We performed a comparison between Auvik Network Management (ANM) and Plixer Scrutinizer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Monitoring Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"It also integrates with our ticketing system. We use ConnectWise and having that integration is valuable for billing and for all-around general management. Having one product that can integrate with everything is valuable because we don't have to worry about building out APIs or custom maps to do that for us."
"I don't worry about the scalability of the solution because it is quite a broad, scalable, modern platform."
"Among the most valuable features are the hardware life cycle and configuration backups, when applicable... When it does show you the hardware life cycle for, say, a Cisco device and the configuration backup, that's the most useful aspect for me as a network engineer."
"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."
"I've found the topology mesh graph helpful, and I like the other features that factor into my work with Kubernetes."
"I like the fact that it's easy to set up and learn our network. I've used some other systems where it takes a lot of time and effort to manage the monitoring system, so you get what you put into it. The nice thing about Auvik is that you put the credentials in, put the agent on the network, and it just does its thing. It sets up alerts that you would most likely turn on anyway without even having to do it. If you add another new device to the network, it detects it and sets alerts up for that device. With the other systems that I've used, I had to manually add those devices in and manually set the alerts for new devices. I like that it's an almost set-it-and-forget-it sort of system."
"The ability to map out the network topology is one of the top features I like about Auvik. It's one of the best on the market. They have a feature called Loopback Detection, which has helped us, in many scenarios easily detect that without having to physically go to the location to see if there is a loopback somewhere."
"The SNMP discovery features are impressive; few products are as robust in their abilities, and it discovered objects I didn't think it would."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic."
"The solution helps to enrich the data context of our network traffic. It allows me to see what applications are most in use on a slightly historical basis, going back a day or week at tops. It allows me to tune QoS or traffic shaping around what's being used. It saves me from having to unnecessarily upgrade, if I don't need to."
"It shows us the saturation of the network of devices. It gives us a clear view of the flows in the network to understand, for instance, planning upgrades in the network to get an idea of what's going on the network on traffic flows. It gives us insight, for instance, on what's going on on our VPN Client. There are a lot of things where it provides very helpful information. It also gives us our security reports with quite detailed information on what's going on in the network, and whether there are data exfiltrations and so on."
"It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic."
"We didn't experience any bugs."
"One feature I found most valuable in Plixer Scrutinizer is the very extensive reporting. Reporting is very flexible, though sometimes you need a little bit of support from Plixer Scrutinizer to create custom-made reporting in a very short time. Reporting is a very strong feature of the product."
"The ability to view the status of the top-10 at a glance is helpful. We immediately know which link is over-utilized or heavily used... and it's all in real-time."
"Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I would like to see more extensive syslog capabilities. It can ingest syslogs and I think it can alert based on quantities of messages. You can also look back at some of the messages, but it's not a forensics level syslog."
"Navigating around the map on more complex networks is pretty painful if you're showing endpoints. I know there are filters to knock it down, but sometimes that's not enough. It handles like 'early-90s Java.'"
"There is room for improvement in the reporting aspect."
"The NetFlow app can be a bit compressed and difficult to customize for better readability."
"I would like to see improvement in terms of its integration with other applications and systems. I know that they are adding new systems. However, there is still work to be done there, such as integration with MS Teams. That is not working great for us."
"More capabilities in terms of default OIDs, so we can leverage more of the information from SNMP would be good to see. It's been a while since I messed with the OIDs, but the last time I was trying to get additional information from printers, such as the model number. I was able to find that information, but it took a good amount of research to figure out how. I want to see more default capability regarding what information gets spit out from SNMP."
"It would be cool if they came out with an app, but running the browser isn't bad."
"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."
"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."
"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it."
"We couldn't get it set up properly."
"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."
"I wish the reporting side was easier to work with, but it does a decent job. I also wish the reporting side was a little more intuitive or they offered more reporting examples."
"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information. E.g., if you wanted to deploy a new instance or disaster recovery, you could quite easily deploy and restore the config, as opposed to having to restore all the NetFlow data. If there was just a button that said "backup config information", that would be good."
"Data retention needs improvement. Data retention is a thing where we are looking for a better way to collect flow data for a longer time to do forensic research on security incidents. By default, data retention is quite low. We need detailed data in safe storage for a longer time, e.g., for a couple of months. An improvement would be a way to export data into a secure long-term storage."
"For updating the Scrutinizer platform, when we have the actual data, it never happens in one day. Every time we have the data, we are obliged to install a new server in order to integrate the old data, and every time it has a problem. Most of the time, we were obliged to scrap all the data because we couldn't transfer it to the new server. So, it would be very good if they could improve this part."
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Auvik Network Management (ANM) is ranked 3rd in Network Monitoring Software with 133 reviews while Plixer Scrutinizer is ranked 48th in Network Monitoring Software with 15 reviews. Auvik Network Management (ANM) is rated 8.8, while Plixer Scrutinizer is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Auvik Network Management (ANM) writes "Enables us to get on top of issues before they become an outage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Plixer Scrutinizer writes "Advanced reporting runs analytics on NetFlow and provides signature-based recognition of problems in the network environment". Auvik Network Management (ANM) is most compared with PRTG Network Monitor, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds NPM, Meraki Dashboard and Zabbix, whereas Plixer Scrutinizer is most compared with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Flowmon , Cisco Secure Network Analytics, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer and LiveAction LiveNX. See our Auvik Network Management (ANM) vs. Plixer Scrutinizer report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors and best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors.
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