If something is not working today, instead of asking around who made the change, what was changed, and how things were two weeks ago when everything was working, we can just pull both configs, check them out, and know what exactly the problem is and investigate.

Auvik is a cloud-based solution, and it definitely has advantages over on-prem network monitoring solutions. We don't have to manage anything on-prem, and we don't have to patch the backend. We don't have to allocate resources for the management console to work, and it's accessible from anywhere. We don't have to back up the virtual machine or the appliance because everything is managed by Auvik. We really like that part. You definitely need internet connectivity to send all the logs and data to Auvik. If your internet goes down, then technically, you don't have visibility at that time, but then, you likely have a bigger problem than being able to get the data.

It takes significantly less time and effort to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solutions. With the previous solutions, we needed to get somebody trained. Somebody had to go and watch tons of videos to understand how to deploy the solution and how to properly install and configure it. With Auvik, we just provide the executables to somebody, and they just install it. We then go to the console and the data starts to come there. It's way easier and faster to set it up.

They can improve its monitoring capabilities for the physical servers or operating systems. At the moment, they do have some visibility. Even though you don't buy Auvik for monitoring your servers, and it is more for network monitoring, it would be nice if they can do end-to-end monitoring so that you don't have to use a different tool for operating system monitoring. You can get all the information from Auvik.

I have been using Auvik for about three months.

It has been very stable so far. I don't see any issues. I'm not concerned about its stability.

It can scale. I don't see that as an issue.

We have various firewalls and switches in HA. We have various models and vendors. We have a three-layer topology. We have a core layer, a distribution layer, and an access layer. All that is visible and monitored from Auvik.

Their technical support has been good. They come up with solutions, and they are there to help. I'm happy with the experience so far. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

We used PRTG, and we used Nagios. We used these two recently. They were more for monitoring. They didn't have the capabilities of management. They weren't keeping backups, and they weren't alerting us where there was a new firmware update. They also did not have the topology visualization.

Both of them were on-prem solutions. So, we had to have a system or VM to install them. We installed PRTG on Windows. We needed a dedicated box to run it. They weren't cloud-based, and they weren't highly available.

I deployed it, and I worked with my network engineers to set it up properly. I started the initial deployment or initial installation of the collectors, and then my team took over. I worked with them to deploy it in multiple locations. It was straightforward and pretty easy to deploy. You need to do some configurations to add everything, but the initial configuration is straightforward.

We just downloaded the out-of-the-box solution and just clicked on next, next, and next. We haven't done any customization. It took about 30 minutes initially because I added a few subnets. It took 20 to 30 minutes to get the diagram. Initially, you get some data depending on your network. We have a fairly large network, so it took about 30 minutes. It is awesome to get that information in 30 minutes.

It was pretty straightforward and easy to use for firewalls. You set up a connection to the firewall, and then everything pretty much works on its own. Some tools require you to learn for weeks before you figure out how to deploy. Auvik, in that regard, is pretty easy. We had a little bit of a challenge adding the switches just because we have specific switches, and they communicate with the firewall on a specific protocol. There was an API or a way to add them up, but we just didn't know how to add them up out of the box. Auvik's support was able to help us out fairly quickly, and overall, it was an easy and smooth deployment.

We did it ourselves. I don't see a need for an integrator to do it because it's straightforward.

It doesn't require any day-to-day maintenance from our side. Everything is managed by Auvik. They run the updates and the patches. The only thing that you need to do is that when you add a new device, you need to provide a new password, or if you change the password, you need to update that in Auvik. Other than that, there is no maintenance.

I would like it to be more cost-effective or affordable. It's not the most expensive one, but it's also not the cheapest solution out there. You pay month to month. It is what it is. It is not for everyone, but it depends on what you're looking for in your budget.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that Auvik is not the cheapest solution out there. You pay per device you monitor, but there is value in it. If you monitor the key systems and components, then you can make it cost-effective. If you want to monitor every single switch in your environment, it certainly won't be a cheap solution. You need to evaluate what you need to monitor. Do you need to have every switch? You can have maybe the top-tier switches and get all the information from those. You don't necessarily need to have every switch monitored because it doesn't really distinguish. You pay the same price whether you are monitoring your core switch or your access switch. To make it more cost-effective, you need to pick and choose what you want to monitor.

We've evaluated FortiMonitor from Fortinet, but it wasn't a good fit for us. We also evaluated LiveAction. That was also not a good fit for us.

I would advise giving it a try in the trial period, adding all the devices you have on the network, and seeing what value you are getting. I would also advise assessing what you need to monitor and what you don't need to monitor because you pay per monitored device.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

As an MSP, we monitor all of our clients with Auvik, specifically to monitor their network devices and connectivity, and to generate tickets. We also use it to back up configs for network devices, and it's where we get warranty information since we deal with life cycle management.

We can even push changes to devices through the terminal. Anytime there's a disaster, it's the first thing that we'll go to, to see what may be down or what may be inoperable. It's a really quick way of seeing what may be broken in a network. That's really handy. It's our network monitoring management go-to.

The configuration management has been a godsend. Every time something goes down, we don't have to worry about how it was configured. We're also getting alerts a lot faster. We have an RMM platform that's monitoring things, but it's a little slower to give us alerts and to give us data. Auvik is a lot faster and that's been really valuable. Both the configuration management and alerts are aspects of automation that result in less manual, repetitive effort.

If we're not wasting time checking configs and pushing documentation or mapping devices in a topology, that's time that we get back to do other things. The whole time I've worked here, we've had Auvik, so I don't really know this world without Auvik. But at my last MSP, those things took up a considerable amount of time, five to seven hours a week for me, at least, and probably the same for others. So it would be a considerable amount of time savings.

It also builds topologies automatically, so we don't have to go through Visio and hand-sketch something for every client. That would take a tremendous amount of time. Auvik does that for us and keeps it up to date every day.

And for what it does, Auvik gives us a single, integrated platform. Auvik is our source of truth for all network devices. We don't have anything else that overlaps with it. The amount of time it saves us is incalculable. If we were having to do this on different tools, or if we were having to manage things manually, it would take up a significant amount of our time. Not that managing things with Auvik doesn't take up a lot of time already, but it would take a lot more.

It is unified, automated and it's pretty concise. You don't have to dig around a lot to get to what you need, and that's really important. I was listening to one of the TruMethods guys and he was just talking about how many clicks it takes to get from your question to your answer. Auvik has a pretty concise depth to it.

Also, because we can drill into any one of our clients or any one site and get a very quick overview of what's going on, our team has good visibility into our networks. When a disaster happens, that visibility is crucial because it gives us a fast response time and faster mediation, which our clients love. Day-to-day, it can be important or not, but certainly, when everything's on fire, Auvik can be a real lifesaver.

We have virtual CIOs on our team who work with our clients and the fact that Auvik keeps device inventories up to date is invaluable for them. They can pull up warranty information and start plotting life cycle changes and let the client know, "Hey, we've got to replace all these devices over the next number of years." Having that data in a nice easy report saves a tremendous amount of time. And all of that information gets put into IT Glue, so we can easily search it or run reports from there on it.

As a result, we can communicate better with our clients. You don't want to just go to your client and say, "Hey, we need $50,000 so we can upgrade your equipment." What you want to do is say, "Hey, look at this report. Look at how old your stuff is. This is our plan for the next four quarters and how we're going to spend $50,000." That is gold. And delegating tasks to junior technicians is usually around procurement and projects to replace that equipment. That also wouldn't happen without that reporting.

In addition, having the device inventories up to date definitely saves us time. We don't have to wonder if something is still onsite or in the environment. It has a green check beside it so we know Auvik is checking in and we know it's online.

Another benefit is that it has helped us in reducing our resolution time by something like 15 percent.

The configuration management is the most valuable feature. I worked at an MSP before where they didn't have something collecting network device configurations. It was basically up to the technician who did it last, and you never knew if they saved a copy or not. Auvik makes that a lot more automated so we don't have to worry, if a device dies, that we don't know how it was configured. That's my favorite feature.

Ease of use is paramount for our organization. We have 15 technicians and everybody has to be able to get in there and work consistently. If it's not easy and we have to come up with all these rules on how to use it, there is a lot of room for people to make mistakes.

Auvik's network visualization is pretty intuitive. There's a legend right there and you can hover over any of those lines and it will give you the breakdown of the information. You can even click on any part of it and it takes you right to the device.

We have some clients that are rather large and the topology display can be a little bit of a mess. For smaller organizations, Auvik is perfect. You have your firewall, it connects to your switch, it connects to your LAN, it connects to your clients, and you're done. But for some of our larger clients, the topology view is almost unusable. I don't really know how to solve that. I don't know if you can.

I would like to see a better IT Glue integration in Auvik. With most platforms, when they dump something into IT Glue, it just shows up as a configuration. That is somewhat helpful, but it's not as robust as it would be if it filled in a flex asset for network details, or if it took that topology view and somehow pushed that into IT Glue as an image, for example. We try to treat IT Glue as our source of truth for documentation, and the better integration we can get from Auvik into IT Glue, the more we don't have to go logging in to everything to check everything.

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

I get emails frequently about service interruptions, et cetera, but I don't experience them very often. I think a few weeks ago we had some collectors that started flaking out, but I'd seen the email, so I knew it wasn't a big deal. I do get those emails regularly, so it seems that they have problems frequently, but I don't experience them very often. Are they shooting themselves in the foot by letting me know? Probably. But at least they're being transparent.

The amount of effort it takes to set up one client, when you have one client, is the exact amount of work it's going to take to set up one client when you have 100 clients. In that sense, it doesn't scale with the number of clients, but it's certainly much more scalable than doing it all manually.

We deploy it to every one of our 50 clients and about 2,200 endpoints, and that includes computers. We have configured every switch and firewall and WAP that we possibly can in Auvik for management. 

All of our technicians have access to it. Support uses it to troubleshoot network problems and our technical alignment team uses it to review standardizations. Our centralized services team uses it to make sure that we're backing up configs and that the devices are working correctly. BCIO will use it for life cycle management and phasing devices in and out. We deploy it to all of our clients because the value makes it worth it.

I haven't had to use tech support very much. It's a pretty intuitive application. But the times I have had to contact them, I have usually done so with the chat so I can do other stuff. They always send me a knowledge base article and stick with me to make sure everything's working correctly. I have no complaints. It's been smooth.

Positive

The only "solution" I used previously was "sweat equity." You can rely on Auvik a lot more. It takes some of the human error out of the equation. I can be forgetful, so I assume most people are. You can't be 100 percent all of the time, but Auvik can get a lot closer. It's a lot more reliable.

If you have a lot of clients already, there can be a lot of work to get everything into Auvik and fully turning. That being said, you can drop a collector and start discovering network devices really fast. When we onboard a client, I'll drop a collector and let it start scanning and then I'll go do something else. I'll come back 10 minutes later and it has a fully populated network scan. So you can get up and running pretty quickly with just the bare bones.

But to really get a lot of the benefit out of it could take some work to get all your clients in there and get everything integrated. You do have to touch every device and configure it to point to the collector or put in the right community string. There can be a little ramp-up time, but it's worth it.

We have a lot of problems with licensing in many other solutions, but I've never run into a problem with Auvik licensing. That's a pretty good vote of confidence.

When comparing network monitoring solutions, if the concern is pricing, you need to factor in how much time the different solutions could potentially provide. If you can save 10 percent with this one and 40 percent with that one, but the last one costs a lot more, your time is valuable. You have to assess just how much easier it will be knowing you don't have to worry about something and how much more you can focus on other things. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis. 

Some of our clients are co-managed. They have technicians onsite who work for them and they work with us. One thing we do is give them access to Auvik and they just go crazy. They say, "Man, look at all these cool tools. You mean we get to have access to this?" Just being able to tunnel straight into a device within the Auvik portal saves a lot of time. I don't know if every network monitoring tool in that class can do that. There are a lot of features within Auvik that may not be present in others.

It is about as easy as any other SNMP monitor when it comes to monitoring and management functions. Sometimes, it can get a little tricky to get stuff logged in and connected to the collector, but that's not on Auvik. That's just authentication and networks.

We've used Auvik to generate tickets to alert technicians to go and set up SNMP or to look at a particular alert. That's not really what we use it for, but we've gotten some benefit from that in the past. It's not crucial, but we've saved some time with it.

Every solution requires maintenance, even if it's just checking in and making sure things are working. But I don't think there are a lot of things that break that we have to fix, unless it's something that we've broken, like changing a password or changing a community string. The agents that we deploy are usually pretty solid. I don't recall having to reinstall an agent recently. So it doesn't require a lot of maintenance. It's mostly just the setup time to get everything integrated and get everything working.

We are using it for more visibility on our network devices.

It did highlight a few things in the very beginning. When we were in the trial, it highlighted some misconfigurations, some of which were quite important to fix immediately. It has brought us to a better place from that perspective. There is comfort in knowing that there is something watching the devices. If a site was to go down, or something was to stop working, or someone plugged in something incorrectly where they shouldn't be, we would be notified, and then we could figure out how to fix it straight away, whereas before, we would be in the dark. We didn't have visibility on that before.

It provides a single integrated platform, which is very important because it saves time and it gets to the point very quickly. If there is something that's not quite right, we can find it and figure out a path to resolution.

It's very good for visualizing the network mapping and topology for our organization. It's really helpful. We do need network diagrams to be accurate and up-to-date for certain accreditations that we have. As we are still in our infancy with the product, with the diagrams that we've got, we do need to do a little bit of work. They are very detailed. They do show the connectivity parts, and once I tighten them up, they'd be sufficient for us to use for our audit purposes. They're good.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is pretty good. They are quite intuitive. It gives you the option to drill down into certain sites and see their connectivity and see what goes where. It's pretty good, especially when you get stuck into the filters and you start adding devices and adding different bits and pieces. It works well.

We've got various sites across the country. We aren't global, but in the UK, we've got various sites. It's very helpful to see the topology and what's going on in our other sites as well, whereas before, we had little to no visibility. This visibility is very important.

It helps keep device inventories up-to-date. It has saved time when it comes to us having audits and interrogations.

The alerting has been really useful. The integration with other vendors, not just using their SNMP feature, but the actual integration to other cloud-based solutions is also valuable. We use Cisco Meraki, and integration into that has been very helpful.

It's very important that it's user-friendly and easy to understand. They've got quite a good knowledge base as well. Their resource center is pretty helpful. I had to go there a couple of times.

The deployment could be better. It's something that we've done recently. Auvik uses something called a collector, and I added a collector to our main site. I only added it to the main site, but when it came to adding additional sites because this was in the testing phase, I had to reconfigure that collector. It wasn't overly clear about how to do that and how to share. They call it sharing a collector. I had to mess around a bit to reconfigure that collector and add some new sites. I originally set Auvik up as a single site and put the credentials. We share the credentials across the other sites as well. I did the credentials onto our headquarters, and then I realized that I could have added the credentials at the very top level or the organizational level. I had to do a bit of reconfiguring to move the credentials over, and then it scanned the device again to make sure they were the right credentials. So, reconfiguring was a little bit of a pain. In the initial setup phase, if it was described a bit better that if you use the same credentials, you can put them here instead of at the site level, that would've been quite beneficial. They could also mention that you can set your collector up as a shared collector from the very beginning. It could be that it does that, and I just missed that step. If that's not there, then just the description as to what it could do and how it would benefit, instead of having to retrospectively change it, would be useful.

There should be a slightly clearer understanding of how devices are charged. We integrated the Meraki system, and certain devices are chargeable and certain devices aren't chargeable. It would be quite useful to have some kind of message saying, "Right, we've discovered these devices on Meraki. Once you are monitoring them, you will be charged this per device, and there'll be an uplift of your billing every month." 

I have been using Auvik for a couple of months.

Although I haven't taken too much notice of these emails, I have received a fair few in our short period of being with Auvik that describe system outages and maintenance windows and changes. I was a bit surprised at how many I've had, but every time I've wanted to use it, it has been there. It's nice that they email to say that there are potential issues, but there seem to have been a fair few. The downtime hasn't affected us directly, but it potentially has been a fair bit.

It appears to be very scalable. In terms of usage, it spans the whole company's infrastructure. We've got five locations. It spans across all of those and most of the subnets at those locations as well. There are some irrelevant devices that don't need to be monitored there, but we have Cisco switches, and we have Meraki firewalls and wireless access points. We have also got some Polycom and Yealink desk phones that it monitors. It monitors our HP printers, and we've got some Lexmark printers. We monitor those across the sites, and obviously, we've got all of our end-user devices. So, we've got phones, laptops, and a whole mixture of tech that is connected to the end.

We are looking at expanding one of our warehouses to have a lot more infrastructure inside it. Its usage will be expanded. In terms of users, we've only two users who log into the dashboard.

It was pretty good. I only got in touch with them once about the collector we put in. They were pretty helpful. I'm happy to give them a 10 out of 10. They got to the point and helped me out.

Positive

We used PRTG, but it was decommissioned. It was only a free version. 

The initial setup was straightforward to add the single site, but when I wanted to change that collector to point at multiple sites and move the configuration of the credentials over to the top level, that was a bit of an arduous task.

We implemented Auvik out of the box. It took about an hour after the collector was implemented before our network mapping started to populate. I had to authorize the networks that it was detecting, and it took about an hour.

Overall, the deployment probably spanned over a couple of weeks. If I had dedicated time for it, it probably would've taken only a day or so to add all our sites and get everything as it should be.

In terms of the implementation strategy, there wasn't too much of a strategy because it was a trial that we then continued onward. We didn't really have too much of a strategy devised.

I deployed it myself. For maintenance, there is just our team, which includes me and my colleague. Maintenance is required only when we have changes on our network.

Personally, I have seen an ROI, but I am not sure if the decision holders who deal with spending money have seen that yet because it has not highlighted any issues. It has not had that value in their eyes. It will probably show its value when it highlights what's gone wrong and how quickly it could be repaired due to the information that it provides.

In terms of time savings as compared to our previous platform, the platforms that we used in the past were decommissioned. We were looking at finding alternatives, which is when Auvik came around. I'm not so sure it has had a chance to save too much time just yet because it has not highlighted anything that needs to be repaired. I can imagine it being a great time saver should something go wrong, but because we are only in our early stages of use, we've not been able to benefit from its fault finding so much just yet.

We have not yet seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR) because we've not had any problems.

Auvik has got quite a unique pricing model where you can spin up and spin down devices monthly. Obviously, there's the option to have a yearly commitment, but you can add different tiers of monitoring on devices. There are lots of bolt-ons and bits and pieces that you can choose to have. You can slim it down to something very cheap every month, or you can spin it up to whatever the requirements are, whereas others are a bit more finicky to set up and understand the billing.

The pricing could be tiered so that you get a discount for more devices. We're fairly early on in the billing process, but it could be slightly cheaper.

When we first signed up, it wasn't overly clear in terms of the devices that were chargeable. They seemed to be on the performance plan for some reason, as opposed to essentials, which had a higher tier of cost. So, I had it switched down to essentials. We use Meraki, and we also use another product called Cisco Umbrella. So, there are some aspects that we already have in other products that are a bit more detailed. I don't need additional functions, such as NetFlow, because we got Meraki Firewall, and we use Cisco Umbrella and all of their devices. We've already got the visibility that Auvik has, and we didn't need that portion of the billing. So, it cost a bit more initially because we were on this performance plan.

We did look into other products, but we didn't do a trial of them. I can't remember the name, but there were a few open-source products that we were considering for which we would have needed servers and other bits and pieces. Auvik being cloud-based was very appealing because we are very cloud-first. We did the test, and we liked it. So, we decided to carry on.

I would advise giving it the time it deserves to set it up correctly. Make sure that you are not preoccupied with other things. It doesn't take a lot of time, but just make sure that you aren't doing other things, and then you'll get it right the first time.

It's pretty straightforward. It takes a little bit of concentration. It's not something you could just set up in a rush. You would need to make sure that you're doing everything properly and giving it the attention it deserves, which sometimes I struggle to do because I multitask quite a bit.

It hasn't yet helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, but I can see it being able to do that. Similarly, its automation hasn't yet had an effect on our IT team's availability.

Comparing Auvik’s cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, I personally don't see any downside to it being in the cloud as opposed to being on-prem. It has security for logging in, and it's normally always available. It's easy to spin up collectors that will talk out to the cloud. You still have a small on-prem application, but the whole infrastructure, the system, and the database are all living in the cloud, which really helps. Personally, I find it brilliant. It's great having a cloud-based solution that is powerful, like this one.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use Auvik for monitoring networks across all of our sites for alerts, reporting, configuration backups, and troubleshooting. Auvik does a little bit of everything when it comes to networking.

I'm not the only person that utilizes Auvik, but I'm the only network engineer. The infrastructure team uses it for server monitoring. Security guys can also access it, but I'm the primary caretaker.

I monitor 34 sites with 200 managed devices, and about another hundred are unmanaged. Altogether, I have over 2,600 devices that are not networked. If you subtract the network from that, it's about 2,300 devices that aren't network devices, including printers, servers, and computers. Auvik crawls and finds those kinds of things on the network. That's what I mean by total picture.

I previously used SolarWinds, which I call a Swiss Army knife of network monitoring systems. SolarWinds is great. It does many things, but it's gotten too bloated and slow. It's not as intuitive as Auvik. SolarWinds didn't do mapping on its own, and the mapping provided was kind of clunky to get running because you have to manage the licensing and everything. Even after tweaking SolarWinds, I couldn't get the mapping capabilities Auvik gives me. 

Also, SolarWinds wasn't a one-stop shop. Auvik is the closest I've gotten to a single pane of glass. It's hard to judge whether Auvik has saved time over SolarWinds after two months because I'm still doing some slight tweaks. It took me months to get SolarWinds the way we need it here. Auvik is still a pretty new product for us. Though it's meeting our basic needs, I'm the kind of guy who likes to squeeze every bit of juice out of my fruit.

The out-of-the-box alerts were pretty on-point, so I've only had to create two alerts on my own. The reporting is easy to access, so pulling reports is more straightforward. That saves time. 

Also, I don't need to add devices to Auvik. It automatically crawls, finds them, and puts them in the inventory. I don't have to go back and draw maps. Auvik does that. Mapping in SolarWinds requires their map tool, a separate product you must install on the server itself. Drawing maps on that was painful. Discovery isn't something I need to do anymore. When I added five new devices to a site, it found them all and brought them into inventory. I didn't have to do that.

Auvik automatically keeps the device inventories updated. I'm shutting down SolarWinds this week. On Friday, I did my final inventory comparing SolarWinds and Auvik. I have not been updating SolarWinds, and Auvik has about 20 more devices on the network side alone because I don't have to go back through and update the inventory. It'll pull it in itself. When something is added, I get an alert saying the new device has been added to the network.

Auvik has sped up my resolution time because you can drill down in Auvik and look at the net flow information faster. The alerts also help, but if this is a data-driven event, I need to look at the net flow, which is much quicker. 

The monitoring and alerts are easy to use and set up. Discovery is the first step in monitoring, and that's a piece of cake with Auvik. It'll scan your networks once you get the credentials set up and automatically find newly added equipment as long as the same credentials are already on that gear. Auvik makes my job a lot easier. I don't have to keep going back to a monitoring system to add devices each time we bring something new. That part alone saves me time.

It's all intuitive and straightforward. The out-of-the-box alerts provided everything I needed, but I've made a couple of additional alerts. You can schedule maintenance windows in Auvik, and the solution won't send any alerts during that time. With other products, you have to turn off the alerts on each device if you don't set it up correctly. Ease of use is crucial because I'm the only network engineer at a company of 900, so I have many things to do. 

I have a single pane of glass. It's easier to go into one system where everything is easy to find. It's a one-stop-shop with everything you need instead of going into multiple products to get it done. I don't consider Auvik entirely cloud-based because you have collectors onsite. The portal for viewing your infrastructure is cloud-based. You don't need to get into a VPN or anything like that to get to it. It's two-factor authentication, so it's a little harder for bad actors to get to your data.

The ability to log in and run commands from the cloud is helpful. You can access a full command line on the device, so I don't need to VPN into the infrastructure, which helps when troubleshooting. It's also beneficial that it's not on-prem. If my leading site, where the on-prem solution is located, goes down, no place is being monitored. As long as the internet connection is up and the collector is running, all my sites are being monitored.

The mapping automatically finds all the interfaces but tags some of them incorrectly. For instance, if it can't find how a CPU interface is connected, it will use the MAC address last seen on the router and sometimes attribute cloud-connected devices to the route, but it's not actually there. That's not a true connection.

It isn't going to the cloud. It's going directly back to the router. I've talked to Auvik support about that already. They're looking into it. Overall, mapping could be a little better. Though they do a great job, there's still room for improvement. It's 100% accurate for some sites but only 90% for others. It gives you a complete view of how things are connected for the most part. Auvik still struggles with wireless bridges and things of that nature. However, Auvik isn't the only product missing that, and there is a simple way to make those connections myself.

I did a couple of trials with Auvik, but we've officially been using the solution for about three months now.

I'm through my testing phase, and now that I'm in my third month using Auvik, I can say it's pretty stable. I had one issue with Syslog, but they fixed it. They made a change that caused an unforeseen issue in Syslog. They resolved the problem in the next release.

Auvik's scalability is pretty good. I'm monitoring 30-plus sites. I was running 30 of them off one collector, so the scalability is pretty good.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. 

Positive

SolarWinds does many of the same things, but Auvik has a different approach. If we have some networking event, we can find the problem machine in Auvik and see what it has been talking to a lot faster. 

Auvik is a little more agile. We can find things a little faster with Auvik than in SolarWinds. We don't need to dig as much. The graphical nature of the product makes it easier to navigate.

Deploying Auvik is very straightforward. I implemented it pretty much out of the box. When I had my customer success meetings with Auvik support, I had already done everything they told me to do. I'm experienced in setting up things, so I had it up and running by the time we met to review our technical onboarding.

I can onboard a small site in 10 minutes. Once you input credentials at the top level, it's only a matter of putting in subnets that you want scanned, waiting for them to be scanned, and verifying everything is there. It's about 10 minutes per site once your credentials are squared away.

Once that is ready, it takes Auvik an hour or so per site to stitch everything together. Much of it is on the backend because it makes all those maps and everything like that, which takes time. It has to pull in the data from SNMP and CDP. It looks at all the interfaces and stitches together maps, so it depends on how many collectors you have. It takes longer if you're running a couple of collectors for an entire enterprise because a few collectors are doing a lot of work.

It's much faster if you have a collector at every site. It's probably 15 to 20 minutes per site. I only used one collector when I started because I wanted to see how hard I could push it. It took much less time to set up than SolarWinds. The discovery is pretty simple for what you have to do from my end. As long as you have your credentials at the top level, you add a new site, throw in your subnets, and it finds them for you. 

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance after deployment. I wanted to stress test the collector to see what might break it. I had 30 sites on one collector at one time, but I decided to go back to the suggested implementation.

With a single collector on 30-plus sites, the daily tasks were completed, and we weren't close to using up the CPU or memory on this device—this wasn't a beefy server. It was built to their specs but not overly powerful. Once your collector runs, you don't need to do much with this product because the brains are in the cloud. If your collector goes down, bringing up a new one is a piece of cake.

It's apparent off the bat how much time I'm saving by doing tasks because of the ease of use. Once I got everything discovered, it was evident that I would save time by automatically drawing maps and keeping them updated. I immediately noticed that I would save time, and time is money. I always have several projects and no longer worry about my inventory because Auvik does this for me.

Once the devices are configured, and the collectors are installed, I don't need to add anything to the monitoring system or make sure the backups are there. Auvik grabs it for me.

It's worth the price, depending on how you use the product. Price is a significant component of any purchase; for me, it all goes back to visibility. I have more visibility into everything now than I had before. SolarWinds was on every node, and every interface had to be licensed. With Auvik, the cost could be the same or more depending on the level of visibility you want. The price and value vary according to your network infrastructure and the information you want.

If you want a complete picture of your entire network, then Auvik is a better choice. SolarWinds is a better option if you're only looking at network devices. I think Auvik's price per node is a tad high. That's probably my only knock against Auvik. Your network nodes are billable, including servers, printers, or other devices. You have visibility into those things as well. In other products, each one of those devices is a billable node, so Auvik gives us a little bit more visibility than we had before because now we have more devices in the system.

We looked at Entuity and Datadog. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I deduct a point for the mapping and reporting. I like everything else that Auvik does. The only aspect I don't like 100% is the mapping. Also, they have canned reports instead of a built-in report builder. You have to extract the data in Power BI or some other way. They have great pieces, but I can't customize them and create my own within their system.

We use Auvik to monitor our whole network infrastructure. It helps us keep track of issues that arise and things that go offline. We have one main corporate office here that has multiple buildings and a lot of private fiber.

We have 68 access points, 46 switches, and 240 employees. Every person here utilizes the network on a PC, iPad, or iPhone. All of our CNC machines are on the network. That adds up to about 600 total devices on the network, including everything with an IP address. 

Auvik allows us to get on top of issues before they become an outage. It alerts us about when dropped packets on an access point get out of hand, so I know to look at that. It speeds up the remediation time for network issues by about 25% to 50%. I get a heads-up about all the potential issues in my network. 

I don't have to worry as much about the network because I have something telling me when issues are happening, so I can be proactive. If a situation is happening, I know where to look because I've gotten emails about what's going down before the problem hits my desk.

I know about power outages at our facilities before somebody calls me about it because Auvik sends me a report that the network at one of our facilities is offline. I can investigate and find that the power went out long enough that the battery backup for the switch gear ran out. 

I have peace of mind because Auvik constantly records the state of the network configurations on all of my devices, and it provides one place to find everything. I don't need to waste time searching a million different settings in a million different pieces of software and endpoints. It's given me back some time. It has saved me time because I don't need to create Visio drawings of our network. That was massively time-consuming, and everybody does it differently. Nothing ever looks great, but Auvik's printout of the network map looks phenomenal.

We don't have a global footprint, but we utilize multiple buildings. Auvik has given us a lot of visibility by allowing us to see what's going on in other buildings a lot easier. We can remotely log into networking devices through Auvik, so you don't have to manually open a window and remember the login credentials. Everything is stored inside the app on the cloud. It's easy to jump in and hit the ground running instead of trying to look up an Excel document or a OneNote with information on how to get into the device.

We use a product called PDQ Inventory to keep track of our software inventory, but Auvik helps us manage our network inventory, letting us know what's on the network, and where it's located.

The network flow piece is the most useful. We can identify the busiest parts of the network based on the reporting from the switches about what is utilizing the most bandwidth on specific switch ports. I can narrow down which segments of the network might be having issues.

Auvik has everything I need in one place. I don't feel like I need other modules to use the product. In the past, we had about five different pieces of software, none of which did anything like what Auvik does. It provides a whole network map breaking down all the connections and ports so that you can drill down. I had nothing like that in the past that let me track everything. It has helped to see the state of my network at any time.

I like Auvik's cloud-based solution. I prefer to have a collector that pulls all the information and sends it up to the cloud so that I can access that from basically anywhere. It's all multifactor authentication, so I don't have to worry about people hacking that. At the same time, I also love that I don't have to tie up computing resources here in my data center locally. I like that better than setting up something that collects it on-premises. Then I have to back that up somewhere. It creates a larger overhead to maintain.

I love the network visualization because drawing the network out in Visio was becoming almost impossible because of our network's size. The ability to show a dynamic, updated view of our network has been a huge help. I enjoy that because you can drill down into visualization and focus on different segments of your network

When I change IP addresses on a device or on a server, I have to wait for Auvik to figure out that change. It will tell me the device is offline until Auvik scans the whole subnet again and finds it. If I change 25 devices, I'll get 50 emails in a short time because they've gone offline. 

I'd love the ability to change that where I can update that device with the IP address without it going offline. That goes against the idea of a system that dynamically scans. It's information overload sometimes when you need to change a bunch of factors. You get inundated with emails. I would almost love a button whenever you first log in that says maintenance window, and then it would maybe take some of those alerts away.

It's fairly intuitive but sometimes you have to search for things because it's hidden in the user interface, so I think that could be improved a little bit. The search could be better because they have these strange search terms. Instead of being able to look for what you want, you have to lay out the query in a specific way to get results.

We've also been dealing with some weird bugs lately. We get alerts on miscellaneous items that go offline and online all the time. I've reached out to support, and they said that they've got a fix that they rolled out. However, we're still experiencing the issue, so I've got to work with them to fix that. They seem to be on top of the support.

I've used Auvik for a little over a year. 

Auvik is pretty stable. I often get emails about preemptive maintenance outage windows, but there's never been a time when I needed to access it but couldn't. My computer also struggles with visualization because it's a little older. I'll usually remote into another computer that handles it better.

It seems to be like they would be able to handle quite a bit, especially being cloud-based. I feel that if I had to triple or quadruple the size of my network, they would be able to handle it really well. It doesn't seem like it would be tough for them.

I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. There have been times when it has been excellent. However, I still have some issues where things go offline and come back online. They reached out after the ticket to ask, "Hey, would you recommend Auvik to your colleagues?" That was the first time any company has reached out to me, so it sounds like they care about that score.

Positive

I used a free solution from a company called Spiceworks. It was a network monitoring software that listened to SNMP traffic. However, it got overloaded with the size of our network and wouldn't function how I needed it to. The alerts were out of control. It was too much for me, so I turned it off and looked for something else.

We set up Auvik over a demo call, and they said they would set me up with a production-ready environment. I would have 30 days to play with it. After that, they got me into a little bit more in-depth setup. It took me and the technician 30 minutes in total. About 15 minutes after the installation, we were collecting data and setting up alerts.

It's phenomenal how quickly Auvik was set up. It reminded me of another system that I used called Action1, a remote endpoint management solution. We installed the collector for that, and within 20 seconds, it had installed its agent on every machine with a domain login in my environment. Auvik was very similar to that. It was up and running and collecting data within minutes.

The network map started to populate the same day. It takes a while to get most of the map worked out, but it started populating within an hour or so. My previous solutions were fairly easy to set up. Still, I never got them to work in a way that served my purpose, and I ultimately uninstalled them because the features weren't good enough to justify the amount of time it took to set them up and get them working. 

The majority of them were free tools that I had looked at before going with Auvik. I  generally understand why they were free, which led me to the point of needing to buy a service where I had support. I need support to fall back on if I don't know what I'm doing rather than just sort of meandering through a free tool.

Auvik doesn't require much maintenance. Suppose I'm looking for some information on why something's happening or what a device is, and I don't have any information besides spreadsheets. In that case, I go to Auvik to get an idea of that device because it has some good guesstimates based on a MAC address. 

We saw value almost instantly because of the visibility we get into the network. If I'm curious about why a device is dropping offline, I have a map to see what devices are offline and dig into what's going on. I can check to see the state of the network if a lot of things are going offline. We didn't have that before. We were able to get value out of it within the first week.

Auvik is affordable. The license was under $4,000 annually for our setup. That covers a lot of switches, firewalls, and integration. It was well worth the price.  I think it's around $20 per device per quarter.

It's the best monitoring software we can get at that per-device cost. They get pretty aggressive with pricing. When you add network switching that will be managed by Auvik, you'll see it on your next quarterly bill. You have to choose not to manage it whenever you install it if you don't want to be billed for it. You can keep your costs under control if you don't want to manage a device you're adding to the network.

I looked at SolarWinds. Their problem was that they had just been hacked at a pretty high level, and I didn't want anything to do with a vendor that had any hacking going on. The other one was called Netwrix. We had a demo of ManageEngine, but setting it up was like pulling teeth. I was in the middle of the demo with the people, and nothing was working right.

With Auvik, we were up in 15 minutes after downloading the collector and getting it on the network. It started populating data without the need to provide a lot of information. It went so smoothly. That sold me on it.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. My advice would be to try the demo and kick the tires as much as possible to find out if it's the right tool for you. Annual pricing is cheaper, but I believe they do monthly licenses if you're still not. Utilize it as much as possible before signing a contract.

We use it for network monitoring. We don't do a lot of systems monitoring with it. We predominantly use it for core switches, external network adapters, and other similar things but not for the endpoints or server hardware.

We are currently not using any of the automation functions.

It definitely assists with visibility into our remote and distributed networks. We don't necessarily use the Windows side of things, but we do have a couple of systems that are monitored. It is almost like a ping test or just a sanity check. From that perspective, it definitely helps. This visibility is 100% critical.

It helps keep device inventories up-to-date. It has saved us time because we have pretty much everything at a glance. It does allow us to prioritize what needs to be replaced or anything that would be necessitated by the device inventory, such as software updates or vulnerability patches. It definitely helps, especially with the end-of-life hardware. We're able to determine that and apply a device lifecycle to it.

In terms of helping our teams focus on high-value tasks and delegating low-level tasks to junior staff, in our network team, we do everything. There are all types of tasks that would be normally assigned to juniors. It definitely provides a lot more visibility and helps in delegating specific things. For example, when an interface is flapping or a port is shut down, it is a lot easier to delegate such a task. We're an MSP staff that doesn't necessarily deal with high-end network equipment. Turning a port back on is something most of us can do as long as we can log into a command prompt. Even the server admins can do some network tasks if need be. Within that, it does allow us to prioritize and state, "Okay, a senior network admin can figure out why this entire site is down," versus, "We need to update a switch."

Our mean time to resolution has reduced due to the alerting system.

We are seeing that the monitoring is very accurate. We are seeing that in terms of problems and solutions, there is a lot of functionality to it, such as APIs. So, you can dig down. You can dig deep into it. It does provide very useful metrics, and it has improved a large portion of our day-to-day operations.

The network monitoring portion of it has pretty sane defaults, and it is fairly good as a product. It is probably one of the better ones that I've used.

The visibility on the site itself is a bit of a problem. We do have the alerts panel, but there is no central monitoring. When we had requested how we would do this to place it up in the NOC and how we would view it and everything else, their answer was to use a third-party tool, such as Power BI. That was the response that we got. A front-end component to show the actual NOC operations at a glance is not present. That would be a major con in my opinion, especially for what we do as a data center. 

The actual adding of networks, systems, and everything like that is fairly easy, but the problem that I have is getting the metrics out. Specifically, if you go to the Auvik webpage, sign in, and go through the alerts and everything else, they don't offer any plasma display with a red light, green light, or stop light indicating this device is in an error state, down, etc. To get around this, we have to use their API. I had to code an entire interface to work around that lack of information. 

One of my major concerns or my major problems is the API hasn't always been super reliable. Sometimes things get broken. Sometimes it is down for a little bit. It doesn't seem to have the same reliability as their primary service, the actual web page itself. The API reliability is problematic when you apply a user account. I have a super admin account, and I have an API user that is a super admin as well. I create a new site as a super admin, and you'd expect everything to fall through, where the top level is the super admin and the subsites don't have access. We have network admins that create sites and DCOM sites and everything else all the time. When that happens, it breaks the alerts API and gives a 403, forbidden error, and that's across everything. If it can't access the top-level tenant, it just breaks the site. There are ways of counteracting that, and we're aware of the pitfalls there. 

We have had the API function in erratic ways where we do filtration based on various criteria, for example, if a ticket has been dismissed, if it is in maintenance, or if it is critical. We have filters for all the metrics. Sometimes, we had a couple of tickets where it doesn't acknowledge those filtrations or the filters, which causes a little bit of a problem, and we have to do a little bit of a sanity check within our code itself. It almost seems a little bit like they do focus on the front end and making it visible, but it seems like the API is almost a second-class citizen.

We've been using Auvik for about two years.

Because the API is what we use frequently, we've had various issues. It could use some work, but in the front-end portion of it, where I'm assuming most of the customers would be looking, we haven't had any downtime that hasn't been pre-planned and reported to us in advance.

Its scalability seems to be fairly good. We're not having any real problems. With the way we're doing things now, it seems to be fairly scalable, and I don't think we'll have any problems.

In terms of our environment, we have operations predominantly in New York. Specifically, there are a few in Manhattan. We have a few in Queens and Suffolk County. We do have one location that is in Singapore, which is one of the smaller operations that we have, but it is predominantly located in the New York, Long Island region.

They were very friendly. They were very good. Generally, if there was a problem, I was able to talk to an engineer on their side relatively quickly, which was a good thing. I was able to very easily prove the point that I had with the calls and everything else, and it worked flawlessly. After I was able to show them the output and everything else, they were able to resolve the problem. I believe they were able to resolve it after six hours or eight hours of having the call with them. That was a pretty good response time in my opinion.

I would definitely rate them a 9 out of 10. Getting a 10 is almost unheard of. All things considered, support is one of the better parts of Auvik in my opinion.

Positive

We have been using OpsRamp. We got Auvik because one of our larger customers used OpsRamp and then changed to Auvik. In our case, my boss said, "Well, why don't we use it too? They seem to be really enthused by it." However, that customer doesn't use it with the same use case. They monitored a lesser number of sites and locations. Their use case is slightly different and their monitoring is not the same, so it works for them, but it doesn't necessarily have the same impact on us. 

In terms of the consolidation of tools, we are still using multiple software types. Auvik is what we use exclusively to monitor network areas. We are currently using OpsRamp with which we are monitoring network hardware as well. We also used Kaseya, which was the worst software for monitoring anything. That was the reason why we immediately binned it as fast as we could, but we also have a couple of other different software. We are using an application manager. We do have Zabbix, and we monitor some things through that as well. That's mostly the ESXi and servers that are on-prem. We are a data center, but we also provide managed services as well. We have a lot of different systems within a lot of different operating systems and environments. Some are PCI. Some are non-PCI. So, we do use other software, and Auvik fulfills some of the same monitoring purposes but for different clients or different hardware.

In terms of time-saving by switching to Auvik, the OpsRamp software has some faults and after the actual interface that I wrote was deployed and started to be used by our NOC, there have been time savings. However, getting to that point took a little bit more frustration in setting up compared to some of the other products that we've used.

We spent substantially less time with Auvik than with our previous solution. The initial setup was relatively straightforward, but my experience level is closer to DevOps than a traditional Systems Administrator. Between my own level of experience and my network team, it was fairly easy to get it deployed.

We were able to deploy it, but then we found that for our monitoring needs, it was a little bit lackluster. I had to code the webpage.

In terms of maintenance, with regard to the API and the coding work, maintenance is required, but it is infrequent.

We did it by ourselves.

There were quite a few options that we looked at. It has been a while, but there was a large selection of software that we've tried, both on-prem and cloud-based. We did monitor or look at NinjaRMM and ScriptLogic. There was Nagios for the on-prem and Applications Manager from ManageEngine. We checked out Enable as well.

When comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus the on-prem network monitoring solutions, they serve different use cases, but the cloud-based Auvik has its advantages due to the fact that we don't have to have firewall ports opened. We can very easily monitor various devices and various client sites without having to be concerned about any leakages because we have the accumulator of the agent gateway and whatever the terminology that they use. It definitely has its pros and cons in the sense of firewall access, deployment speed, and monitoring aspects. We can apply a template across all different types of devices, and the scanning works perfectly in that sense.

My advice would be dependent on how many sites you are monitoring and what you are intending on monitoring. For network equipment, Auvik is very good. For hardware and software, such as Linux, Windows, ESXi, and other similar things, it is very poor in those regards. That would be the major thing. If you are intending on having one tool to rule them all, I would probably steer you toward that limitation because it is quite limited in the endpoint monitoring and server monitoring, but it very well exceeds in network monitoring.

In terms of providing a single integrated platform, the API access to it is good. It does provide that, but the actual OS and software side of things that are not network devices is a little bit lacking.

Overall, I would rate Auvik a 7 out of 10.

We are a small company of about 15 people. We do open-source kernel development for lab machines. We have about 100 of these machines and they are all connected using smart routers. However, it is hard to monitor the routers' states.

We do open-source driver development as a contractor for other companies that may have licensing issues. We write the open-source network drivers for Linux and other open-source operating systems. That is the reason we need good network monitoring software: so that we know where there are problems in our network drivers. If the network drivers produce very bad network traffic, we need to know the first time. We have a lot of test devices, laptops, running in our lab, and they are currently monitored by Auvik, and we are very satisfied.

Before we got Auvik, we had to write scripts to get every device's state, to see the upload speed and download speeds, and whether there was any abnormal download or upload bandwidth. Because we develop network drivers, these are very important metrics for us, so that we know if there is any bad traffic in our network. Previously, we had to update our scripts every time there was an update to our routers' firmware. And if we had to update our requirements, we needed to rewrite the scripts and redeploy them on all of our routers. That required a lot of manual work. Auvik helped us eliminate that work.

Previously, when we managed the system, we needed to write our own script to run a single command on all the routers. Now, we can do that on the console. We can select everything and run a single command for all the devices with a single click.

A lot of tasks used to be repetitive work, like for new-device support. One of the really great points about Auvik is that it helps to reduce all that toil, including debugging scripts and maintaining them for the latest version.

The most important thing is that you can control everything, every device, all at once. As a unified platform, it handles all kinds of devices and all kinds of brands. If we decided to buy a new brand of router, we wouldn't need to check the manual and write new configuration scripts or record configuration macros ourselves. Auvik handles everything for us.

Before Auvik, we used multiple applications for managing things. Every week, we save hours. Previously, we spent a lot of time watching dashboards to see what went wrong. When a bug would occur, we would need to dump all the logs and look at everything. Now, we can usually diagnose everything within 30 minutes to an hour. It is saving three to four software-engineer-hours per week. That is a lot.

Auvik saves time and effort for our IT team. We can automate more things with the help of Auvik. It makes our team more available, always. It not only helps with availability of the software engineers on the IT team but with the availability of all our IT people. It has eliminated a lot of low-level tasks. And sometimes, it could be reducing work for senior engineers. Some of our issues can be hard to resolve, especially when dealing with the in-lab hardware. It can be hairy. Those weekly hours can be better used for the introduction of new devices or maintaining the high availability of our devices better. We can focus on expanding our labs a lot. It makes us more scalable, overall.

One of the most valuable features is the remote monitoring. It monitors the egress and ingress bandwidth and you can add custom rules to monitor if something is wrong. You can also add your own metrics if needed.

Auvik provides us with a unified management console. It is a website that displays all your routers, network switches, and devices connected to that router. You can easily see everything in that single dashboard.

You can use rule-based or simple, program-based monitoring to see if there is any abnormal traffic. 

It has good support for our devices, including our routers and Ethernet switches that come from the major brands. We are using Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, and Auvik has very good support for them. And it has pretty good support for other major brands like Netgear and TP-Link, as well. One of the reasons we choose Auvik is because the devices we currently use overlap with its list of supported devices.

Overall, the monitoring and management functions of Auvik are easy to use, but at times they seem oversimplified. Sometimes, we need more complicated scripting. Only using the basic logical rules like AND or OR or NOT is not enough. It can make the rules too complicated.

Also, when you load the Auvik website, it shows the topology. From my experience, it is mostly accurate. When we configured our network, there were some mismatches between the automatically-detected network topology and the actual topology. Some of the devices were not detected or were not supported by Auvik. We were able to manually modify things and everything has worked well since then.

Another issue is that to use Auvik you have to have a dedicated machine, either a virtual or Windows machine. Auvik continuously listens to the devices to look for all the devices on the network. This is a problem because it is a single point of failure. If that machine fails, all the functionality of Auvik stops. We can have redundant nodes, but it is still a problem.

Another problem is that it only works on Intel processors. Some of our machines do not use Intel processors. This was a problem initially because we had to get a new machine that runs the Auvik service. I would like to see it support more platforms and operating systems.

We started the 14-day trial plan this summer, and then we decided to purchase a license. So we have been fully using it for four or five months.

So far, the uptime has been really ideal.

Performance-wise, it's also good. For our use cases the monitoring machine is just a server, but it is not that powerful. It uses a lot of networking I/O, but it hasn't caused any network congestion.

It is scalable.

We have not been in touch with their technical support that often, but on occasion. Most of the team is in Toronto or the Eastern Time Zone and we are located in the Pacific Time Zone. But they are pretty responsive and their technical support team is pretty professional and reliable.

Positive

We didn't use any solution other than our own scripts to maintain the network.

As the head of IT, I led the work of deploying Auvik. It is straightforward because you use a new machine to run Auvik. It still needs to be part of the same VLAN as the other devices, but we didn't see any real glitches.

Our deployment is just a single location and we only use it for our lab devices. The lab has multiple layers of switches, Layer 3 switches, and routers, and all the test devices are managed over SNMP and Intel vPro.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping went pretty fast. After it started running, it populated almost immediately, within minutes. But to get it fully propagated and have every device fully scanned took a while. That was expected.

We did our test of Auvik in a physically isolated, small testing network during the trial period. When we actually deployed it in our prod environment, it went pretty smoothly. We followed the playbook and it worked well.

The time that Auvik takes to search all the devices and get everything propagated is average or slightly above average. If there is a device update, for example, and a router reboots, it could take a while for it to be rediscovered by Auvik. I think that is because the frequency with which Auvik checks devices is pretty limited. If it worked otherwise, it would make the whole network congested. So the speed of checking devices is throttled and that means it could take minutes to get the latest state of devices. But once everything is online, you get real-time information.

We haven't had to do any maintenance on Auvik itself.

We did it ourselves and we didn't run into any issues. We had two software engineers involved.

We have only used it for a few months, but in the future we are going to expand our testing-devices fleet. We are going to double our number of testing devices. For most of the tests, the waiting time will be cut in half. Developers will spend less time waiting for tests to finish running everything and spend more time on actual development.

It is on a monthly subscription plan and it's charged by the device. We decided to use it for a year, first, to see how good it is.

PRTG Network Monitor and LogicMonitor were quite a bit more expensive compared to our current solution. Some of the other solutions we looked at are one-time purchases, but they are longer-term investments. For our projects, Auvik is more elastic. Per router, per month, it is a fixed price. We negotiated and got a more competitive price.

We did shop around for other network monitors to see what the best option was before we decided to buy Auvik. We tried PRTG Network Monitor and we tried LogicMonitor, but both are pretty focused on automatic network monitoring using protocols that are common to all devices, like SNMP. 

Auvik attracted us because of two things. One was that it is easy to configure. You don't need to set up your own web server or something like that. There is a trade-off there. If you do everything yourself, you own all the data within your network. However, that scenario is more vulnerable to external threats. But if you give all the network topology to websites like Auvik, there could be some privacy or security concerns. We did an evaluation and it seemed that Auvik would be a reliable partner for us.

The second thing that attracted us was Auvik's pricing, which is pretty competitive.

In terms of deployment, Auvik is a mixed model. You don't need to buy a dedicated machine from Auvik, but you need something that can run the Auvik monitor, whether it is a Docker instance or just a physical machine. We chose to use a physical machine mostly for security. That gives us better physical isolation from the rest of our network and makes it easier to manage and monitor if an attack were to occur.

As a very small company with a limited IT team, we found that Auvik is really helpful when you don't have a large IT team to do a lot of things. A lot of tasks can be done by Auvik and it will really help automate things.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization provided by Auvik is an eight or nine out of 10. There are some glitches, but it is easy to handle.

On the whole, it is a good solution. There are some issues, but I'm really satisfied.

We're a managed services provider that caters primarily to movie theater clients. Most of our Auvik collectors are deployed at active movie theaters and point-of-sale environments.

We use Auvik to get alerts on network activity and server resource utilization. We monitor firewalls, interfaces, traffic bandwidth utilization, and VPN usage. Auvik alerts us when a VPN or other device goes down. We monitor aspects like port utilization and which switches are being used for what or how much traffic goes across ports.

We don't automate anything through Auvik. We have other tools we use for automating tasks on our systems. We're utilizing Auvik specifically for visibility into the networks and SNMP-assisted log alerts and functions like that. When those are triggered, other tools outside Auvik run the daily automation routines.

It provides a single integrated platform for monitoring, but we use some other RMM tools to log into our servers and things like that. Those have some monitoring built into them, so we get duplicate alerts along with those. If a hard drive on a server fills up, I'll get an alert from Auvik and our RMM solution. But there's no other platform offering more monitoring or alerts that Auvik's not giving us. Auvik gives us more than what all of our other platforms give us, and it's all in one spot.

Auvik helps us be proactive versus reactive. We stay ahead of the curve by getting alerts and knowing that a problem could potentially occur. The ability to resolve potential issues before they become a problem is a massive benefit for us.

The visualization is excellent, and our customers will speak to that too. We often export the map it creates and hands it off to customers, so we don't spend lots of time manually creating these things in Visio or Lucidchart. We don't have to use any of those kinds of tools anymore.

I might have had trouble with the visualization if I hadn't had all those sessions with them to walk us through all the technical points of it. There's a lot of information, so it's like trying to drink from a fire hose. They handed all that information about filtering and using the solution in those technical calls. I think they know that you'll get hooked and become a long-term customer once you get familiar with it and understand how intuitive it is.

The visibility into remote networks has been immense. It's quite a big project to swap out some network switches for a new customer. We weren't familiar with the current network. We deployed Auvik on the web and scanned the switch ports to understand what was on the other end of each switch. It helped us replace those switches and plug everything into their new destinations on the correct VLANs. It's a huge deal for us.

We have it set up so that various alerts go to different teams. If an alert comes in for hard drive corruption on a desktop, that will automatically go to the manager of the help desk team instead of the server infrastructure team. That works pretty well. 

Auvik keeps our device inventories updated, saving us time because we know what is deployed and what has been decommissioned. It's also helpful from a billing perspective. It was a manual process of exporting reports from our RMM solution to do billing per device. We can do it all through Auvik because we can see what is active and what isn't.

We're a pretty small shop, so Auvik has helped us a ton. I would spend two to three hours a day manually doing this if we had to put it down to an actual number. With Auvik, it takes no more than 30 minutes of just browsing through alerts in one spot, creating tickets, assigning them to our resources, and taking care of things that need to be done.

Auvik is easy to use. It took some time to set it up, and they were pretty good to us. They offered us around six sessions with a technician to help us set up the monitors we wanted. After we were trained properly, I had no issues using it.

It has been crucial for us to have all these monitoring capabilities in one place. That's why we've been willing to shell out the monthly expense. It's helped us tremendously.

Configuring alerts is pretty tedious. It would be nice if they had a wizard who walked you through instead of having everything turned on or off from the start. 

For example, it could have some radio buttons and ask you, "When this kind of alert happens, where would you like the alert to go?" Is it push alerts to a cell phone or an email address? Is it simply alerting? I think an initial onboarding wizard would help you to build out Auvik and get more out of it from the front end.

We first used Auvik when it came out or when ConnectWise started pushing them. That was in 2019. We used it for about a year. I don't remember why we stopped using the product, but we picked it up again eight months ago and have been using it consistently since.

We've been with Auvik for eight months, and we've had a few alerts that Auvik collectors are not communicating with the solution. We had three of those in an eight-month period, and they were fixed within an hour. I'm pretty sure some of those came in overnight while they were doing maintenance. The uptime has been reasonable. 

It's pretty easy to scale up Auvik. We cater to movie theaters, so many of our sites are cookie-cutter from our end when we set them up. It would be nice to have the ability to copy a site and apply the template to another site. 

This may be a solution that they offer, but I don't know. We've never been able to do that before. In terms of deploying the collectors, the scalability is fine. After that, you need to go in and approve all the networks you want to scan. That takes at least an hour.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. I needed some help setting up an alert to monitor the VPN. I needed to get an alert if a specific VPN tunnel went down. I had no issues with that. They sent me a quick knowledge base article on how to configure the alert.

Positive

Previously, we used some open-source solutions called Observium and Libre. They're both SNMP and sys log monitoring tools hosted internally. We had to maintain the servers and do the updates. A lot of time went into that, and it would break frequently. When it broke down, we'd lose a lot of data and dedicate significant resources to maintaining the solution. That's the main reason we switched back to Auvik. Once we got into Auvik, we realized we got so much more data through it.

Auvik's cloud platform was a critical reason why we switched. When you're hosting an on-prem solution, you need the resources to maintain it. You have to apply patches to the software and maintain the infrastructure it's running on. In terms of capabilities, Auvik is like a hybrid solution. The platform is on the cloud, but you have an on-prem collector agent running these scans. There aren't any gaps in the data that it can obtain, and it's much easier not to have to maintain the infrastructure.

The deployment was straightforward. You create a site on the web portal, and it gives you an installer. You download the collector onto the device you want to monitor, and it starts collecting data. After deploying the collector, the network map takes 15 to 30 minutes.

We have Auvik deployed to around 25 sites, and our networks are heavily segmented. We have to create extensive rules on our end, which isn't necessarily an Auvik thing. We want one device to see everything on every network segment and VLAN. You have to have a rule specified for that. It took an hour at each location to get Auvik fully deployed. We started with those technical calls to understand the controls needed in the firewalls. Now we have a template that we use to deploy.

Configuring the alerts took four to six hours worth of technical calls. A lot of those were global. Those alerts could trickle down through each customer site as we had them set up. Our previous solution probably took the same amount of time to onboard a new site. At the end of the day, we have no internal resources dedicated to maintaining the infrastructure whatsoever. It runs and collects the data. We just log in and review it from there. It saves us at least two to three hours per week in the long run. It doesn't require any maintenance after deployment. 

In our experience, you get what you pay for. Everything is priced based on its actual value. I think Auvik is on the pricey side, but it has been worth it for us. It depends on how much you will use this and the level of visibility you need into the networks you're monitoring. Some managed services providers don't do much monitoring, while others monitor extensively, so it depends on how much it means to you. If you go with a low-end solution, you'll miss out on quite a few capabilities. On the higher end, you need to justify that cost.

I understand the pricing model with it, but I don't know the details about how much we pay monthly. I am not usually the one that handles it within our organization.

We did not look at any other solutions this time around. Initially, we were a ConnectWise customer, so we got a free trial to test it out. After we left, we decided to come back because it was a project where we needed visibility into a customer site. I knew Auvik provided that capability, and we did it. Once the owner of our company was able to get in and poke around through that, he was like, "Oh wow." So, he decided to sign back up for it.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. To implement Auvik, you must understand what you're trying to monitor. If you don't know where you're trying to go, it's much harder to pave the road. You must understand how to allow that monitoring within your infrastructure before trying to get it. 

We ran into a problem when we were deploying the collector and were only getting limited amounts of data because particular ports are closed on the firewall. We weren't getting alerts within Auvik saying something wasn't happening because it was blocked. It just wasn't working, so we had to figure out the hard way to create rules in our firewalls to allow the collector to get its data.