We performed a comparison between Auvik and Wireshark based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Troubleshooting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."My impression of the ease of use is that it definitely is easy to use both the handheld device and the app walking around."
"The things that I find most valuable are the Wi-Fi app and the Discovery app. Those two things help a lot when I'm doing the initial discovery of a space. I also use the AutoTest feature quite a lot, especially if I'm troubleshooting."
"I love the AutoTest feature... AutoTest allows us to find out what port it is on the switch and to trace it back to a particular patch panel. We can then document it, if necessary, or use that information for connecting a device or for re-VLANing a switch to the appropriate VLAN."
"Being able to do a Wi-Fi walk-around survey with a handheld tool is one of the most valuable features of NetAlly EtherScope nXG."
"I like EtherScope's WiFi scanning, heat map, and load testing. It's an excellent tool that sets you straight, so you don't need to beat around the bush or wait for other people. It's easy to share the reports with other people."
"It clearly depicts the information we're looking for on a 10Gig testing, and we can also verify 100Gig links with it between our routing sites."
"The AirMapper Site Survey app is one of the biggest highlights of this product. When somebody asks me, "Why should I use this device?" it's the first thing I show them, and they usually love it. Its ability to gather WiFi site survey data is absolutely amazing."
"The solution’s AirMapper Site Survey app is extremely easy to use. We give it to the technicians and send them out to go do that function. We hand it to the technician who goes onsite, then they take a photo of the overall area of a floor plan and are able to go do that site survey without almost any instruction from any engineer. So, it is very usable for beginner-type techs."
"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."
"All of the features are valuable, but the ability to remote into anything, whether it's a terminal or a browser, is really big for us. It makes things a lot easier day-to-day."
"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."
"The primary reason I wanted Auvik was SNMP. It discovers all the MIBs and pulls them. That's how it can monitor the things that other platforms don't."
"The solution automatically updates network topology. The network topology has been great, not only just for troubleshooting things, but also for training. I can show newer or not-so-experienced guys what a network looks like from the top down. Also, we have used the network diagrams for our audits, where we just kind of print it out and hand it to them. It satisfies all of those requirements."
"I've found the topology mesh graph helpful, and I like the other features that factor into my work with Kubernetes."
"I like Auvik's alerts. We can configure the alerts for a specific timeframe, i.e., we can set it to alert us when devices have been offline for a specific amount of minutes. If a device or port is flapping, we can ignore it or allow only the first alert to come in and mute the subsequent alerts."
"What's best about Wireshark is that it doesn't require installation. It supports cards and monitoring permissions and is sufficient for appending and capturing activities. You won't need to install other tools to use Wireshark, so this saves you time. You can capture packets at any time from your laptop through Wireshark."
"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."
"I like the filtering feature as we can filter data easily. This feature is also available in tcpdump, but it's a simple piece of software. Wireshark is more advanced and has many features. It allows you to filter a lot of things. The output can be filtered easily. The most important feature is colorization. If I say, "Okay, this particular SMB protocol in red, it will show me red." It's easy to identify that protocol or capture data."
"The best part about Wireshark, in my opinion, is its ability to analyze packet capture files."
"The initial setup is simple."
"I find Wireshark a very useful tool. Its best feature is that it allows me to deeply understand what's going on at the packet level, as well as any adverse signatures that I can analyze. When I need to create an IPS rule, I need to check the traffic deeply to get more insights about the actual traffic, what's the name of certain flags, etc., and I'm able to do all that through Wireshark. The tool is also user-friendly."
"The ability to decrypt traffic and the abundance of filters available are both valuable features."
"The product is simple to implement."
"NetAlly doesn't have a spectrum analyzer. I have to use other tools to view the spectrum, and this is a problem."
"I use the NetAlly site and one of the things I don't like about the topology map, something I wish I could fix, is that the map kind of jiggles if you don't adjust any of the settings."
"One point of contention might be that when we were starting it up for the first time, there was a little bit of confusion about registration and getting the proper support plans applied. So, that could be more streamlined, but that's not uncommon in the industry."
"On a hardware spec, it'd be nice to have something above 10-Gigs."
"The small screen is a little bit of a handicap. It would be nice if we could, for instance, connect a larger screen to the device, but it's very user-friendly. You're only limited by the size of the screen. That's the only negative aspect of doing surveys with this device."
"AirMapper is very quick and easy once everything is on there, but I would like to see an improvement on how you get things on there. Currently, rather than being able to build up buildings or a site of things, every map is an individual piece. We should be able to set up an AirMapper survey easily and more effectively. At the moment, we just have separate floor plans. It'd be great to be able to build a building and tell where different floors are so that if it hears an AP on the floor below, it doesn't put two APs, one on that floor and one on the other floor, and it knows that there are two floors here. One is on top of the other, and it won't put the AP at both places. It would put it on one of the floors where it would be strongest. This would be one of the biggest improvements."
"The only issue that I have ever had is the battery life. It does drain a little bit quickly... While it's true that by the time I'm finished with my assessment it's usually dead, I have usually finished what I need to do and everything has been pushed to Link-Live. But occasionally, I might need a backup battery if I need to do something for multiple hours."
"NetAlly EtherScope nXG's reporting and table qualification could be improved."
"Auvik could be better integrated with our ticketing system ConnectWise Manage. We tried integrating Auvik to create tickets, but working to implement a more granular classification system based on priority. The important thing is that we get the alerts, regardless of priority, but that's something that can be improved."
"If the out-of-the-box price was about 30% lower, I think it would have allowed us to purchase it sooner. It definitely costs more than some of the competitors that are out there. It's also better, so I understand why it's a little bit more expensive."
"There is room for improvement on the development side. As new devices and models come out from different manufacturers, they aren't always supported by Auvik right away. For example, Sophos switches came out within the past year and we only have CLI support right now for those..."
"I would relegate the network map to its area instead of being the focus of every page. The network map is in the front and center of the UI. I would rather have the option to look at it when I need it instead of having it on every single page. It's beautiful, but I don't need it on every page."
"I would like a Power BI-style dashboard that you could show to a non-technical person with metrics like the number of devices accessing wireless, the amount of internet, total issues resolved each month, etc."
"It is amazing in keeping device inventories up-to-date. It mostly keeps them up to date as things change. There were a couple of hiccups where a device would get replaced and the mapping would break, and we'd have to go in and fix the mapping. It was with devices that Auvik couldn't fully discover or devices that would change frequently, such as cell phones or other devices on the network that are dynamic and change all the time. The integration would just show up with an IP address and a MAC address. There was no other information in them, which wasn't very helpful. They were the devices that Auvik wasn't able to discover fully. If they had full SNMP or SSH credentials and Auvik knew what the device was and it was matched correctly in Auvik, then Auvik could push it through."
"Automatic configuration backups would be an excellent feature for network devices and access points. The solution could take a backup of the configurations weekly and store that, which would be very nice."
"We're having difficulties with Auvik's regular maintenance windows. They do the maintenance on the cloud side, which affects the on-prem collectors that gather the logs from the different network assets."
"With Wireshark, you cannot download and utilize the packet in automation."
"I would like to see Wireshark improve the ease of application of the command. The command is very powerful, but not easy to apply."
"Wireshark's UI isn't easy to handle and doesn't have as nice a view as Omnipeek."
"The product has been using the same GUI for many years."
"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."
"Wireshark is restricted when any sort of encryption is involved, such as XSL encryption or DLX."
"It is difficult to scale this solution."
"This product needs to improve the UI."
Multi-technology, all-in-one handheld network analyzer that enables engineers and technicians to get more done faster, from deployment to maintenance and documentation of their ever-changing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/BLE, and Ethernet access networks.
Auvik is ranked 4th in Network Troubleshooting with 93 reviews while Wireshark is ranked 3rd in Network Troubleshooting with 23 reviews. Auvik is rated 8.8, while Wireshark is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Auvik writes "Great support experience, absolutely worth the money, and very helpful for quick discovery and troubleshooting". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wireshark writes "Excels at analyzing and decoding packet capture files and powerful tool for troubleshooting network issues". Auvik is most compared with PRTG Network Monitor, LogicMonitor, Meraki Dashboard, Liongard and Domotz, whereas Wireshark is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios XI, SolarWinds NPM, PRTG Network Monitor and ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer. See our Auvik vs. Wireshark report.
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