Auvik Network Management (ANM) vs SolarWinds Network Automation Manager comparison

"The product has helped to decrease our main time to resolution by 50%."

"The automation of the network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. They can see if it is something as simple as a power issue in a wing of a building. This lets them pick the low hanging fruit. Then, if a configuration needs a more skilled person, they can easily escalate it."

"The ability to have visibility on a network to see the traffic and the ability to see if devices are misconfigured and if something changes in that configuration, are most valuable."

"Its proactive monitoring and simplified troubleshooting have significantly impacted our efficiency in handling network management tasks."

"The TrafficInsights feature not only shows me network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, but it gives me which device is using the most traffic. It ranks devices by which are using the most CPU, memory, storage, and it keeps those up to date, non-stop."

"It's hard to say that one feature is my favorite, but I like Auvik's ability to map networks using SNMP. It maps the network, so I can look at all the devices and set them to provide alerts or automatically create tickets when outages occur. If clients need it, I can export all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet."

"The traffic insights and the configuration management are the most valuable features."

"I appreciate the ability to log in to different switches with the click of a button, using the SNMP map and having that login information there, because it allows you to skip going through each IP individually and trying to log in manually."

"The installation is easy."

"The solution offers so many great resources, it makes them a powerhouse in the market."

"The visualization of network mapping is good. The only complaint would be that VLANs don't necessarily show up as a regular LAN does. They do show up, but there is some manual tuning you have to do to make that look perfect."

"If I could make a wish list of things that I would like to see from Auvik, I would definitely love to see more vendor integration with specific manufacturers. They've got that integration with Cisco, but it would be awesome to also have that with other major brands, such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. It should have integration with more vendors, and in general, being able to quickly and easily access vendor-specific tools from the portal would be amazing."

"One drawback I found with Auvik was its inability to generate clear network diagrams."

"Auvik's network map is easy to use for someone who is experienced, but if someone is not too experienced with it, they might be overwhelmed, especially if they run a really big client network with hundreds of devices."

"Sometimes we get false positives, which every now and then is not a big deal. But it would help if they made it a little easier to suppress some of the alarms."

"If I am an administrator, then I have to maintain, clean, and label that environment. Auvik's utility in that regard is cumbersome. It is hard to find where certain things are configured. Also, it is sometimes hard to figure out why Auvik is doing what it is doing."

"The map would be the first thing I would like to see improved because sometimes the maps get really odd-looking and the automated placement of things on the map, devices on the map is sometimes not right. In fact, I was just looking at the map and something got moved. I'm sure it didn't get moved, it's just that Auvik realized it was supposed to go somewhere else. So the map could be better if there was a little bit of manual manipulation that you could do."

"They can definitely build more alerts."

"We did not like SolarWinds because it was not able to communicate between UPSA and our accounting system. They should have better integration."

"The price could be a bit lower."

"Auvik offers two publicly available pricing tiers, but there are also additional options that require contacting a sales representative."

"I believe we have a special arrangement with them because we, as an MSP, take care of some of their technical services."

"Among the products considered, Auvik stood out for its competitive pricing."

"For the way that it's deployed, where the pricing only affects certain devices—meaning there are some free devices, so that you don't pay for everything—it's quite nicely priced in the middle. It's not an overpriced product, but it's also not a very cheap product."

"It is a little more on the expensive side, but I feel that it is a premium product. It is good."

"I assume it is not crazy. I know it is on a per-switch basis or per-device basis, but I am not sure what the exact values are."

"I understand Auvik's value proposition, but the retail price might seem high at first glance."

"The cost for all the devices that we were billed at in my last job was about $2500 annually. It wasn't much. It has the most reasonable pricing as compared to any product out there. I can't complain. It is amazing. It allows me to bundle inside the package what I charge customers per user per month. I don't charge them per device anymore. That's not how we do things in the industry. It is per user per month. The way Auvik is charging us allows me to do it. For example, if they charge $250 for a certain number of seats, I'm just going to write the costs onto per user per month. I have a few leftover licenses to use, which allows me to go out and make some more sales and give some freebies at some shows. So, it makes me very flexible. I am very happy with it. It is billed by network devices. You could choose which billable device you want. What is really nice is that if you don't want one switch to be billable and the other one to be billable, you can do that. You just won't have the features that the billable switch has, which isn't horrible. Sometimes, you don't need that. What I'm really happy about is that Auvik doesn't force things on you and doesn't say, "You have to have all of this," and that's a great business model."

"The price of SolarWinds Network Automation Manager is fair. However, it is more expensive than ConnectWise."