Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

Our use case is to monitor and maintain not only our corporate headquarters, but all of our remote sites and embedded sites across our company.

It's a SaaS application.

It has definitely helped us to put out fires before people even know there is a problem. It helped us to discover a lot of network problems with one of our buildings so that we could have it rewired.

We're a pretty small team, there are four of us in IT. I'm the primary network person and then I have a backup. Auvik does help him and other members of the team, and our developer. We all wear multiple hats, but we have our specialties. It helps everybody on the team when I'm not able to get to something, and somebody has a network issue. It helps everyone else to diagnose the issue if I'm tied up working on something else.

The solution has also decreased our mean time to resolution by at least half. We're able to very quickly see what's going on. We can see the connections within the image it shows, but we can also deep-dive quickly through the TrafficInsights and the logging. Even if you quickly go ahead and make a decision to reboot something to restore service, you can still capture logging and things that would normally be on the device, so that you can quickly figure out what happened. That helps with root cause analysis for after the fact so that you can come up with plans to avoid the issue going forward. That's the kind of thing we didn't have before. Before we'd have to make a quick decision regarding, "Do we troubleshoot this to figure it out or do we go ahead and just reboot it?" Nine times out of 10, that'll probably resolve your issue.

It's a network monitoring system, so being able to see things like the hardware lifecycle, if our equipment is up to date, if connections are broken, or whether there are physical line breaks, is helpful. We're able to determine connectivity issues. We can monitor pretty much anything that is network-related.

It's fairly easy to use out-of-the-box.

We also use the TrafficInsights feature and it has been a huge help to us. Using it, we can see interface utilization, both WAN-facing and LAN-facing. We can see what kind of bandwidth we're using and what is using that bandwidth: what type of application, what host is using it, and how long it's been using it. And the historical data of TrafficInsights is great as well.

With TrafficInsights, we can obviously tell when our backups are running, because we run nightly backups and hourly backups. We can see the performance utilization of our backup server. And we can also tell, end-user-wise, what applications end-users are using and how long they're using them for. And while we don't necessarily know what they're doing, at the same time we kind of do know what they're doing. We know what websites they're going to, so we understand how they're utilizing the internet connection.

When it comes to identifying where we are experiencing performance issues using the TrafficInsights feature, I'm actually working on that right now, for the comptroller of our company. It's mainly about trying to get her to call me when it actually happens so I can log in and see it. This is the first time I've used it to diagnose an actual connection problem.

Auvik's network discovery capabilities are pretty fast. The biggest thing is that you have to commit to SNMP. You have to turn that on so that you can get the layer below. From a ping perspective, it does a great job of discovering devices on the network, once you have pointed it at the right entry point. You have to commit to a few protocols to open up the network so that it will get to the levels below the surface, where you're actually pulling information, data, logging, et cetera. If you really want to manage the network, you do have to open up a few protocols.

It also automatically updates network topology. It has a great map view of everything so that you can see all the connection points and the health of a connection. You can say whether it's a ping or if you have the right protocols set up so that you can pull in information. It's very easy to quickly see, from a graph, where you need to possibly address setup issues. The other thing that is great about the highlighting is when you have unknown devices on the network. They will come up and you can quickly filter for them in a very easy-to-use table. That way, you can tackle if they really are unknown devices or if somebody is trying to do something they shouldn't.

It's rare, but sometimes the actual application itself can be a little slow. That's because of the amount of data that it is pulling from remote networks. That has been my only complaint with it and it's really not even a complaint. But if the speed of the application were to improve, it would help a lot.

We've been using Auvik since December, so it's been about six months.

They do really well with the availability of the application. When they need to take maintenance windows, unless it's emergency maintenance, which I've only seen one time, they always have a backup. That means it's pretty much available all the time. We've never had a problem with it going down, ever.

It's pretty scalable. It's always easy to add on another visible device. Depending on how you decide to set up your network, you're going to pull in anything that isn't a piece of that main entry point. From a pricing standpoint, that part's good. 

Their technical support has been crazy good. A challenge for us, if we wanted to consider leaving the product, is just how good they are. Not only were they engaged from the beginning—even as easy as it was—but they guided us through and showed us different tools. They gave us multiple workshops. And even after those workshops we've had quarterly follow-up.

They really want you to use the product. It's not even a partnership issue. Rather, you can just tell they love what they do. It's definitely one of the better relationships I've come across in the last 20-something years of IT. That made the decision to go with them really easy for us. We felt really good about it after as well.

They're also very open to feedback and to looking at what that can lead to in terms of development and enhancing of their product. They've done so much reaching out to us. We have nothing but great things to say about them.

They definitely work with us. They don't just say, "Here, we sold you a product." They want us to get the most out of it, and that's what changes it to a partnership-type relationship.

We didn't have anything before Auvik, and it's helped out immensely.

There are a couple of tricky things to set up. You've got to know the equipment that you're running, but once you know that and you work alongside Auvik and use their Knowledge Base, it's extremely easy to set up. We had ours up and running in a day and we had it fine-tuned in a couple of months.

As a cloud-based solution, other than troubleshooting, there's barely any maintenance on our side. A lot of it is just the initial setup, such as getting a site running, and even that doesn't take that much time. You can have a site up and running and loaded in 30 minutes or less, if you know what you're doing. It's very straightforward, very easy to use, a lot of it is point-and-click. Once you've set up a few sites, you tend to know it like I know the back of my hand. It's super-easy for me to set stuff up.

We worked with an Auvik technical engineer. They had a deployment roadmap that we followed, and typically, every other week we were going through the different features and functions. We would set up a meeting to go over, for example, setting up SNMP and SSH login and turning on TrafficInsights. They helped us tune it to the way that we needed to use it.

The time-to-value ratio, for us, was day one. We had nothing before Auvik, so as soon as we got the product up and going, we were already seeing the networks through the discovery services. After a session of a few hours, we started to understand the SNMP and how to set things up and pull in a lot more of the logging and alerting, detailed information regarding the traffic. Within two to four hours, on top of the discovery stuff, we were off to the races. We quickly discovered versions and where we were from an asset-management perspective. We could see older equipment that we had, and we were able to quickly target a hardware refresh. The time-to-value was almost instant.

It's great for small businesses, but when you start reviewing the pricing model, depending on how many devices, and what sub-devices you decide to pull in, it can get tricky as far as the pricing goes. 

For us, as a mid-sized organization, it works great. There are some functions and features that you might get from a Meraki or from SolarWinds that, if you have a more robust networking team or a security team, might be useful, and Auvik might get passed over for an enterprise-grade solution. That said, Auvik is phenomenal for us. It's great for what we use it for. It gives us a very powerful tool at a very cost-effective price point for our size of an organization.

We have 20 to 25 billable devices. In terms of endpoints, we at least have 250 machines and there are a bunch of printers that we've got alerting on, and other miscellaneous devices that are connected to networks.

The challenge might be for a more robust network, where you start putting in a lot of billable devices. There's going to be a point where this solution would potentially be more expensive than some of the enterprise solutions, just because of the billing structure. Auvik could potentially price itself out of large organizations because of how it does billable devices and lose out to solutions that not only have more robust services but that price things out differently.

We have looked at a couple of open-source, network monitoring solutions, but they weren't as robust as this. NinjaRMM was one of the solutions we looked at. We pretty much just chose Auvik and moved forward with it. 

The strength of Auvik, and many of the tools at its price point, are the out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities. Where Auvik pulls ahead is when you set up SNMP and you're able to scan the layer details and information from all the devices underneath. That's when you're really going to start getting more of the robustness it offers, whether it's TrafficInsights or it's the asset management that comes from having a network monitoring tool. That's definitely where it comes out ahead. Ninja RMM, for example, is just giving you a high-level inventory of what it sees on the network. It probably wouldn't give you much more than a Lansweeper or the like.

My recommendation is that even if you have network experience, their product is vendor-neutral, so pay attention to the way that they do things. Even though it is specific to them, it's very easy to get used to the way that they have everything laid out.

Take advantage of the training sessions and of all the meetings. Go through the certification course that they have and pay attention to the Knowledge Base. Everything that they have done shows that they actually care about what they're doing and what they like doing. They are there to help. They will bend over backward to help you.

It does configuration backups and it takes them automatically. I also do those on the side as well, manually. In the event that something does happen, it's always better to have a backup. We've got backups for everything. We haven't come across any issues where we've had to use the configuration backups yet.

It does its job well. I would rate it at nine out of 10. I'm a little bit more network-driven, so a lot of the things it can do are fun, for me. I probably enjoy it more than anybody else on the team. 

You can definitely tell that this solution is younger than some others. It definitely knows its niche. It gave us everything we needed, to the point where I could rate it an 11 out of 10. But if I start to look at SolarWinds and some of the other names out there, some integration capability to do all the clicks within the service would probably be the next improvement that I would want. But if you ask for those, it may price itself out of where it's at now, which is a really great spot.

I don't see us leaving it for quite some time for sure.

Our company operates in the IT field and offers managed services to our IT clientele. We provide a range of IT solutions to these customers. One such service is managed networking. To ensure the smooth delivery of this managed network service, we utilize Auvik for network monitoring purposes.

After exploring the market, we evaluated several products that offered device monitoring features. Our key objectives were to track device status up or down, receive alerts for offline devices like switches or access points, and gain network visibility through a visual dashboard or network map that would provide real-time health information. Ultimately, we decided to implement Auvik to meet these needs. 

In our evaluation of competitors, Auvik emerged as the superior product across several key metrics. It stood out for its usability, ease of onboarding, and customer onboarding. This meant minimal training and upskilling for our staff, as the product is intuitive and user-friendly. Overall, Auvik impressed us with its user-centric design and streamlined implementation process.

The network map and dashboard offer a real-time view of our networks, which aligns with our expectations. Since most of our customers are located geographically close together, a single top-level dashboard provides a clear picture of their network health. This centralized view allows us to quickly identify any potential issues and zoom in on specific areas for further investigation. The alerting system is also very responsive, notifying us promptly of any problems.

Gaining real-time visibility into our network is a breeze thanks to Auvik's intuitive dashboard and user-friendly network map. This feature has been a major hit with our clients, who appreciate the ease of use. The ability to filter and search directly from the dashboard makes it simple to identify specific information, saving us valuable time and effort.

Auvik has made significant improvements in device protection, along with enhancements to how the network diagnostics and network map are built. Their recent launch of additional loop tools is quite impressive.

We have empowered our entry-level technicians to resolve more tickets independently. Previously, we had to escalate network-related tickets to two network specialists. Now, Auvik allows us to assign these issues to generalist engineers, at least for initial triage. This way, generalist engineers can gain valuable information to troubleshoot the problems much earlier in the incident lifecycle.

It has significantly improved our mean time to resolution. Auvik can generate those corrective alerts promptly, which is a significant improvement on the previous product we were using.

Auvik has been a valuable tool for understanding the health and composition of our customers' networks. It provides us with proactive insights into firmware and software versions across a wide range of devices. This information is crucial for planning and implementing security patches and improvements. Additionally, Auvik helps us track hardware lifecycles, allowing for better planning of replacements. The richness of the data provided by Auvik makes it an essential asset for network management.

The value of Auvik became immediately apparent. We were tasked with onboarding a significant number of customers – roughly 150. While the onboarding process itself was quick, taking only about an hour per customer, the true benefit came after deployment. Auvik's proactive reporting allowed us to identify issues that our previous products had missed.

The true value lies in its ability to provide immediate network visibility. By minimizing setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting time, Auvik empowers users to spend less time on the software itself and more time on understanding what's happening within their network devices. This easy access to information is what makes Auvik a valuable proposition.

In my experience as an MSP, Auvik stood out for its ease of deployment. We were able to quickly roll it out to over 150 customers without any hassle. Additionally, it was straightforward to configure the alerts to meet our specific needs. Finally, the Auvik team provided excellent support when we were integrating the software with our ticketing system.

Proactive monitoring, particularly proactive alerting for misconfigurations, is a powerful tool. For instance, if a switch has incorrect VLAN configurations, the system can automatically detect the mismatch and raise an alert. This allows us to proactively resolve these issues before they cause any problems for our customers or even our own team. Additionally, the ability to see a high-level overview of network issues and traffic throughput provides valuable insights. It's important to remember that we're currently only using the essentials package, which is the most basic offering.

To improve customer onboarding, Auvik could consider offering a free tier of the product. This could be a discovery-only model, allowing potential customers to explore the software's features without a financial commitment. Alternatively, a per-site pricing model could be implemented for initial trials. This would enable them to experience the value Auvik brings to their specific network size before committing to a full subscription. The initial cost can be a hurdle for smaller businesses, but they often recognize the value after using the product. The challenge lies in getting them past that initial barrier.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for almost two years.

Auvik is stable and we are always notified ahead of time of any scheduled maintenance.

Auvik is easy to scale once the deployment is done. We scaled up from ten to over 100 within a couple of days. 

Out of all the SaaS products I use, Auvik's technical support team stands out as the absolute best. They consistently impress me with their professionalism and deep technical knowledge. They are, without a doubt, the most effective support team I've had the pleasure of interacting with.

Positive

We previously relied on a network monitoring solution that is no longer actively maintained by the vendor. While the vendor has released a newer product, it fell short of our needs during our evaluation. In our search for a replacement, we prioritized network monitoring solutions. Unfortunately, neither the original product nor the vendor's new offering aligned with this requirement. While both products aimed to address network monitoring needs, they lacked the established reputation we were seeking within the industry.

Our deployment of Auvik involved a staged approach, which took a significant amount of time upfront for research, development, and planning. The actual deployment of the Auvik itself was relatively quick. The most time-consuming aspect was customizing alerts to align with our specific business needs. This customization likely took our team a combined total of more than five to ten hours. While I primarily performed the deployment myself, a team of two or three people could have completed it seamlessly.

I understand Auvik's value proposition, but the retail price might seem high at first glance. However, for commercial businesses, the cost becomes quite reasonable when considering the broader commercial benefits. Our challenge lies in targeting small businesses and educational institutions. These customers, often with tighter budgets, may not fully grasp the value of proactive monitoring. This makes it difficult to convince them of the product's worth.

Despite this hurdle, we have successfully sold the product to these customer segments. The value it delivers is undeniable, and we haven't had a single instance where a customer needed to be removed from the service due to lack of benefit.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

We have 100 engineers that utilize Auvik.

Agents deployed to network probes are automatically maintained. This is a natural advantage of using a cloud-hosted service for Auvik. Since the software resides on the vendor's cloud infrastructure, they handle product maintenance and updates. This translates to a lighter workload for our team, as there's no need for manual maintenance on our end.

I definitely recommend Auvik to others and have proactively encouraged friends and colleagues in the industry to consider the product. However, it's important to acknowledge that Auvik might not be the perfect fit for every business model. Additionally, the price point can be a challenge depending on the scale of your deployment.

We install the product on all of our customer's endpoints. As an IT services consultant and provider, we depend on it to help us monitor the SaaS applications in use in customer environments. This includes monitoring for shadow IT, but equally important is being able to monitor license usage of approved apps and report that usage back to our customers.

Our customers' environments range from a handful of users to hundreds. Most of them are heavy SaaS users, and most work in at least hybrid environments, if not completely remote. Many of our customers are highly regulated or work with highly regulated customers themselves. All of them have intellectual property they're concerned about safeguarding, as well as customer information. 

This solution is one of a set of tools we use to control and protect these environments. It's one of the most important. Knowing about and stopping data from being stored or otherwise transmitted to unapproved SaaS applications is a primary concern for our customers, as it can cause regulatory violations or data loss and exposure - of both their customers' data and their own IP. It works quickly and proactively, allowing us to prevent these problems.

The product provides important insights into application usage for our customers and for us. Many of our customers are in highly regulated industries, and all of them have concerns about security. Our customers are also concerned about the proliferation of subscriptions they are signed up for. The solution allows us to monitor all of these things. We can provide reporting for audits and as part of our monthly reviews. We can detect and respond quickly to people using unapproved applications. 

We find that it is incredibly easy to install. Early in our use of the product, we worked with the development team and were able to work out a simple process for us to remotely install the tool through our RMM. Doing so is now a routine and fast part of our onboarding process. Management is zero effort on our part.

Overall, the solution gives our customers significant piece of mind, helps them save money, and removes a complication from their business. For us, it's a breeze to use and very dependable.

Reporting is critical for us and our customers. Many need to present documentation of their efforts to protect their data and their IT environment during audits. We can periodically generate reports from the product and store these in a convenient location. These are then at hand during audits, so our customers don't have to scramble to prepare.

Shadow IT monitoring is huge for us since so many of our customers are highly regulated. Being able to quickly detect and respond to Shadow IT usage is incredibly valuable for stopping potential regulatory violations.

Integrating some LLM/AI capabilities into the product that would enable us to use natural language to query the tool and get sensible answers back would be great. Being able to integrate that with Slack or Teams would be even better.

We are always looking for ways to shave time from operations tasks. Even without LLM/AI, being able to integrate some degree of real-time query from a tool like Slack would be very useful. That would eliminate some of the need for us to check the portal and various customer tenants to get the information we need.

We've used the solution almost since it was first developed. It's been part of our toolbox for several years.

We've never run into any issues. The software works and doesn't interfere.

The product is very scalable. We deploy it to thousands of endpoints.

The solution always provides strong customer support.

Positive

We didn't use a different solution previously. We adopted the product early in development, and there weren't many competing products available. Since then, competitors have come out, yet we've stayed with this solution not only due to what it does but due to the quality of the team and company (Auvik).

The initial setup is very straightforward. We've completely automated the installation. The Auvik team is great at helping with this.

There's significant ROI to our customers, both in avoiding the downsides of Shadow IT and in managing their SaaS licensing. Our ROI comes in that we are adding value to our customers' IT and security operations while not incurring significant costs or time to do so.

We feel that the solution is incredibly affordable and fits well into our portfolio of tools. Setup is very easy and has been easy for us to automate. 

There wasn't much else available at the time we started using a solution of this nature. We have looked at other solutions since. However, we prefer to stay with Auvik.

Shadow IT monitoring and SaaS license management used to be uncommon thing. In just a few years, it's become table stakes. Any company not doing this is missing an important part of what IT needs to perform to secure the enterprise and manage costs. This solution provides an easy-to-use and affordable way to do this. I recommend it very highly.

We use Auvik to manage our network devices and get alerts about what's happening on our systems. We've deployed it across our showroom office network. We have 140 devices.

We're discovering devices we weren't getting previously. For example, we can monitor printer status and be more aware of what's happening with our printers. It's given us visibility that we didn't have.

It's essential because we don't have a dedicated IT team to manage our network. In addition to our IT infrastructure, we need to monitor smart office devices like the cameras and ensure all our devices are online. The ability to monitor this is massively valuable for our potential clients and us. 

We plan to use Auvik to keep our device inventories updated, but I haven't set that up yet. However, it has already populated a list of devices we will keep up to date. We didn't have that list previously. 

The best feature is the ease of setup. Auvik immediately scans and finds everything. It automatically connects to multiple devices with a single set of credentials.

Managing the platform seems relatively easy. I've only used it for a few days, but it's far easier than the previous product we were using. It gives us a single integrated platform, which is crucial for our business model because we provide solutions for others. The network visualization makes rough sense. There are elements that I find tricky to get my head around, but I think might be because it's all new to me. 

I say it's fairly clear, but obviously, it needs me to spend a little bit more time maybe grouping things together and things like that to make sure we've got the correct devices that things are mapped incorrectly.

I'm still undergoing the trial period. My only complaint is that I still don't understand what the license cost will be. More transparent pricing would be massive. In terms of functionality, it's head and shoulders above our previous solution.

I have only been using Auvik for about a week.

Auvik seems more stable than our previous solution. 

The scalability seems good. I placed a collector on a relatively low-power machine, and it doesn't seem to be struggling on the network. Everything seems fine.

We previously used Domotz, but we switched because it required us to run a device on the network that took another device off the network for some reason. I began looking at other solutions to see if they all had this issue. I stumbled across Auvik and decided to try it out.

One of the issues we face is that some of our customers won't allow anything to leave the site, so it has to be on-prem. That's one reason we chose Domotz. However, that caused problems with our network. We prefer a cloud-based system on our network because I work remotely more often than not. On-prem and cloud solutions have advantages and drawbacks. Some customers need an on-prem solution, but I prefer a cloud-based one.

Deploying Auvik is straightforward, and I did it myself. You install the agent, add credentials, and click okay. After you deploy the collector, the network map populates in under a day. I deployed it in the evening, and everything was there the next day. 

When comparing prices, you should consider how long it will take to set up and configure. A cheaper option might not be completely deployed for months. We don't have tons of time to do these things. The most important aspect is how fast we can get it running. How good the software is, and how quickly we can start using it effectively.

There was no visibility prior to setting it up on pricing. Having set it up, their pricing seems fair. It's definitely more expensive than what we're paying at the moment.

I rate Auvik seven out of 10. It seems fairly simple so far, and we haven't had any issues. However, I haven't used it extensively enough. It's expensive, and it would need to be mind-blowing to justify the cost. 

My advice to future users is to ensure you get your credentials together before starting the setup.

We're an MSP, and we use it to manage our customers' networks.

The industries of our customers vary. They are from healthcare, manufacturing, finance, education, etc. It's mainly used to monitor switches, firewalls, ISP connections, and Wi-Fi, such as controllers, etc. It does do some additional monitoring on workstations and servers, but we don't rely on it for that. It's just not what their bread and butter is. So, even though it does that, we don't really focus on that.

We have an MSP portal for accessing all of the different customers. Auvik has an integration with ConnectWise which we never used. We just log in directly to the Auvik portal whenever we need something with Auvik, but they do offer an integration with ConnectWise that we don't take much advantage of.

Switching to Auvik has helped with two main parts. One of them is with time, but we also had difficulty accomplishing what we're now able to accomplish with Auvik. We had several applications that have been replaced by Auvik and several different panes of glass that are all now just in one place. Previously, sometimes, one of those panes of glass had an issue that we didn't find out about until we realized that we missed an alert that should have alerted us. With Auvik, there's the ease of deployment, the reliability, and the consolidation of everything together. That has been huge. It has saved hundreds of hours over six years.

It provides clear visibility into our customers' networks and reliability. I can't stress this enough, but reliability is so key for an MSP. If you're in-house, you have a lot of eyes and involvement in all the different systems, but when you're an MSP, there are many times when you're not going to touch or look at a system unless there's an issue. It may go months like that. For example, we had a switch that died at a customer. I had a level-one tech take down a replacement switch. I logged into Auvik, pulled the configs that were running on the machine, and sent them over to him. He terminaled into the new switch, pasted in the full config, and the customer was back up and running. My tech was on-site for about an hour or less, which included taking out the old switch, moving everything over to the new switch, and programming the new switch. That's incredible. We saved our customer's downtime. We saved ourselves working time on this issue. It was also easy. It was a breeze.

Planning new projects is a breeze now because we have one place we go to. We see all the current network configs. If we're doing a switch upgrade, we see every port that's used on the switch. We see exactly which VLANs are assigned on each port. We see all the configs very easily on all different switches. We can filter on the network map by device type. If there's an issue where one machine is not connecting, we can easily trace which switch it's plugged into. We can trace which uplink it's supposed to go to. We can trace it all the way back to the data center, and very easily, we can track down where the issue is. I rave about Auvik.

It has absolutely helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. We had to install several different platforms and configure several different platforms for each customer. Now, it's one software that we have to install. We do some basic configuration and enter unique credentials. We just configure it once, and it applies to every single customer. It has significantly helped in that regard.

We're not a global company. We're just a national company, but it has helped with the visibility into every one of our customers' networks. It's a total game-changer. It was something that was a significant struggle, which we had ironed out. We had a system that was functional, but it wasn't the best system in place. Auvik has been a game-changer.

Its automation had an effect on our IT team’s availability. They're not as busy with it. They don't need to check up on it as much. When there is an alert, it's very quick and easy to verify, remediate, and check if it is a false positive. We get to know:

• What exactly was the issue?
• Do we have a real issue on our hands?
• What are we going to do about it?
• What's the plan of action?

It has cut our time dealing with a network issue. Now, we probably spend between 20% to 30% of our time, or even less than that, dealing with any network issues. Similarly, it has cut the time by 20% to 30% when it comes to checking on the alerts to see what's going on. Previously, we would've spent a lot more time on that, but now, it's so much easier to remediate an issue that we spend 20% less time on it. Something that would've taken a whole day now literally takes an hour and a half. The whole thing is remediated.

We've been able to significantly cut down on the amount of network expertise required because we don't need every level-two tech to be able to understand the networks, configure the tools, and troubleshoot if something didn't quite work. We cut that down significantly. We just have a couple of people who are network experts, and they are able to handle the full load of what's going on because of the access and the visibility that they get.

It helps us to keep track of the devices that each customer has. There is an incredible export feature using which you can export all the information into a spreadsheet. It does a very nice job on that.

The network map is fantastic. The backup of configs is also valuable. It does SSH into each network device and retains a copy of the configs on the machines as well as the change logs. So, when something suddenly stops, you can compare the configs to see what happened. You can do a side-by-side comparison of the configs to see exactly what changed. That's fantastic. The alerting is great. We get email alerts from them. Those are my favorite features.

It's incredibly easy considering the power and the capabilities that it has. For a tool that can do this much, it's crazy how easy it's to set up and manage. There are some very powerful tools out there, but they also take a lot of configuration, tweaking, and setup. Auvik is quick. It's a breeze. I can have level-one techs setting up a lot of things. I can script out the deployments, and it's done with a few clicks. We can get it up and running, go into the customer's tenant, and just have whoever's setting up the different devices enter the credentials into the portal, and it runs. It's great. This is one of the best MSP tools that I've used. When I factor in the ease of use, the power and capabilities that it has, and just how useful it is, it wouldn't be an exaggeration at all to say this is the best overall MSP tool that I've used. Its ease of use is critical. One of the biggest things with running an MSP team is to make sure that your team can easily use the tool without needing to have a ton of training. That's what MSPs are all about. We can occasionally have a complex tool, but then there's going to be a limited number of people who are familiar with it, which is going to limit our ability to manage it. It's huge for an MSP to be able to have a tool that a tech can use with minimal training.

I didn't find the UI, especially for the network maps, to be so intuitive. Navigating the network map was not so intuitive. It has been awesome for visualizing the network mapping/topology, but it took me a little bit of time to get a hang of how to use their network filter interface. It's not complex. It's just a user interface issue where you realize, "Oh, okay. That's where that button is." It took me a little bit of time to get the hang of that, but that was years ago. It's not complicated. It's just that I wasn't expecting a couple of UI items to be there, but once I realized where they were, it worked great. So, once you know where what you're looking for is, it's just amazing. It's user-friendly. It doesn't have a steep learning curve. Its learning curve is similar to or smaller than any new software that you're adopting. There is a little bit of a learning curve, not super steep. 

We use a lot of Aruba networking products. I know that over the year and a half or two years, they've significantly improved their integration with Aruba products. They can just improve it a little bit more. 

For the last year and a half or so, I've had other people doing a lot of R&D. So, I know that they've come up with a lot of improvements. I felt that for a while, a lot of the improvements weren't things that we cared about. It was good to see that the company is continually trying to grow, expand, and improve its product, but we didn't really feel a lot of improvement. 

We have a few other networking tools. Some of them are specifically for managing Wi-Fi. They have some great features where they give specific recommendations based on the network traffic they're seeing and based on other customers that have had similar issues, or even just by looking at your own data that they're gathering. They give AI-based recommendations on how to improve the network. Auvik could have something like that. It gives us excellent visibility into the network, but if there is a way to include some remediation tips that are digestible by level-one and level-two techs, that would be great. That would be a huge benefit because we still need our level-three network engineers to look into any real network issue. A lot of times, it does feel like this is something that could have been understood by an AI. It could have been an alert such as:

• There's a network loop here.
• We are detecting this device has a mismatched VLAN or something like that. Do you want to look into this?
• Can you confirm that this is the appropriate config, or should it be changed? 

Some sort of remediation-based focus would be awesome. They could just expand the feature set to things that would help us further. These are the things that we would care about.

I have been using Auvik for about six years.

It has been great. I have zero complaints about it. They notify you if there are upgrades that are taking place. The notification is very good. It has been very smooth and very good.

It has been so easy. Once we have the software configured, it's more or less copy-paste for every additional customer that we add. Of course, there are some things, such as credentials, that are unique to each environment, but that's it.

The number of end users that are affected by Auvik could be up to 7,000.

Their support is very good. They also have pretty good documentation. They're easily available by chat and pretty knowledgeable. Every time I've had to reach out to them, it was a pretty smooth experience. I hope it stays that way. I feel that so many companies start off like that, but then a couple of years later, you can barely get through to anyone. It has been great so far, and I hope it stays that way. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. I have no complaints at all. 

Positive

We previously used different solutions, but they weren't direct competitors to this. It was more like we had to cobble things together and through ConnectWise or some other tool, set up our own ping service that would run and then alert us if it doesn't check in for X amount of time to see if the network is down. We had a different solution that would take backups of the configs, but it wasn't a live solution. It wasn't that we had a direct network monitoring competitor that we used. We had to use several other solutions out there to make up for all the different functionalities that Auvik now provides.

It was straightforward. It did take some time, as you would expect for a tool with such power and capabilities. It took some time, like every such tool would take, but overall, it was probably less than what you would expect considering what the capabilities are. So, it was straightforward and simple. It wasn't complicated. It didn't take a lot. You spend an hour on the phone with them. They'll walk you through all the different places where you'll configure everything. If you compare it to ConnectWise's RMM, ConnectWise's RMM is probably five times or even more complicated than this. You need an expert for that, whereas you don't need to hire an expert to handle Auvik. You can handle it all on your own.

We implemented it on our own. We had just one person for deployment. It started to be implemented several months before I took over, and there was just one person. When he left, I took over the full management and handling of the configuration of the tool. Since then, I've delegated it to another person, and he just handles it himself. He checks with me occasionally if there's something he is unsure about, but that's been almost nonexistent. One person should be enough to configure it for a bunch of places.

In terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight. It rarely needs tweaking.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. We have also seen a significant reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). It's one of my favorite tools. When I go to trade shows and talk to people, I feel that it's just the easiest sell because it's so easy. There's no, "Oh, well, you have to choose which features you want, and we like this." I literally have so little to quibble about with this.

It was worth every penny that we paid for it. It's not necessarily the cheapest. I don't know what its current price is. I haven't been involved in the pricing part of it for a couple of years. I know that a couple of years ago, it was a bit pricey, but it saved us many times over the cost that we were paying for it.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that I understand the initial concern, but just look into it and do the math on how much money this can save you. It's a drop in the bucket.

I wasn't the one who researched it originally. The director of IT started implementing Auvik about six months before he left, and then I took over. I did look into a bunch of other ones because I always keep an eye on the market and what the vendors are offering. Occasionally, we have to change our solutions. So, we're always looking to see what fits our needs the best. In six years, I haven't found anything that has made me seriously think twice about swapping it out for Auvik.

To someone who is just starting out with Auvik, I would advise having a plan of what you want to accomplish with Auvik so that you can configure it properly right off the bat. You should know what you want to accomplish, what type of alerts you want, and what type of things you care about. It'll make your life so much easier because you can then just go and configure it very easily, instead of trying to figure out what you're trying to do while configuring it, which was some of what we did. We didn't quite know what it was capable of, how reliable it was, and how much we wanted to move the functionality over to Auvik versus using the current system. Once we did get past that point of having a clear idea of what we wanted from Auvik, everything was a breeze.

It has been such a game-changer in our network management. I can go on and on. It's one of the most awesome, incredible tools that I recommend to everybody. I have not seen any other competitor tool that even comes close to what they do. To me, it's just a no-brainer. Especially if you're an MSP, or if you have a complex network to manage, just get Auvik. It's going to make your life so much easier.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It's one of my favorite MSP tools to use and talk about. It's incredible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I use the monitoring on a daily basis. I receive the alerts. We have two monitoring software solutions and Auvik complements the other one. We use Auvik to cover the gaps in the other one. We get alerts from both sides.

Working at an MSP, I come across very different networks. No two are quite the same. Auvik makes it really easy for me to get a logical outlay of what switches are connected to what switches and what equipment is connected to what equipment. It takes a lot of the detective work out of the equation for me.

Without a doubt, it has affected the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. Having everyone in one portal, they click on their client and, as long as we have it configured properly and we're getting that accurate picture, it's absolutely incredible. That visibility is fantastic. We'll hop on a call and the other guy will also log in to Auvik. We can say, "Hey, search for this. Look at this path. The VLAN is everywhere except on this device. What are we going to do here?" It really helps us out with collaboration and brainstorming.

Auvik makes it much easier to trace connections and log in to a switch without having to jump through all those extra hoops. It makes logging into switches accessible for some people who may not be comfortable with that.

The network mapping, the logical layout, is the part that I love the most, showing what switch is connected to what switch. I couldn't live without it. That is the big selling point for me. If somebody asks me a question about a network, I log in to Auvik, 100 percent, to look at their network before I can make any decisions or answer any questions. The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is excellent. I don't know how I lived without this solution before.

Most people will also use Auvik for one of my favorite functions that it provides, the remote terminal. That's pretty much the preferred way as far as management goes. We still have people logging in to a service locally using SSH and getting into networking equipment. But personally, in the last year, I have really shifted over to Auvik-first management for my tasks.

In addition, we are all about consistency, and having one unified platform is very nice. Familiarity breeds efficiency. It's important to use a unified platform because you're going to know where things are at for all your clients. You're going to know what you're looking for and where your tools are. That's why I've been shifting to Auvik-first to administrate my network devices. I could be at any one of 150 clients in a day, remotely, and Auvik makes it such a breeze because they're all showing up in one platform.

I have a love-hate relationship with the network mapping. 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."

For instance, I just pulled up one of the clients that I work with a lot. When I get a view of the entire network, it's highly complex. I see a lot of it. When I filter it down to just network items it's great. That sure helps simplify it. But actually trying to get around, for example, if I need to go to the right, I can't quite grab things and move them. It's just not super responsive. 

I would love to be able to use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out on the map, but instead, it scrolls the page, which it's fine. But sometimes it resizes the map too. I have a really high-power system and that map resizing sometimes even chugs my computer down.

In addition, I would love to be able to drag assets and place them where I want to, maybe on a session-by-session basis. Sometimes, if there are a bunch of devices to the left or the right of the core switch or stack or router, the connections blend together. I would love to be able to grab a device or a device group and drag it out of the way a little. It would still maintain the links between the icons, but the ability to place the icons where I want them, spread out a little bit, would be really cool.

I've been using Auvik for just over two years.

I have a very positive impression of its stability.

We had some kind of database error with accounts last year but that was resolved in a reasonable amount of time.  And I do see maintenance banners up for planned downtime, but I can only think of one or two times that I thought, "I really wish I had Auvik, but it's down right now." It's such a rarity so I'm not complaining. 

The stability is very good as far as I'm concerned.

Aside from making the map too big, the scalability is great.

We have it deployed in about 150 locations.

I haven't needed to contact customer support. It's intuitive enough that I've been able to get through it on my own.

I did not use another solution previously. I actually spent a decade saying, "Man, I really wish there was something out there like this." When I saw Auvik, my jaw dropped.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have installed the agent.

To my knowledge, there is no recurring maintenance. Occasionally I need to move an agent or restart an agent if it stops responding, or restart a server.

Part of the value of Auvik comes from being able to trace connections graphically and visually, rather than having to manually back-trace MAC tables. That alone saves enough time for me.

The only other thing I've ever heard of that is comparable to Auvik is something called The Dude. I looked it up once. I don't get intimidated by technology, but that was pretty intense and I never looked back. When somebody showed me Auvik, it blew my mind because it was pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

Install it on more than one client, make sure that you have your network scoped properly for scanning, and enjoy. Also, make sure you have your SNMP set up on all your devices. That's the hard part.

Within the last year, we made it a requirement for all of our clients to pay for an Auvik license. This is required software for us, going forward. That's a win.

Although I don't know anything about the pricing, I would definitely say look into Auvik. If the price is right, I understand why our organization has made it required, per client. If I was doing this on my own, Auvik would be a requirement for me as well.

In our organization, everybody uses it and everybody recommends it. Everybody says, "This is the way to go." Everybody hears about the efficiency, ease of use, and what's going to cause the least amount of stress. Everybody here likes it.

We use it for network monitoring and for configuration backups.

Auvik makes it much easier for techs to diagnose issues. And the automatic configuration backups are a game-changer. In addition, the ability it gives us to see more accurately what's going on inside our networks is very important to us.

It has also reduced our MTTR by about half.

The monitoring and management functions of Auvik are as easy as they can be for the functions they do. It's definitely the easiest product I've ever used. That ease of use is a nine or a 10 out of 10 when it comes to importance. If I have to hire somebody specifically to do those functions, it's very expensive to keep that person. If someone who has general skills can use it, it's much more affordable from a business standpoint.

It gives us a single integrated platform for networks and that ranks as a seven or eight out of 10 in importance.

And it's a tool we use every day for visibility into remote and distributed networks. That too is very important.

We also use it to keep device inventories up to date.

The network mapping is just okay when I consider what I would typically see in a network map. It doesn't fulfill what I would expect, but it does some other things: dynamic port information and VLAN. But that whole overview map in a single pane of glass can be pretty messy and a little bit of a performance hog on computers. The network mapping needs improvement in Auvik, as a whole.

I've been using Auvik for about three years.

It's very stable. I can't remember a single time when we've had an Auvik outage.

Other than the network map becoming a little bit of a performance hog as you get into bigger networks, it seems very scalable.

As an MSP, we provide IT for about 50 organizations, from healthcare to manufacturing to education. That means we have Auvik deployed with collectors at single sites and at multiple sites with multiple collectors. It covers a broad spectrum for us.

We weren't really doing Auvik-type functions on any kind of scale. We've used SolarWinds or PRTG, but we weren't really using anything, before Auvik, for all of our clients.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Once the Auvik code was implemented it took a couple of minutes for the network mapping to start to populate. It was very fast. We have about 50 clients, and the overall deployment took about 20 hours, when all was said and done.

There is no comparison between Auvik and previous solutions I've used when it comes to setup and maintenance. With other solutions, I would literally have to touch every single networking device to monitor them. With those solutions, it probably took at least five times as long to set up. For deployment, we quote three hours, and for ongoing maintenance, we don't even think about it. It just works.

We did a pre-sales call with Auvik for the basic training, but outside of that, we did not use other help.

Our time-to-value with Auvik was right away.

I would love to be able to get into the tier with the sys logging and the NetFlow/sFlow. That tier is a little bit expensive for us. If that could come down a little bit in price, we would be using that everywhere.

We looked at SolarWinds, but Auvik was really the only fit for our business model, since we are an MSP. I couldn't find anything else that met the needs of a multi-tenant environment the way Auvik does.

If a comparison is being done among network monitoring solutions and there are concerns about pricing, I would tell them to look at the amount of time it takes to set up and maintain other solutions, as opposed to Auvik. Also, having to look at a MIB or do an SNMP walk for our devices, functions that would require a high-level tech, are things you don't even have to think about in Auvik. You put in the device, you tell it what you want to monitor on, and it does it for you. It honestly saves money.

As a cloud-based solution, Auvik is reliable and easy to use. I wouldn't even consider an on-prem solution at this point.

I would recommend it to anyone who would ask me about it.