Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

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.

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.

Our primary use cases are network management and configuration backups. The solution is deployed across 1,500 to 2,000 devices, and we have multiple clients as an MSP. The tool is multi-tenant within our environment and deployed across VPNs and numerous sites. Our clients range from small family-owned businesses to enterprises.

We previously used multiple applications to manage our networks, and switching to Auvik saved us a lot of time; we can troubleshoot two to three times faster than before. 

The most significant benefit of using Auvik is being able to pinpoint where an issue is. With the monitoring we had before, it wasn't proactive or reactive when something went down. It would inform us that something isn't working, but Auvik can tell us there's an issue on a specific subnet, and we can trace through and pinpoint a particular switch that went offline, for example.  

The solution helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, which is another area that's two or three times faster now, if not more.

The product positively affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and globally distributed networks, which is essential for us. We previously had separate tools for different locations, so it wasn't cohesive. With Auvik, we can tell at a glance that there are three devices offline at a site, including why they aren't working from a network perspective. It helps us figure out what's happening quicker, which helps us resolve faster and get back online. That insight is invaluable.

The solution's automation significantly affected our IT team's availability, as it frees up a lot of time for tasks we didn't have time for before. The rapidity and ease of resolution give us time to focus on other areas.  

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolve (MTTR) in the area of 50-60%.  

One of the solution's best features is how it helps us visualize our network mapping/topology. It builds the map out automatically as it discovers devices, networks within our network, or different subnets. We can see exactly where devices are in the environment and all their connections. Nobody likes to build out Visio diagrams, but with Auvik, we can take a snapshot of the network map and show it to a client. The network visualization is straightforward, intuitive, and makes sense.  

The automated network topology map is excellent; it shows connected networks, where they're going, and what they're visible on.

The configuration backup is a great feature, as it allows us to compare to previous iterations after changes and roll back if necessary.

Auvik allows us to get into devices through remote tunnels rather than going to the actual sites.

The alerting is another helpful feature, as Auvik gives more timely alerts than other tools. This makes it easier to pinpoint when and what network component goes down.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform for network management, which is essential for us; the fewer platforms we have to jump between, the better.   

Auvik helps keep device inventories up-to-date and find devices we didn't know were there in some cases. This functionality is excellent for helping our teams focus on high-value tasks, though not so much for delegation, as the solution is relatively challenging to learn and understand. 

The solution keeping device inventories up-to-date saves a lot of time because we can find devices we didn't know were there, figure out the network quicker, and identify potential issues.  

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about price, you get what you pay for. We've used cheaper and free products, and we use Auvik now. It depends on how much time and energy you have to put into it versus a tool that's ready to use immediately. Our time is valuable, and we don't have enough to fiddle with a solution all day to get it to work or do what we want it to do.  

I want to see improvements to the interface, as it's data-heavy and challenging to navigate. This makes it harder to delegate and have junior staff look around and figure out the solution. A more straightforward interface would be a welcome improvement, whether by making it cleaner or more intuitive.

We've been using Auvik for about five years. 

The solution is highly stable; I can't think of a time when I tried to access it and it was unavailable. I've seen maintenance alerts and notifications, but we never had an issue.

The product is very flexible and scalable. 

We contacted technical support on a few occasions, and they're familiar enough with the product to answer our questions and solve our issues. 

Positive

We previously used a kind of piecemeal solution; we tried to do SNMP reporting through our RMM tool. We also used a free Linux distro called LibreNMS, Nagios, and SolarWinds.

Libre was too convoluted; it was challenging to set up and obnoxious to deal with. Nagios gave us a lot of false alerts and irrelevant data and required tedious maintenance. Lastly, the company didn't like SolarWinds, so Auvik was our best solution, even though it was more expensive. Auvik does a better job of alerting and presenting relevant data, and I don't know if the other solutions featured automatic backup configuration or remote tunnel access. Most of the competitors didn't have the network topology mapping, or they didn't do a good job of it, but Auvik does that very well, and it's dynamic. Auvik seems like the more complete, refined tool, despite being a bit more expensive or on par with the competition.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it's not as straightforward as some but not as complex as others, such as LibreNMS or SolarWinds. Auvik is somewhere in the middle in terms of setup difficulty. Two or three of us carried out the deployment, as we were the most familiar with the different environments, and the product is lightweight in terms of maintenance. 

The solution was quickly available out of the box; we created the tenant and deployed the collector, which were straightforward tasks. Following the collector deployment, the network mapping began to populate right away. 

To compare Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, we don't have to worry about the backend setup and config issues as much. Other than making sure the Auvik collector is up and running, we don't have to do anything else, which means less maintenance and an easier time for us. 

Comparing the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus previous solutions, Auvik took less time to set up, deploy, and fulfill the job we wanted it to. In terms of difficulty, it's on par with other solutions though better than most, and it provides more data, better information, and better results. Auvik also makes troubleshooting straightforward and helpful; LibreNMS was too granular and complicated to operate for troubleshooting.

We deployed via an in-house team, though Auvik Networks Inc. helped us with a few issues. As we tested the solution and played with it beforehand, we were familiar with it when we decided to go with Auvik and didn't feel like we needed outside help.

The price is a little high, and the product could be more cost-friendly. We work with many small and medium-sized businesses, so the cost can be hard to justify. We try to work around that, but it would be nice if Auvik were more cost-effective. Most enterprise-level businesses we work with have their own internal monitoring solutions, whether Nagios or SolarWinds.

I rate the product eight out of ten. If the interface was cleaned up and it was more cost-effective, I'd give it a ten.

It is moderately challenging to use Auvik's monitoring and management functions. It isn't the most accessible tool to learn; there's a bit of a learning curve, but it was fine once we got the hang of it. There are more intuitive solutions, which is why it takes a while to adapt, but it has excellent capabilities.

The solution didn't particularly help us delegate low-level tasks to junior staff because learning the platform isn't as intuitive as it could be. Therefore, it's harder for our junior techs to figure out what's going on, what's relevant and what isn't, so we haven't had our juniors in there much.

From a technical perspective, we have seen time to value with Auvik, though it can be challenging to demonstrate that to the higher-ups with tech solutions. The network topology is an excellent way of showing that value, and so is the remote management backup. It can be impactful when people don't have such bells and whistles to see.   

My advice to those considering the solution is that it may be more expensive than some, but it does a better job than just about anything else on the market. Auvik is more reliable, does an excellent job, and makes life easier once it's up and running. Be prepared to spend some time finding out what is and isn't relevant to your requirements and configure accordingly, which will make your life easier.

We're an MSP. We use this solution for all of our clients. For anyone that has a network more extensive than a switch or two, we install Auvik. We do this to make sure that we're getting the right connectivity and that everything is working as it should. I get alerts whenever something goes wrong, and I can jump in and say for example, "That's there. This is why." And I can tell what is happening. If I'm not on site, I can say, "Plug this port in because whoever was there, just plugged it back into the same switch." 

Having a single integrated platform has helped improve our organization. Ease of use and speed are the most important. I always know that I can go back. I've got a solid monitoring solution within Auvik. I know I can access the solution and get the right information that is updated in real-time.

The solution helps us get ahead of issues. If I see something going on, I can start getting ahead of it before my client notices. I can at least get a heads-up right away as something's going on. It's always better to alert my customer that I found a problem rather than have them call me. There's also a perception of being proactive versus reactive.

Depending on the issue, I have seen a reduction in our MTTR.

I have absolutely seen a TTV with Auvik. The solution allows us to hit the ground running. When we get to a client, it takes me 30 minutes to an hour to absorb what that network looks like and I can start rocking and rolling immediately.

The solution's ease of use for our operations is fairly important. It's wonderful for when I'm going into a new client and I don't want to do discovery. The solution plots out a network map for me. The solution tells me where I've got congestion and additional information that would normally require me to do discovery. Auvik is not as in-depth as for example, ExtraHop but this gives me enough of an overview that I can look at a network and say, "Okay, I know where they're at. Now I know where they need to be," and gives me the first stepping stones to get acclimated to the network. 

An example of Auvik's ease of use for our operations for an existing customer is if I receive an event that needs to be worked on, whether I'm onsite or not, I can call my client and say, "Hey, if you're seeing network issues, we just caught a couple of alerts." These alerts may or may not be an issue but it's good to have that in our back pocket to say, "Okay, something else is seeing this. " It's another set of eyes. We're a small firm and we can only be in so many places at one time.

The solution provides a single integrated platform. Although the solution doesn't do everything that I would want network-wise it is good enough. For what we pay, Auvik does the job we need it to do.

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date.

This is the first solution we deploy at every location. We bring out a machine we call a data collector, and we put it in their network, get on DHCP, and it starts to scan immediately. The solution is absolutely fantastic.

Auvik is a fantastic network monitoring solution. When I look just for something that's really focused on network, for the price, Auvik can't be beaten.

The one aspect that I dislike about the solution is that there is no current way to export diagrams. If I want to take this and say, "Okay, here's my network map," I cannot export that network map to Visio and make edits or add notes if I need to on the diagram. Those are the aspects that are really missing for me. Not every product has everything I want. But what Auvik's support has told me, is that it's in the pipeline.

The only area that I dislike about the solution is the lack of exportability. That would be a wonderful feature to have.

The exportability of the information is really where I see the big value, and the other area is when network changes occur. One thing I would like to see is the option of an automated backup shortly after a configuration has changed because Auvik monitors the configs. When it sees a new config or I move five ports from one network to another, Auvik picks up that there was a change. The solution knows that it happened, but it won't back up at that time. The ability to do rollback would be wonderful. If something breaks I will have options, "Okay, here's your latest config. Here's the previous config, do you want to roll back?"  Juniper offers that in their OS automatically and it is beautiful. This would be a wonderful update.

I would like a little bit more of a deep dive because Auvik uses flow data to update what type of traffic I'm seeing which is pretty good but it's not a hundred percent. What I'd really love to see as well, is an offering of a small appliance to do this type of work, to wash packets. 

The exportability of data and network maps can also be improved. One thing that Auvik does well is tell me how long a switch is under maintenance for. For example, if I have a switch, and everything gets pulled up into my portal for the client, I take the serial number, it goes out to Cisco or HP or whomever, and it will tell me how long that switch is under maintenance for. That's invaluable. I know that I have one source of truth I can go and look at and say, "Yeah. Hey, that switch is still good for another two years."

I have been using the solution for around two and a half to three years.

The stability is rock solid. I haven't had any issues.

The solution has done everything that we have needed it to do so far. I can't complain about the scalability. 

Any problems I've had were resolved by the technical support team. Auvik's technical support is email support first, which I'm not happy about, but I understand that that's the way they work. I haven't had an issue that was so critical that I needed the situation resolved immediately.

Positive

Previously, we used Symantec RMM. We used a couple of other items for a while, and finally, once we got onto Auvik and I showed my business partner the power of Auvik, he said, "Yeah, this is what we're going with." Literally within an hour, he said, "You just made up my mind."

The initial setup was not bad. We installed an agent on our data collector, gave it the name of the client, and told it what networks to start looking at.

The implementation was completed in-house.

What is good about Auvik is that it is a monthly spend versus a CapEx. That tends to be a bigger driver, especially for a small environment. Using a product like Auvik and having the same visibility that any tech can walk into and, assuming they've got a decent networking background, can look at it and go, "Oh, yeah. Here's what it is." With this, my client that has 15 switches doesn't need to worry if something happens to the main infrastructure person. 

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

There are certain aspects that I've had little issues with, but nothing that couldn't be resolved by support. I can't be an expert on every product. I've got ten different switching vendors I work with and have to learn the syntax. As long as I've got SNMP and I can get Telnet, who supports most of the major vendors out there, Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade. I am very much in favor of the product and the discovery capabilities therein.

Depending on the vendor, the solution reduces repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. Cisco, Juniper, or Brocade, have CLIs that Auvik can get into and do backups automatically for me, which is a need but is repetitive. Auvik does configuration backups but overall, that's the big area the solution automates for me. 

We're a regional player, we definitely have visibility to our environments.

The visibility that helps our IT team focus on our networks is fairly important. Visibility is the first building block that we have for every single client.

Auvik's automation has not necessarily affected our IT team's availability. The solution does configure backups for me, but if I wasn't using Auvik, I would be using something else to do that. For what I am using automation for, the solution is pretty freaking awesome.

We're a smaller firm, and all of our guys are in senior positions. As we move along, Auvik is going to be watched and managed by lower-caliber staff who can raise the flag and run it up to somebody as needed.

If I need to get a listing to my vendor, say, "Here are the serial numbers that I need to renew maintenance on for next year," I can't just take that and export it out of Auvik. But overall, the solution does make my life easy because I can just copy the serial numbers and give them to my vendor, whomever that may happen to be. 

Auvik as a cloud-based solution covers enough compared to an on-prem network monitoring solution. It does a good enough job, without being on-premise. The solution is fairly lightweight and it's fairly innocuous. Auvik doesn't cause any problems on the network, it sits there and receives. Auvik is a very good passive solution.

I recommend the solution. This is a good product, it's easy to set up, and just give it the once over. I think that it's one of these solutions that can really add value. Depending on the size of your network, it might be small enough and it might be the right size to help you get your hands wrapped around it. I haven't seen the solution in an environment of more than 500 users. That is my scale limit on Auvik, but I know that the solution goes further. The smallest environment in which I have seen the solution used was in a doctor's office that had three switches.

We are using Auvik specifically for monitoring network devices. We are an IT company that's focused on network integration and monitoring for our customers. We use Auvik to monitor routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and other network devices.

If there is an alert, we can just click on it in the email, and it redirects us to the Auvik page where we can see what's going on with that device. That makes it quick to find what's going on in the network.

And the visibility into remote and distributed networks globally was one of the reasons we moved to Auvik. The cloud platform means our team can work from home and it takes seconds to access a customer's network to see what's happening. We don't have to deal with VPNs and go through something on-prem. That has saved a lot of time. You access Auvik and you are good to go. Everything is there.

It also helps keep device inventories up to date so that we can pull this information and have it ready. There is no need to engage someone to have them reassess the inventory or split inventory into categories. You already have all the categories and you can just export the information. For example, when we want to renew a support contract with a customer and we need to know their inventory, we can use Auvik to export it and we are good to go. It saves us 90 percent of the time it would otherwise take.

The first feature that I appreciate is the topology drawing in real time. If our NOC wants to troubleshoot, they can go to the topology map and see that this access point is connected to that switch via that specific port. And when something changes in the topology, it's dynamically updated.

The network mapping is such a great tool. We have some customers for which we manage access points and switches. The management platform for those products, like Meraki, shows you topologies on their cloud dashboard. But if you look at the topology in the Auvik, it is much better with colors. It shows Layer 1 and Layer 3 connectivities and provides you with a view that has a look and feel that is better than what the vendor itself provides. Its overall intuitiveness is excellent.

The backup feature is also important. Once we have access via SSH to devices, Auvik will detect if there are any changes and will back up the configurations.

And using the cloud ping feature, it will monitor WAN circuits. It sends a ping and alerts you if anything goes wrong with your WAN. It will also give you the speed and the round-trip time.

Comparing Auvik to SolarWinds and other platforms, it is pretty straightforward when it comes to monitoring. The people we recruit in our NOC learn how to use Auvik very fast. It's a core element for our NOC service. Before, we were using legacy vendors for NMS. When we moved to Auvik, things became more flexible and easier. We can onboard people easily when it comes to learning how to use Auvik to do monitoring for our customers.

It also provides one pane of glass. You can do the things you want to do in one place. Your NOC team can access and look at the alerts, check all the backup configurations, see the status of the devices, et cetera. It's one place to look at everything.

We would like them to make the alerting more customizable. We had a conversation about this yesterday. We want to be able to access more fields.

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

It's stable.

It is also scalable. We plan to increase our usage of the product.

We use it across multiple locations and we are at about 600 endpoints.

Their technical support is great overall.

But recently, we got a little bit frustrated. Two weeks ago, we were able to access the support chat via a small button on the bottom right side of the screen. Now, that button has gone away. I'm not sure if it is a limitation of my browser and I tried to find out about it on the internet. But it has become pretty difficult to access support right now, as long as there is no chat button available. Before, it was great. We need the support button to come back.

Positive

We tried other vendors, including SolarWinds, but you had to host those solutions in your data center and maintain them. Auvik is cloud-based, and it's a new way to think about monitoring. It gives us simplicity and enables a multi-tenant philosophy.

The cloud is a trend. That is what the world looks like now. Everything is cloud-based, making it easy to access, wherever you are. With on-prem solutions, you have to maintain your stuff, such as VPNs with your customers to collect information. Cloud-based stuff is great.

The initial setup to install a collector takes about 10 minutes. Within 10 to 20 minutes after that, you can have your topology built. Of course, you have to configure the devices to the SNMP, so it can grab the information. The whole process to get a rock-solid topology will take two hours or so. You have to engage the customer to do additional configuration on the devices. But if they have that configuration done ahead of time, it won't take more than one hour.

Most of the time, it's just me doing deployments.

As for maintenance, because it's cloud-based, Auvik maintains it on a regular basis. I notice every weekend that they have something to do, but it doesn't disturb us. We are not maintaining the solution.

For the first deployments, we had someone from Auvik who supported us. We learned in real time with someone who was an expert in the product. After that, we just replicated what he did and added more things as we went forward.

Our ROI is in saving a lot of time in terms of onboarding. When we want to engage a new customer, we can do that in about 10 minutes. With the legacy stuff, we would have to spin up a VPN and maintain it. Now, we just put in the Auvik collector and we are good to go. It starts scanning and collecting information.

The pricing of Auvik is good. If it could be less, that would be even better, but as long as they offer free devices, that is great.

We looked at LogicMonitor at the same time. But we had a salesperson from Auvik who demonstrated more features. In the end, we saw that the solutions are pretty similar, but we picked Auvik.

While I didn't check the price of LogicMonitor, Auvik is cloud-based and you have to pay a monthly subscription. But what you gain is that it will monitor servers and APs, et cetera, for free. It's a subscription and not a one-time fee like SolarWinds and other legacy platforms. For instance, we have some customers with 20 switches, two controllers in high-availability mode, and 200 APs. We get monitoring of those 200 APs without paying for it. We just pay for the switches and controllers.

I would recommend Auvik.

We use it for insight into an entire network, all the devices on it, and for monitoring their health. We also have it hooked into our ticketing system for automated ticket generation from any of the devices that we need to manage.

The benefit is the ability to monitor and react to issues on devices that we manage. I've existed in this organization for eight years and it has scaled up tremendously. That wouldn't have been possible without a tool like this. That has been the most powerful part, the ability to scale up an organization from managing a couple of hundred endpoints to tens of thousands of endpoints.

It also definitely clears out a lot of repetitive tasks, reducing them by between 20 and 30 percent. It helps us attend to issues much faster, scaling up the availability of our entire team by a lot. They're not spending time doing things that are manual and unnecessary anymore. Our team is 10 percent more available. And with Auvik, there has clearly been a reduction in our MTTR, in the 20 to 30 percent range.

Another advantage is the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. That's pretty important, although it depends on who we're talking about on the team. It primarily impacts the more senior network engineers. It's definitely helpful for them. So the importance of the visibility it provides, overall, is somewhere in the middle range.

It's helpful for delegating low-level tasks to junior staff. They don't have to have the education that would typically be necessary for understanding individual products. It does some of the heavy lifting for them and presents things in an easy-to-understand way for someone who is not necessarily as technically inclined as they would otherwise have to be. There are a lot of tasks that we wouldn't give to our junior techs if we didn't have a tool like Auvik.

And the fact that it keeps our device inventories up to date saves us time. That's a use case I didn't mention, but it's a huge piece of what we use Auvik for.

I like the user interface and the fact that it generates a map automatically of any network that you are trying to manage. That's pretty valuable, as is the ability to hook it into all the devices and keep an eye on their health.

It's a really useful tool for visualizing network topology mapping. When I first started using it, it definitely wasn't as powerful as it is now. There were some issues with it performance-wise and with how it mapped things, but now it's become very useful, with a very accurate visualization of what's occurring on a system or network.

It also has a single web console and it integrates with other tools. That's very important because it's pretty cumbersome when you have a bunch of consoles that you need to go to. Being able to narrow it down to as few consoles as possible is definitely paramount.

It's very intuitive. It does a good job of showing you individual nodes on the network and their relative positions to one another, with pertinent details on each node, all in one location. And it provides easy accessibility to drill down into each node and get more specifics on them.

There is some difficulty using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. If I were to rate it out of 10, I would say it's a seven or eight, on the "difficulty" scale, to set it up properly and in a way that's useful. It's not outside of a normal difficulty range for a tool like this, but there is definitely an amount of overhead required there.

The user interface could be tweaked in a few different ways to make it a little bit more intuitive when it comes to navigating through the menus. 

Also, getting remotely connected to managed devices could be a little bit smoother. Sometimes, it's a little bit cumbersome trying to do that. If they could streamline the facilitating of remote connections to network devices, that would be an improvement.

I've been using Auvik for about six years.

I've only had a few hiccups here and there. The stability is an eight or a nine out of 10. It has been pretty reliable.

It has really done great in scaling up according to our needs.

In the company that I'm with now, we have it deployed in up to a couple of thousand networks and to a lot of different devices. I don't know what the specific device count is because we've come to a point where we've handed that off to a specific automation team that is there to manage Auvik and a couple of our other tools. There is a lot in our Auvik system right now.

I've had contact with their technical support multiple times. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks, or no applications at all, which was something of a mess. It's definitely helpful to unify a lot of different tools in one spot. Switching to Auvik has saved us 15 percent of our time.

Because Auvik is ubiquitous, it's useful for a lot of different network devices. Before we had a tool like Auvik, I'm not even sure that a tool like this existed in the managed services industry. We would use either the vendor-supplied tools for managing specific vendor network devices or something muddled together out of Microsoft's software, like Excel or Access, to try to manage everything.

Overall, the setup is pretty straightforward. It's just time-consuming to get it set up to a point where it's maximally functional. It's not complex, though.

We're continuously rolling it out to clients as we pull new clients in and build out new networks. Once the Auvik code is implemented, the amount of time it takes before network mapping starts to populate depends completely on the network side. It has varied over the last six years that I've been using it, but it doesn't take longer than I would have expected.

I've seen value in the product, absolutely. I don't think that we could operate as a business on the level that we do without something like Auvik. It's done what we needed to do and it hasn't caused us any reason to start looking for any other solution to replace it.

When comparing network monitoring solutions, if there is concern about pricing you really need to assess where you're at in your company and decide how much value a platform like this would bring to you. Sometimes, it's not always apparent how much time you're actually spending on the types of tasks and functions that Auvik can provide. 

Check the knowledge base articles because they're very helpful, and don't be afraid to use the forums as well because the people are very responsive there.

We're an MSP and we deploy Auvik for every single customer that DP Solutions has. We use it for network monitoring and infrastructure provisioning alerts. We also use it for troubleshooting, and for backups and configuration.

We used UniFi or Ubiquiti for our switching and access points, but that didn't get us into firewalls, so we had to have a separate pane of glass for the firewalls. Having one piece of software to manage it all is the reason we love Auvik. 

We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks, including the Ubiquiti portal and whatever firewall portal the customer had. That included Cisco, FortiGate, SonicWall, Palo Alto, Juniper, and Barracuda. We have used a lot of firewalls, but having one piece of software that has all that combined is really nice.

Auvik has saved us hours, per issue. We've caught multiple network loops due to user error, and that problem is usually incredibly hard to troubleshoot and pinpoint exactly what the issue is. Auvik pinpoints it and tells you exactly what happened: when, and which switch port—all the kind of stuff that no other piece of software can do, at least in a single pane of glass. Without that single pane of glass for us for troubleshooting and monitoring and alerting, it would take us hours to troubleshoot, not minutes. 

It can find the network loops and configuration errors without us even having to lift a finger. The minute we sign into Auvik, we see the alerts. At times, like in a network loop situation, the reduction in MTTR could be over 100 percent. At other times, it could be 50 percent. It depends on the issue.

In addition, the fact that it automatically backs up configurations is outstanding. That way, if there's any kind of change or something has to be reset, I can just copy that configuration, put it back in, and call it a day.

When it comes to visibility into distributed networks, we have clients all over the Lower 48, especially on the East Coast. The amount of time it saves us from having to actually go out to a site to do something is phenomenal. That visibility is critical. Without that, it would be really hard to really stay afloat and make money. Every time a tech has to go out, we're talking about money, labor, and time that we could be using for something else.

At this point, we have close to a couple of hundred clients, and we dedicate a technician one day a month to each client to do documentation and keep inventories up to date. It is probably saving us 200 hours of labor every month. That amounts to tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, Auvik definitely helps keep device inventories up to date. I'm able to tell how long ago the device was offline. Being an MSP, we don't always know everything that happens at a customer's company. They might switch phone providers and not tell us, but we'll get the information because we can see they switched on date XYZ because instead of going online, now it's not. Now, we have more information and it gives us much better insights into the customer and network.

The ability to change the severity of alerts is also helpful. If it's a level-one, then we can have some junior people look at it and determine that it's not important or that it should be escalated if they know it's a bigger issue. It keeps the critical alerts to the upper-level staff, which means they're not dealing with a service advisor or a service director and looking at every single ticket to delegate it. That is saving us plenty of time.

I love the alerting. With a single pane of glass, it's able to tell me that there's a firewall error, or that something is offline, there is a switch configuration error, or a configuration change has taken place on a certain device. I don't think I can pinpoint a single favorite feature of Auvik. I use almost everything.

Using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik is really easy, but I'm a little bit biased because I am Auvik Certified. (The certification process includes super in-depth training. Before the training, I was able to use Auvik, but I wasn't using it full-strength. Once I did the training, there was not a whole lot I didn't know about the software). The ease of use is incredibly important. If it wasn't something that is easily accessible or has the tools that we need, we wouldn't be using it.

It's also fantastic for helping to visualize the network mapping topology. It saves me countless hours of time every time a customer asks for a network topology map. Normally, I would have to wing it and roughly create one. But with Auvik, I'm able to just hit "filter by network elements only" and it prints it out. I can take a screenshot for the customer and send it back to them within minutes. 

And that network visualization functionality is right there when you sign in. It's front and center, which is great. It especially helps when we have junior network engineers work on it because, when they sign into that Auvik device, it gives them a good start into the network and its complexity. It gives them a brief description of what they're getting themselves into.

The automation side needs improvement. I'm a regular in the Auvik forum, and there have been a couple of automation requests to remedy some things that a normal single pane of glass would have. 

A really important one was about a SonicWall firewall that needs to be rebooted every single month. You can do that in the SonicWall GUI, but you can't do it in Auvik. Hundreds of people have endorsed the idea of having an automated command line interface command run on any device that supports it. When the device goes in it would run the command and the device would reboot (just as an example, because that's a really simple task). 

Having a scheduled task like that would save lots of people from having to go into a different pane of glass, such as the SonicWall GUI. Or, in a worst-case scenario, if I have to schedule a reboot at midnight, I have to be up at midnight to schedule that reboot instead of just letting Auvik run the command. That kind of automation would be really beneficial.

I've been using Auvik for 10 months, since January of this year.

The software is incredibly reliable. We really have never had any issues with Auvik. We have issues with Windows more than we do with Auvik. Perhaps that is pretty standard because Windows is not really that reliable.

The scalability is very good. The addition of the multi-site feature was a great touch. We can have one customer with multiple sites, which really reduces the load and the horsepower needed for an Auvik device. It reduces the bandwidth needed to monitor multiple sites when you can split it up between multiple devices.

We manage close to 200 customers. Some customers have one site and some have 30. Each Auvik instance might have multiple VLANs and multiple networks on top of that. And the number of actual users that are affected by Auvik within our clients' environments is between 20,000 and 30,000.

We had a previous network monitoring tool, which I believe was Arctic Wolf. It had some of the security features that Auvik has, but it had none of the technical troubleshooting capabilities. It was mostly a backup and security appliance.

The blessing of how simple Auvik is to deploy is that, once I'm done setting it up, all I have to do is put the device back in the box, ship it to the customer, and tell them, "Call me with this number, plug the device into this port, turn it on, and we're done." That allows me to deploy 20 in a week, as opposed to five. The setup is completely straightforward. It's one of the easiest.

The amount of time it takes after a collector is implemented until the network mapping starts to populate depends on the device. For smaller things like standalone PCs, it can take 30 minutes. But when we have devices with a little more horsepower behind them, it could be within 15 minutes.

I am the only one involved in the deployments. That's how easy it is. You can have one person assigned to it, and it's just plug-and-play. And the maintenance side is incredibly lightweight. The only thing we have to do is manage the Windows part of it, which we were already going to do.

I love the pricing. It makes a lot of sense. It allows you to use your own metal, which is great because it enables us to go higher-end for some clients and lower-end for others. Sometimes we have it just run as a service on a Windows Server. You really can't beat that kind of flexibility. Even having the flexibility to switch clients between the Performance (expert) and the Essentials (simple) version of Auvik, on the fly, is really unheard of.

If someone is comparing network monitoring solutions' pricing, Auvik makes itself worth it very quickly, as soon as you get anything happening that involves labor hours. It completely pulls Auvik out of any kind of argument.

We pretty much had our eyes on Auvik.

One of the best parts about it is that it's a cloud-based solution. A device runs on-prem and only sends out the information it needs to the cloud. That saves so much bandwidth by having it local. Clients that might not have the fastest ISP circuit can still enjoy the benefits of having something that I can remotely manage.

My advice is that you absolutely have to get Auvik Certified. That unlocks so many things that aren't necessarily intuitive, things that are a little bit more hidden behind the curtain. When you get that certification, it's like you have all the keys. You can go behind all the doors and you know how to navigate the system really well. I wish that Auvik would push their certification more. It's incredibly hard to find that training. When you set up the account for the first time, or even when you're a new user, they don't really even talk about the training and they never talk about getting certified. The fact that they have a certification training course is news to everybody.

We use it for monitoring network infrastructure and network servers.

Auvik monitors things that other tools don't monitor. It can monitor VMware, and Linux platforms. In addition, the automatic backup of network switches and changes to them is essential. It has positively affected the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. We can get into Auvik and see throughout the network. We can do discovery and see things that we can't see with other tools. And when the network is too stressed, we get notified. Out of all the tools out there, it's probably number two or number three among those we use. It's very critical for us.

The alerts go to our high-end guys because it's not monitoring desktops. It's notifying us of issues with equipment that only the engineers know how to operate, manage, and deal with. It's very handy for us and very important for us to prioritize which alerts are coming through to which people, so that the right people get them.

In terms of keeping device inventories up to date, it finds equipment that some of our customers never even tell us about. We have one customer with oodles of stuff but they had no idea what they had. They are a district utility and they have stuff everywhere. We know more about their network than they do, through Auvik.

The amount of time it saves us on setup management is significant. We used to have another tool that was good, but it was a nightmare to configure. Now, for every new customer, it probably saves us a minimum of 10 to 20 hours of work or more, depending on the size of the customer. On average, it's saving us about 10 hours.

It has also reduced our mean time to resolution because it's better at alerting us in the middle of the night when there is anything that looks more critical. It's quicker than other platforms. We see things before they happen, such as a hard drive failing inside of a RAID set, or a problem inside a VMware system before there is a bigger problem. We can be more proactive than we could be with the other tools that we have. I've seen some minor issue alerts from other tools, but a lot of time they can't see anything in a RAID set, but Auvik does.

Among the most valuable features are the 

• remote browser
• remote terminal
• remote tunneling.

Those features ease getting into our customer sites, especially ones that are a little more locked down. Instead of having to go through a VPN, log in to a system and do this or that to the platform, we can get to everything right through Auvik. It gives us immediate access to different things.

We have a single platform through Auvik, but it also integrates with all our RMM and management tools. Having a single integrated platform is extremely important. It does everything we need it to do within a single platform. Auvik doesn't do remote management monitoring, but it does everything else that our RMM cannot do and it's crucial. With it, we can see some pretty detailed information.

And while we haven't used Auvik extensively as an automation tool, we do use it to alert us and create tickets automatically. That saves us time.

When it comes to the management side, the navigation is a little bit difficult, going back and forth. It is a little bit cumbersome. The ease of movement is a little bit harder than it should be. If I go to one device and I look at an interface, I can't just go back to the device and that makes it a pain to navigate. If they could improve the navigation, that would be wonderful. It's a great tool but the interface is not great at times.

And Auvik is okay for helping visualize the network mapping and the topology for your organization, but it's not great.

Finally, reporting on alerts could be a lot easier.

We have been using Auvik for about three years.

The stability of Auvik is good. They do a lot of maintenance. They've had some issues over the years, but it is pretty stable. Out of 10, the stability is 9.5.

In terms of scalability, it does everything we need it to do. We have some pretty large environments and it does just fine.

It's a multi-tenant platform. We're a managed service provider. Our managed service customers range from a company that has about 400 or 500 devices to one that has over 1,000, and all the way down to customers that only have about 10.

I really haven't had a lot of interaction with their tech support. I've only had two or three questions and they answered them.

Positive

I used to use WhatsUp Gold when we were a much smaller company, but that product just did not scale with what we were doing. WhatsUp Gold was too difficult to use. I had to have VPNs for everybody and that didn't make any sense.

The initial setup of Auvik is pretty straightforward. We deploy it all the time now. We just onboarded another customer, the fifth in the last two months. We are able to use it very quickly after deployment, out-of-the-box; within hours. We only need two people involved in a setup.

If I compare the implementation time, alone, of our previous solution and Auvik, even for a small customer our old solution would take 10 to 15 hours. And if I had had to use the old platform for our largest customer, that would have taken me 80 to 100 hours. I only put in about five or six hours to get Auvik running for that customer.

We haven't had much training on it at all. We've had to discover a lot, but it works very well.

We deploy it on all our new customers and it is of tremendous value. I can see interfaces going up and down. I'm getting alerts on disconnects and that helps me troubleshoot spanning tree issues that are happening inside the network.

SNMP is critical because I can actually see inside VMware servers. With other platforms, that is very hard to find. I can see through a RAID set. The value is from the in-depth monitoring and the ability to see inside the hardware, rather than just if it is available or not. And in a Microsoft domain, it will tell me if there are any replication issues between domain controllers. It will tell me if there is a status issue. It's very handy.

The billing is excellent. The way they bill it, in most environments, it's not that expensive. The billing is very cost-effective.

I looked at a couple of other solutions. One of them was WhatsUp Gold, which we had been using. It's a great product, although it took forever to configure. Its navigation was great, but it took someone with high-end skills to understand how to do what needed to be done. 

Auvik makes it easy. It automatically finds things for you. I don't have to train someone for hundreds of hours to learn how to use it. 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. That's one of the features that make it a good product. I wanted it because we needed to see all the way down inside a device. For example, on a RAID set has a drive failed, or is there a problem with the NIC, or is there a problem with something inside the hardware? I didn't want to just know if it was available or not.

It's important to me that Auvik is cloud-based as opposed to an on-prem network monitoring solution. I have removed all my on-prem stuff, period, for security purposes. We're a security-focused company. Also, we're not that large, we're only 10 people, and we have enough work to do for our customers without having to maintain internal platforms. We just don't have time to do that. We had an on-prem solution for monitoring, but we went to Auvik in the cloud so that we don't have to maintain all that. It's one less thing we have to maintain.

My advice is to use this solution because it finds more detailed, granular information than other products, out-of-the-box.

We use the tool for network diagrams and troubleshooting, which has been helpful. One of the main issues we had before ANM was the lack of up-to-date network diagrams. With its dynamic function, we solved this problem. We also use it to troubleshoot network incidents such as APs going down and for automatic backups.

There are many things I like about the product. It's cloud-based and automatically refreshes the network container. We like the automatic backups and the comparison between backups. It's straightforward to set up, and it integrates with many protocols.

The tool provides an intuitive interface that's easy to use. The search box is particularly helpful—we can search for everything from MAC addresses to IP addresses to interface names, making it easy to find any device.

The network map and dashboard give us a real-time picture of our network. It's pretty easy to use these features to gain visibility, though we've had some minor issues with Meraki devices due to their lack of support for SSH and SNMP.

The solution has helped us automate our processes and integrates well with ConnectWise so that we can get alerts in our CRM and via email.

We noticed the full value of ANM after a few months, as we needed time to train and understand the system. It has helped our technicians due to its many capabilities and the data it collects. After about a month of training, we were able to share some of the senior team's workflows with junior team members.

ANM has helped us decrease our mean time to resolution by about 20 percent.

I'd like better integration with Meraki and a history feature for network diagrams. If a device fails on Saturday, we can't find it by Monday. A history or PDF export of diagrams would be great to see how devices should be connected.

I have been using the product for eight months. 

I rate the tool's stability as nine out of ten (it gets cloggy with large diagrams). 

We use the product on the cloud. Deployment was straightforward with the setup guide, initially taking about one month with a team of five people. Now, each new deployment takes about 15 minutes. We use it across many client enterprises and sites, with Windows, Mac, and Linux devices and multiple network brands. About ten people in our organization work with it. The cloud version needs no maintenance, but on-premises agents need checking.

The tool has saved us about 15 percent in return on investment.

The tool's pricing is reasonable. 

I recommend ANM for its updated network diagrams, ease of use and implementation, and high availability. Overall, I'd rate it nine out of ten.

Primarily, I'm using Auvik for alerting within client infrastructure and then using it for investigation into issues. We're trying to make sure we are accurately and professionally monitoring IT environments. It helps with tracking issues as soon as they happen immediately and not having to wait to act until users report issues.

We can access information quickly. For example, when I have a device and I get notified that it's offline, I can click on the alert from the email. When I click on that, it'll take me to the overview page and give me all the information I need. So very quickly, I can see its last known IP. I can see what the device is. I can see its history and what's happened over the past ten minutes or the past twelve hours. I can see that very fast - in a matter of seconds. That way, I can figure out what's happening faster and troubleshoot more efficiently.

The alerting is very accurate. I like that the devices have great overviews and we can quickly assess information. 

It simplified tasks and made things easier. It's made it possible for me and my team to be able to get an email that will notify us of an issue so we can put that into our ticket system and start tracking it immediately. It cuts down the troubleshooting time by half - or even more. It's tripled or quadrupled our efficiency.

Auvik and its dashboard give us a real-time picture of our network. It makes it pretty easy to gain visibility. It's also extremely helpful to have that map up by default. For viewing infrastructure for clients where maybe I haven't been on-site before, it helps me quickly get an image and a picture of what's happening there, so it's extremely helpful.

It's definitely made our team better at catching issues faster, which results in happier clients.

Auvik has empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own. Its ease of use is great. The alerts, map, and dashboard overviews let our team know where to start even if they don't have any context going into it. Even for entry-level team members, it's just made us overall faster and more efficient while having fewer escalations. My team feels happier and more productive when dealing with alerts. 

I don't have many critiques. It's a really great tool. If I did have to think of one, I would say maybe there could be a wider knowledge base for auto-determining what devices are would be useful. Sometimes we get a generic device, then we can't tell what it is quickly from the details. Just having a better knowledge-based integration for determining what devices are, and what their make and models are, would be helpful. 

I've been using the solution for two and a half years. 

I'd rate stability seven out of ten. There may occasionally be downtime, but never bugs or glitches. 

Our clients are typically medium to large companies.

We have about 70 or more people directly working with the solution.

I'd rate scalability eight out of ten. It's easy to keep deploying and integrating with our portal so that all technicians can access all clients. 

I've only had to reach out to technical support once or twice and it has always been a great experience. The support experience reinforces why we want to use them and work with them.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

We use local drives at each client site that do the detection and use a cloud deployment. 

The process is complex, however, Auvik does a good job of making it pretty simple. We had it up and running within a couple of days. Typically, it's a one-man job and we have one of our senior engineers deploy it. We deploy based on client requirements with engineers determining the best options for each client. 

The solution does not require any maintenance from our end. Auvik would handle any maintenance. 

I don't have any insights into price or cost.

We're an MSP. 

I definitely would recommend the product to others. It's a very powerful tool that can make your IT company more professional and make your clients happier.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We initially implemented Auvik Network Management because we lacked network visibility. During the trial, the traffic analysis feature unexpectedly revealed malicious connections. This pop-out function within Auvik allowed us to break down traffic and identify TeamViewer sessions by destination, ultimately helping us pinpoint the source. This unexpected benefit, along with its core alerting functionality, convinced our executives of Auvik's value.

While the network map offers near real-time, full visibility into our network, it's limited to managed switches. This means the current drawback lies solely with outdated infrastructure, and the most effective solution is an upgrade.

The interface is intuitive and user-friendly.

After deploying Auvik Network Management within a week, I gained complete visibility into our network traffic. Alarmingly, it revealed a significant amount of unauthorized software and social media usage, with Facebook alone accounting for a quarter of our traffic within just a day. This immediate insight allowed us to take swift action and shut down the problematic activity, demonstrating the clear value of Auvik from the beginning.

In my experience with entry-level technicians at our co-op, Auvik Network Management has been a valuable tool. It simplifies network mapping and understanding for beginners and even helps me proactively manage tickets. With Auvik, I can identify potential issues before they escalate into major alerts, or use existing alerts to create tickets for faster resolution.

Auvik Network Management helps us spend less time on maintenance and setup of the solution and less time on the issue resolution.

Auvik Network Management was a time-saver, but more importantly, it provided greater network visibility which ultimately improved security. Instead of spending time sifting through logs for issues, Auvik's features freed me up to implement solutions and proactively enhance network security.

The most valuable features are the traffic analysis and the network mapping.

The network map is great overall, but it loses track of devices when their IP addresses change. This means we have to manually remove them and let them re-add, or use static IPs. Every month, a bunch of devices change IPs and end up in a random category, disrupting the map's organization. That's my only complaint - otherwise, it's user-friendly and functional.

I previously evaluated one of Auvik's products, but it felt incomplete as a standalone SaaS offering. Ideally, Auvik would bundle this product with its other solutions for a more comprehensive network management experience.

Auvik Network Management needs to improve its operational technology coverage. 

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one year.

Auvik's stability is good overall, with frequent maintenance windows that haven't caused major disruptions for me. While these windows could potentially interfere during a security event, they are thankfully short and reasonable.

Auvik Network Management handled my network well. It discovered devices across multiple VPNs and even unconfigured switches with default settings. This scalability was impressive, as it automatically connected to various sites with limited access, saving me time and effort.

I contacted technical support as soon as I noticed the issue with Auvik not being able to automatically remap devices that changed their IP. 

Positive

While I previously used Cisco Firepower for its rule-based functionality, it wasn't a true replacement for Auvik Network Management. Firepower seemed redundant for my needs since Auvik already provided the network visibility I required.

Auvik Network Management's deployment impressed with its ease of use. Installing the collectors, entering credentials, and letting it discover devices was a breeze. While building a complete network map took a couple of days due to complexities like potential network loops, it began providing valuable insights immediately.

The deployment took two hours.

I took advantage of Auvik's three-hour technical support to configure alerts and receive a high-level overview of their Network Management platform, but I handled the actual deployment myself.

Auvik Network Management's pricing was surprisingly reasonable. Even my C-suite executives, who initially anticipated a much higher cost, found it to be quite fair.

Cisco Visibility provided better coverage for the operational technology side of my network compared to Auvik Network Management. However, Cisco's high cost was a drawback, while Auvik offered a more affordable option with the added benefit of traffic analysis and alerts.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

Our entire IT infrastructure, including all servers and pretty much everything else, is managed by Auvik. The only area I'd like to improve is Operational Technology monitoring. Since our CNC machines run small Windows deployments, Auvik doesn't monitor them as effectively as an OT-specific solution would.

The only maintenance I need involves manually clearing out IP addresses instead of letting Auvik automatically refine and remap them, which can be frustrating. This can cause a device's IP to change several times, leaving outdated entries in a grayed-out section. It's a minor inconvenience but would improve the overall user experience.

Due to our focus on privacy, our company wasn't sold on Auvik's standalone SaaS solution, feeling it was excessive for our needs. While it excelled at shadow IT discovery and endpoint monitoring, it lacked vulnerability scanning and remediation capabilities. Integrating these features into their existing product would be far more valuable, allowing for automatic updates and patching alongside IT asset monitoring. While Auvik's SaaS product is okay, it wasn't the right fit for us.

Don't miss out on configuring Auvik's alerts! The default settings are overly broad, notifying you about everything from critical issues to minor inconveniences like low printer toner. Take advantage of Auvik's customization options to ensure you only receive alerts for important events.