Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We are using Auvik Network Management to monitor switch configuration and usage.

I'm looking to improve my network visibility by implementing effective alerts and enabling remote CLI access for switch management.

Auvik's user interface is user-friendly. While I'm currently fine-tuning the setup after a quick initial process, everything seems logically placed and easy to find.

The network map and dashboard's design are appealing, though the layout might need some adjustments. I suspect this is because my network insights aren't fully configured yet, preventing the system from automatically placing everything in its optimal location.

We can see a real-time picture of our network that reflects changes as they are being made.

I would rate the ease of use of the dashboard and network map seven out of ten.

Auvik provides full visibility into our network.

We saw the benefits of Auvik on the first day.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup maintenance, and issue resolution.

The in-app remote terminal and alerting system are Auvik's most valuable features. In less than a week, it identified previously unknown issues on our network.

It would be helpful to be able to send CLI commands to multiple devices in Auvik simultaneously.

I'm currently going through the process of setting up and getting acquainted with Auvik Network Management software.

Auvik's stability is great; I haven't experienced any unexpected session terminations or unresponsiveness, which is a major factor in our consideration of it as a potential replacement for Aruba Central.

Auvik scales easily by allowing us to deploy additional collectors throughout our network infrastructure. If the system seems overloaded, simply adding another collector is straightforward, especially with their virtualized management system. They even provide a user-friendly OBA to simplify the deployment process.

Our previous network management solution, Aruba Central, fell short in several areas. The interface lagged significantly, it could not provide the level of detailed network insights we require, and its user interface was not user-friendly.

Auvik stood out on the Gartner Square. The demo that we were given by our sales rep was impressive, and then moving into the actual trial that we're working on now. It has checked a lot of the boxes that we are trying to fulfill.

Auvik's initial setup was easy, taking only 45 minutes to an hour to get basic functionality like alerts and configuration changes. Now I'm refining it for better visibility, but the core functionality was up and running quickly.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Auvik is a good product and worth the premium price tag for a lot of people.

Auvik does monitor some of our critical devices at no charge.

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

Building successful connections requires understanding your specific environment – its current configuration, ideal setup, and the unique adjustments needed to make everything work together seamlessly.

We use Auvik to monitor our network and troubleshoot when things go wrong. It also helps us automate and discover network components 

Without Auvik, the onboarding process involved an extraordinary amount of effort and labor because we needed to identify and document all of the client's networking components manually. We had to remote into the servers or physically inspect the issues on site. It was an overwhelming task, especially for large clients. The ability to automate that work made things much quicker for everyone. 

Our engineers have said that they've saved a lot of time because they can immediately identify the root cause of the issue and address it without having to poke around and troubleshoot to find exactly what the issue is. The engineers are resolving tickets faster, making the clients happier.

We realized the benefits almost immediately once it was fully deployed. It was a staged rollout for the clients. Within the first couple of weeks, we identified a failed disk on a virtual server host. VMware didn't report that to use, but Auvik caught the problem before it caused any issues.

I like how Auvik automatically backs up some device configurations. For example, we had a Cisco switch connected. Each time we change the switch, Auvik will automatically back up the configuration so it can be restored when needed.  

Auvik creates a visual map so you can see where things are connected in real time. It will alert you when a device goes down.

Auvik's interface could be more intuitive. It can be daunting if you don't know what you're looking for. I've been using Auvik for a year, so it's no big deal, but a new user may struggle a bit. There's so much in there, so it could be more streamlined. 

Overall, it's pretty easy to figure out what's connected to what and to see the network topology on the map. However, sometimes we're working with more complicated networks with many interconnecting parts. In those cases, we run into trouble identifying where things are connected and putting it into a visual representation that makes sense. It's gotten better, but it's still a little quirky.

The alerts are still a bit noisy. I know they are working on that. They're testing some changes to the data to dial down the noise. Sometimes, we'll get multiple alerts for the same issue until it's fixed. Since it's tied to our ticketing system, it's also generating tickets each time, so we had to turn off the ticketing until we got a better grasp on that.

We started using Auvik last May.

We've never had a problem with Auvik crashing. The dashboard sometimes takes a while to load, and there are a few minor outages, but it isn't unstable. We've been told they're addressing the slow load times in an upcoming update.

Auvik's scalability is only limited by the number of licenses you can afford. The rest is a matter of deploying the collectors and adding the credentials. I don't see why it could be deployed on a massive scale.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. They're fantastic. If the first-level support can't give you an adequate answer, they will escalate it rapidly, and they're quick to respond. 

Positive

The deployment wasn't that difficult, but it was somewhat time-consuming. Once you install the collector, you must manually input all the credentials to get the devices to talk to Auvik. Depending on the size of the network, this process may take several hours. Fully configuring the solution to the client's specifications may take up to three months. Sometimes, it may take longer to track down all the credentials.

After deployment, Auvik doesn't require much maintenance on our end. The collectors must be updated from the cloud, but that happens behind the scenes, and we never need to touch it. Once it's deployed, it's pretty hands-off unless we need to change the device credentials.

Auvik isn't cheap. There are two tiers: Essentials and Performance. We're still on the Essentials plan, but we may upgrade to Performance, which is double the price. They bill based on firewalls, controllers, switches, and routers. Every client has wireless access points, routers, printers, etc. Those are monitored for free. 

We also looked at Liongard. One feature we wanted was the ability to automatically document things in our IT documentation systems. Auvik and Liongard had this capability, but Auvik documented more and had more network troubleshooting features. 

I rate Auvik Network Management eight out of 10. Once you get Auvik deployed, I recommend having your subject matter expert provide all the employees who will use it with detailed training on how it works and where to find things to ensure you get the most out of the solution.

We're an MSP using Auvik to monitor our customers' networks for outages and other issues. Our clients are mostly large enterprises in the UK. 

Auvik has improved our monitoring of contracts for service outside of normal business hours. If anything goes offline after hours, we can alert our engineers immediately, so they can get it working as fast as possible.  

The solution has helped our junior technicians solve more tickets. They can log in at our office and see what's happening and then contact the customer about it. It saves us a lot of time because it can tell us the status. Sometimes, we'll finish troubleshooting halfway, and the device will return online. Without a solution like Auvik, we might not notice it's online, so we will waste time trying to fix it. I don't have a precise figure, but I would estimate that Auvik reduces our resolution time by about 30 percent. 

Auvik allows you to set maintenance windows and notify users when something is offline. Auvik's interface is easy to use, but maybe that's because I've gotten used to it. The layout is clear. At the same time, there are so many features that it's complicated. The dashboards give us a real-time overview of the networks. It's simple and easy to use as you give it access to your network.

Setting up the maintenance windows can be a bit complicated. 

We have used Auvik for three years.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10 for stability. It's definitely stable. We barely need to touch it. It goes offline every now and then, but that doesn't happen often. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for scalability. 

We don't rely on Auvik's support. There's a lot of documentation available, but we seldom need to use it because it's easy to use and the interface is intuitive enough to figure a lot of it out. 

We previously used Meraki's monitoring solution, but it doesn't send alerts the same way Auvik does. Auvik is better for that.

Setting up Auvik is pretty straightforward. I can build and deploy Auvik alone in one day. It requires some updates and configuration changes but no significant maintenance. 

I rate Auvik Network Management nine out of 10. I recommend Auvik for network visibility and any type of network monitoring. 

We primarily use Auvik for network monitoring and occasionally to remotely access some devices. It helps us monitor clients with a multi-site setup. We can monitor the network and overall network connectivity. The configurations of the devices we monitor are synchronized into IT Glue for documentation.

Auvik was part of the company's toolset when I joined as an engineer, and we have been perfecting it. We had a couple of big clients when I started. Everybody was under one site even though there were multiple sites. There was a site-to-site VPN and more. For some projects I worked on, we got directions from Auvik's account managers on how to implement multi-site within Auvik properly. That helped us manage these individual sites efficiently without creating too much burden.

Auvik's alerts notify us about an outage before our clients call us, so we can tell them that we're already on it when they call to say their internet is down. It gives them a sense of comfort and trust. Auvik is also crucial for any troubleshooting. If a device is down and we can't get to it from one way, it's always helpful to have another look through Auvik to start troubleshooting from the outside.

The cloud-based platform gives us ready access to necessary information without the need to go through additional steps to remote into a client site. Otherwise, we would need to set up a secure tunnel through a site-to-site VPN. Auvik makes it more convenient. 

It's arguably a more significant security risk in some ways. However, from the perspective of a managed service provider, it's more accessible to have a single pane of view for all our clients from the cloud-based portal. The initial setup and configuration are more straightforward. You don't need to pick a server or use many resources aside from setting something up in the portal and installing the Auvik collector. It certainly simplifies things.

It increased our visibility into remote networks since we can't be everywhere simultaneously. We don't need to deploy separate tools internally, which reduces the workload. It helped us improve network visibility in conjunction with our other toolsets.

As a managed service provider, we have multiple clients, so it's crucial to have visibility into their networks and our own. We have Auvik set up to cover our critical infrastructure. When the tool is set up correctly, it hums along pretty well. We can relax and let Auvik do the monitoring and documentation. It can gather the information or at least confirm it. If something changes, Auvik can pick it up. It does a lot for us.

Auvik helps keep device inventories updated. We have a couple of toolsets. For example, we have remote monitoring and management agents on servers. Auvik and some other tools can update the documentation automatically if one of the engineers forgets to do it after we change something on a server, such as an IP address. It provides another check for us and a general reminder, "Hey, this was updated. You should update the documentation for it because it looks different."

I like the ability to remotely access devices securely. The multi-site setup has also been useful. Once we learned how to set that up, we could customize each site and push out common information like SNMP credentials from the parent site to other multi-sites. The automatic network layout is excellent, and the overall monitoring is also beneficial. 

Auvik's monitoring and management features are relatively easy to use, but it depends on what you work with daily. When I started, there were features I didn't know about until somebody told me, "Set it up this way, and you could just monitor the internet connection as a whole." I didn't know that existed until somebody showed me. The basics are easy enough, but the advanced features require some training. 

They added two-factor authentication to access some of these devices remotely. It was a significant step forward because someone with access to Auvik has a lot of power. 

The network visualization is nice. We have some large clients with many devices, so the initial visualization might be overwhelming, but we manage that pretty well. There are some devices that we don't need Auvik to monitor. We lower the noise from workstations and printers because we have a separate toolset for that. However, it does get a little cluttered when you have a lot of servers. It was just a matter of getting used to it. I don't know if any platform has figured out how to do that properly, but it's pretty intuitive.

The solution integrates with our ticketing and documentation system. We use Auvik as our primary network monitoring system and alert system if something goes down. It provides a lot of benefits by putting everything in one place. Having a single integrated platform simplifies the process of looking. We don't need to go to multiple vendors and look at everything or have several windows and applications open. We also use PRTG to provide network monitoring for some of our clients, and that's more on the internal side. Auvik is good at monitoring anything outward-facing.

There have been times when our SNMP community strings were incorrect or weren't updated for whatever reason, and Auvik kept trying to scan them. Changing it was a pain, and there wasn't a way to extract that from Auvik. I understand there are valid security reasons why we wouldn't want to do that sometimes. In those situations, we had to recreate those community strings and reapply them to various devices.

Maybe they could implement a way to do that securely. It could be restricted by the role a person has within the organization. For example, perhaps a junior engineer wouldn't have access, but it would be available to a supervisor, manager, administrator, or higher-up. 

I have been using Auvik for a little over a year.

I haven't heard any complaints about Auvik's stability or performance degradation. Auvik has scheduled maintenance windows, but they're transparent about when they will be. It hasn't impacted us. Reliability is crucial because Auvik is part of our service to our customers. We've had issues with a few vendors where they've gone down or had quality issues that affect our services and reflect poorly on us.

Scalability hasn't been an issue so far. There is one thing to keep in mind, and it's probably less of a scalability issue with Auvik itself. However, we've learned from working with large clients that having multiple Auvik collectors is best. It would be best if you strategized about how to distribute the collectors throughout your servers and put redundancies in place. 

I rate Auvik support a ten out of ten. The knowledge base articles are pretty thorough. Once, I had to look up how to confirm SNMP credentials or set up SNMPv3. Auvik's team is excellent. Our support and account managers have been responsive and helpful. 

Positive

I rate Auvik a ten out of ten. I recommend planning and going through the steps to evaluate this. It's a powerful tool with an extensive suite of features, and the support is there if needed. Auvik has good people working there. 

Going back to the SNMP portion, you need to plan how to design and implement the solution, especially if you have a multi-site situation or are monitoring many devices. You need to plan for scalability and collector distribution.

We are using it for monitoring and troubleshooting. It is cloud-based, but the collectors always have to be on-premise. We must be using its latest version.

It automatically updates your network topology, which has made any kind of troubleshooting or planning way more efficient. To make sure that everything is up for you, every 15 seconds, it checks for a device to be online and any network element to be up or down, and every minute, it checks for your other devices, such as your PCs or IP phones. It does a subnet scan every 600 seconds to see if thresholds are being pegged or have fallen off in certain levels. If you don't want to have so much ping traffic on your network, you can change that to whatever value you want. All that is customizable. It kind of becomes something you depend on when you're looking for a device. If I want to find out where a device is plugged in specifically, Auvik is the first place where I would go to check if I can see it there. Earlier, if I'm looking to see where a device is, I used to check my windows DHCP server and look for an odd or new IP address that had appeared. In Auvik, I can filter the map based on a device, subnet, or VLAN, or I can see all devices that are plugged into a specific switch, which is really convenient.

It has significantly decreased our mean time to resolution. In the past, sometimes, it took us a long time to come to the conclusion that this is the problem. When trying to go through the troubleshooting steps to know what the problem is, when Auvik has that information for me, troubleshooting is significantly quicker. I don't have to go through an entire department and look at their connections to see how they're impacted and then decide that everything they have in common is this switch. Auvik is able to tell me that this switch isn't online anymore. I can then say that we have a problem with a switch, and we're working on it to kind of calm folks down.

TrafficInsights dashboard is one of the first things that I log into every day in Auvik. Before going with Auvik, I tried a different solution for it, and that solution was just terrible in comparison. It only permitted five interfaces for traffic insights, and if you wanted more than five interfaces, it costed more money. It was just completely unreasonable. Auvik doesn't limit you on the number of interfaces for traffic insights. I get a better idea of the type of traffic on the network through Auvik than anywhere else. I can look at the type of traffic through my firewall monitoring, but I'd have to go a lot deeper into the protocols and ports that are being used just to see what's going on in the network.

With Auvik, if I look at traffic insights, I can get a good graph of how much traffic is happening at specific times a day. I can lay out the type of traffic and break it down based on the applications. I can then filter from there. If I'm seeing that we have a lot more web traffic or media streaming traffic, I can look a little bit deeper and see the exact applications, such as Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok. I can then see who is watching Netflix. It makes it a whole lot quicker than watching my firewall because I'd have to filter by a domain or IP address to come to the conclusion that someone is watching Netflix on the network. In Auvik, based on the filter, I can get all devices involved with that conversation to Netflix, which is a really nice feature. The other menus within TrafficInsights allow you to keep it all relative, so you're not resetting or recreating those filters. I can just filter based on Netflix and see who are the top users. I can see who is using Netflix and on which laptop they are using it.

The TrafficInsights feature helps in improving our overall network performance. It allows for me to look at a month's worth of time, and then I get an idea of what's the normal baseline. It helps me in getting a good baseline for expected backups because I can see when the backups are happening and how much traffic is related to backups. So, I can see when things are normal or abnormal. For example, when media streams are a little high, that's abnormal, so I will look into it a little bit deeper. It helps with this kind of stuff, and if there is any kind of impact on overall throughput for other users, I get to nip it in the bud right away, which is valuable. 

The out-of-the-box device configuration backups save time and money too. With Auvik, I can see the configurations even if I have them saved on the file server or something like that. If I got a protected share that has configuration backups, being able to deploy that configuration or even save that configuration as a text file from Auvik is a time-saver. I am not paying for the other product any longer just because Auvik handles that. Previously, I would have been paying for both. If Auvik couldn't do that, I'd have to pay for two products, so it saves money, but more importantly, it saves time. I don't have to spend so much time going switch by switch.

The best feature is the support access. Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom, you push it, and you get connected with a support agent. They can see your internet. They help you out, work with you, and answer your questions right there. I don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and try to explain anything, which is a great feature. I can get someone in less than a minute, which is really helpful.

It is very simple. It is very easy to learn how to navigate, and their knowledge base is a good resource. 

It is an SNMP-based platform. It can communicate with almost any device that you're trying to monitor, such as a switch or a router, through SNMP. If you're trying to monitor Windows machines, it uses WMI. It gives you a good layout of the sensors for a lot of devices. It can generate alerts based on if the fans are working, CPU is hot or highly utilized, or RAM is highly utilized.

The Syslog feature is also really valuable. I don't have to go into each individual box, so I have it all centralized. Everything is in one pane of glass. When I first started using Auvik, they didn't have the Syslog fully deployed. It was a beta. Now, it is fully deployed, and it is a great feature. Auvik really relies on SNMP in order to give you good information about a device, but our IP phones, for instance, don't support SNMP. With a phone pointed towards Auvik for the Syslog info, I can see the stats within Auvik, whereas before, I would have to go into the phone server and the phone to get an idea of what's happening with that phone. So, if someone is telling me that his phone keeps restarting or has bad call quality, I can go to that phone's Syslog within Auvik because even the phone itself doesn't store that information. Our phones only show the last six reasons for a reboot, and if someone is saying that reboot is the issue, then that's not good enough. You want to look for a pattern. You want to look for what might be happening internally on the phone. For that, you would have to go into the phone server and then get down to those logs. If the log info is already sent to Auvik, I don't have to go into the phone server and then write up a command to filter it down to just this little tiny query here. I could just look at that device, access the log info, and get what I need, which is very valuable.

It also gives you a live or close-to-live topology map. So, you can get down to things. For example, if all of a sudden a machine is really slow during the day for someone, or they lose connectivity, you can check out the machine baseline by name or by IP. When it is on a switch, you can check the port it is on and get the logs on that switch to see if there are any errors being generated on that port. So, it is just a lot quicker than going into the switch's interface. You can get information on the device via Auvik without going into each device separately. You can get a log, but you can't do any configuration changes. You can just get information on the devices, and then if you see that you need to make a configuration change. If you want, you can also tunnel in through that or do it externally. The ability to launch a console session to your switch, router, or any device that you're monitoring (if that device supports it), or launch a browser session through Auvik to that device is a nice little feature they have. You can interface right there through that single pane of glass.

It backs up my configurations for me. For the routers, I have a cloud-based subscription, and it backs up my configurations every 30 days. So, I can see the changes that were made, and then I can do an A/B comparison of the configurations and identify exactly what was changed. I can even redeploy the configurations from within Auvik, which is pretty handy.

I liked the Teams integration that exists in Auvik. We have Office 365, and I can create a channel within Teams where my alerts from Auvik pop up in Teams so that I can see a feed of different alerts. I have a feed of different levels of alerts such as emergency, critical, warning, and informational that are generated in Auvik, and if I'm not viewing the tab in my browser that has Auvik, and they pop up as alerts in Teams on my desktop. I might have a ton of tabs open, and if I am not viewing the tab that has Auvik, these alerts will pop up in Teams, and that'll get my attention. It also has the ability to send a text alert. It is indirect, and even though it comes to you in SMS or MMS format, Auvik sends it to an email address, and you can get around by using your MMS email address based on your service provider. So, staying informed about the environment when I'm not directly looking is definitely a valuable resource for me.

One of the great things about Auvik is the shared collector mode, which is useful in an environment that has more than one physical location. We have 15 different locations, and I can have all of those locations pointing to one collector. So, all these locations are sharing this one collector, and I can get a map, which is way out on top of the map that you would see in Google maps, to see all my locations. I can see alerts on that map for any of those 15 locations. I can zoom in right there to the location, and from there, click on it. It is really handy.

They don't let you customize the dashboard, which is like the homepage of Auvik. There is one feature that I don't use that's on the dashboard, and it is for SSL VPN services. The way it is designed is that if you have a separate, dedicated SSL VPN appliance, they can see that. I'd rather not have that take up any space on my screen because it never is going to populate with any kind of information. I'd like to move some things around on the dashboard, but I can't do anything like that. I know that they don't plan on doing it, but if they could open the dashboard just a little bit and allow us to customize it a little bit, it would be incredibly helpful, but it is not something that I feel I'm truly missing.

I wish they did have a few more integrations, and I'm sure that they're going to have more coming down the line. It was last month when I had a meeting with them, and their goal is to just kind of make it as universal as possible. So, they take some customization features or limit some customization features just because they feel that if they make it something you can customize, it might make it less universal. You can use their integrations with other applications. It integrates with the popular RMM solutions, and that's great, but when you are viewing Auvik through that integration, there is no way for me to limit or control how Auvik sees a location. So, I can't just have it default to a certain view. If you're looking at a specific department, I can't have everything automatically filtered down to that specific department. I'd have to go through and add those filters for Auvik to do so.

Most of the issues that I have had are related to the dashboard and wanting a bit more customization available through the dashboard because that's where you'll spend most of your time. Auvik is on the dashboard, and you can create and save these filters, which is great, but if I were to filter the map by all switches, the information below doesn't reflect the filter. I have to select the device within the filter, and then it starts to show the results. I can then see the dashboard of that device. If I were to filter by switches, I would like my top device utilization to only show me switches from my alerts and anything related to my map filter. That was something I asked about in one of the meetings with Auvik last month, and I don't think they have any plan to expand the dashboard anytime soon or at all. So, that was a little bit of a letdown. So, I am adjusting my workflow to fit the product and its abilities, but it really makes sense to me to expand it over time within the TrafficInsights dashboard. If I filter by my access points, then it should only show me the information related to my filter.

Another limitation, which is probably still under customization, is related to the reporting features. It doesn't really give you the ability to customize reports, create reports, or schedule reports. Adding those kinds of elements to it would really take it over the edge. It has some built-in reporting, and you can generate a report based on just a few things. You can do 10 reports that are built-in, but you can't create a report, and you can't customize a report. You can export the reports. It is designed that way. I would like to be able to create and schedule some custom reports. There should be the ability to do a temporary report. For example, if I am monitoring one or multiple devices for a week and I had the map filter to these devices, I'd like to be able to just quickly generate a report to be able to see how this device communicates, or how these devices are communicating over the course of a week. Such a feature would be really good. Reporting is the main thing that you're looking for in a monitoring system, and Auvik falls short there.

I probably have to look through the knowledge base to see if it does exist, but I do not believe there is a way for me to set a threshold for certain types of traffic. For example, when media streaming gets to a certain percentage of network traffic, I get an alert. That's why I'm kind of in it all the time. It is one of the tabs that I have open, and then I just take a look and see what is a little high and then zoom in.

Auvik doesn't deploy firmware upgrades and things of that nature. I don't know what would be required to allow them to be able to handle firmware upgrades for all these different devices, but it is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors.

I have probably been using this solution for a little bit over a year.

It has been incredibly stable for me. They do maintenance just about every weekend for adding new features or just cleaning some bugs up.

The whole ability to add more locations is really impressive. I know that people can have multiple collectors, but for me, I just have one collector and 15 sites sending information to that one collector. I can expand if I need to add more devices at a location or add a new location entirely. I can even reduce, which is great.

When I first set up Auvik, during that trial, I was seeing everything from one site. After a discussion with the guys in support, they recommended that I basically change the mode of Auvik to be a shared collector and make the other locations sites. This way I can just look at one site at a time, or I can come to the main dashboard and see all the sites from a bird's eye view. I can just continue to expand or compress based on my needs and preferences.

Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom that you can click to connect with a support agent. You don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and explain anything. You can get someone in less than a minute.

They've been great. All of my questions have been answered, and any issue I've had related to a feature within Auvik has been resolved for the most part.

The other product that I was using was a product created by the manufacturers of the devices. It was something that I thought would be perfect for the devices, but it wasn't. Auvik is superior across the board in comparison to that device. The only thing that Auvik doesn't do, but the other device can do, is deploying firmware upgrades and things of that nature. It is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors. I was using a vendor product for certain devices, and it wasn't reliable and viable.

I was involved in the initial setup of Auvik at my location. It was straightforward, and I was surprised by how much information Auvik can give you. The way they deploy is the smartest way to deploy anything. You go through that trial period with them where you'll give it all the time to gather the information about your gear. When you're actually talking to the guys, they give you a demonstration of Auvik in your environment related to your gear and the information Auvik will use, which is very important. 

Before we got down to the purchase, I wanted to see information related to the gear that I actually have, and that's important for anybody. I didn't want to see the hypotheticals of if we had a specific gear. Instead of deploying it in my environment with the belief that it is going to be great, and then realizing it is not compatible with this, I wanted to know that first, see it, and then decide whether or not that's going to be a deal-breaker. For example, I might get to know that Auvik is not going to show me information about the access points that I have because the manufacturer's access points don't have a feature that allows Auvik to see that information.

In terms of the duration, we gave it a weekend. There are different methods for using Auvik, and you can spin up a Linux box and install Auvik that way, or you can use their appliance. Based on your environment, they have their recommendations, and then you just let it sit for some time while you configure all your devices to communicate with Auvik. The setup configuration took me half a day. I had to make sure that I had the traffic all permitted through the firewall, the switches and routers were all set up to send information to Auvik, and SNMP communication was all good. After all that was set up, I just had to wait for Auvik to gather the information. I come in on Monday, and I saw all the information Auvik gathered about the network topology and other things over the weekend.

Comparing Auvik's setup time with other solutions, I haven't seen better. Auvik does the work for you. I spent half a day setting up the SNMP information and entering whatever credentials I needed to enter into Auvik for the WMI communication. After that point, you'd have to kind of trim it down. You have to say that I don't want to see the subnet because it'll scan everything. When you give it the information to look at your route, it'll be able to grab any route that your router can see. If you're not concerned with the public WiFi that you might provide and that your router might handle, you can just eliminate that from the map. You just say don't scan the network, and this way, you're only looking at the data that you want to see, which is really handy. So, in terms of the setup time, it is about how fast you can get into your devices and how quickly can you enter the credentials into the devices that you manage.

Its pricing is very reasonable. We had looked at other solutions where you pay based on the amount of traffic that was filtered through and analyzed. With Auvik, we pay by a billable device. For one of the locations I have, one network element would likely be a billable device. So, every billable device has a network element, but not every network element is a billable device. If I have a location that has 50 network elements, then maybe 30 of them are billable devices. PCs, VoIP phones, and access points are monitored at no charge. 

You pay based on billable devices, and that is very reasonable. You can control that to a certain extent and make a device unmanaged, but you don't get the benefits of Auvik being able to collect all of the information to make it useful. It'll tell you that this is an unmanaged device. You might know it is a switch, but it is not giving you any switch information. 

When you make a device managed, then it is a billable device. It is important to the whole cost of trying to replace your devices or expand your locations. You have to consider the cost of that switch. You have to think that if you are going to buy a switch, it is not just the price of this switch; it also becomes something that's billable in Auvik. Would you buy another switch, or would you replace the switch and buy a bigger switch? Auvik just continues to collect the data and continues to give you traffic insights, Syslog, and all other features that you want. It is worth it.

There was one other solution that was evaluated in terms of install, deploy, and configure. Other ones for which I had seen demonstrations weren't what I was looking for. They could do things similar to Auvik, but they weren't what I was looking for at the time.

When you're doing the trial, the trial is using your info. I would just say at least do the trial and see what it shows you and really explore all of the sub-menus. If you're looking for insight and alerting based on thresholds and health checks, it is definitely something worth looking at. It might take you some time to configure devices to communicate with Auvik, and then just let it do its thing and watch.

It is a little difficult to say whether Auvik helps us in putting out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. If you are at your computer and your switch goes down to which it is connected, you're going to know at the same time I get to know, but I will know what happened. That is the kind of fire that it helps me put out. When I'm not looking at Auvik or any kind of monitoring system, if your switch goes down, you would come up and tell me that you don't have internet. I won't know why you don't have internet until I go in and see that all people don't have internet, and that switch is offline, but Auvik will let me know if there is an outage right away.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of 10. The only thing that keeps it from being a 10 is just the lack of some customization in certain areas. That has really been the main limitation for me. It is not that big a deal, but that would just get it right to a perfect score. I find it very valuable in terms of how quickly you can set something like this up and how much information you can see within your network from a single pane of glass. I still open up my other monitoring tools that are built into the devices, but I don't really view them as much as I view my firewall monitoring in Auvik. 

I have access to Auvik as the system administrator to use it to view my network and manage the various pieces of it. 

I needed a solution like Auvik because I wanted real-time network mapping. At the time, we were using Visio diagrams, which are obviously very hard to keep updated. And so to have something that is running the cloud in real-time on what our network looks like was something I really was interested in.

When I have my backups run nightly, Auvik is able to tell me specifically which ports on the switches are being utilized. I'm able to label that so when I see traffic on my network at 10:00 AM, 10:00 PM, or in the middle of the night, I know it's regular traffic and not something that could possibly be an issue.

It helps to put out fires before people or end-users even know there is a problem because of how things work with notifications and everything. Through alerts and automation, we are able to resolve before a lot of people are aware of an issue.

The most valuable feature is that it maps out of the network. It is very helpful to see an actual visual representation of how our network is connected. The traffic insights dashboard is also valuable so that we can see the breakdown of the traffic over our network.

Auvik is very easy to use. The URL or the page is very intuitive and very easy to navigate.

The network discovery capabilities are very good. After I put new devices on the network and I want to see them within 20 minutes or so, it picks it up. It's very good.

Auvik automatically updates our network topology. This has shortened our operations. Our network is more organized and it allows ease of finding issues or finding the path of the network that the traffic is taking. It takes a lot less time to figure that out.

It decreased our mean time to resolution. The particular piece of it usually takes me a while, so it saves around 20%.

The traffic insights feature shows us our network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive inline traffic decryption. It's very important to us. Knowing exactly what's going on, what traffic is flowing over my network is very much an important thing for me to know. We know that policies and procedures are being followed. And so we know that nobody is doing anything that they shouldn't be doing on a company network.

The traffic insights feature helped to show where our system is experiencing performance issues. We are able to see by looking at the daily reports that we run where we're slow or what pieces of equipment have a slower connection than others.

I was able to tweak a few of that so that's increased it by around 20%.

I don't really have any points of improvement. The few times I've had to call their customer service or use their customer service, they've been pretty prompt and I've been able to get issues resolved pretty much with one phone call. So I don't have any issues there. 

I have been using Auvik for around one year. 

Everything's always been available. The maintenance windows have always been adequately advertised beforehand, so I haven't had any issue with availability.

It's very scalable. With the way they have it set up as you need it on the managed devices, scalability happens very quickly. You can add endpoints as needed.

I'm a small shop so we have between 150-200 endpoints. We don't have any substantial plans to increase usage at this time. 

Every time I've had to call them with questions or issues I've been able to resolve everything with one phone call. I've never really had long hold times or anything like that. I'm very happy with their support.

The ease of use is definitely higher with Auvik as well as the price points, which is why we went with Auvik. A lot of the other solutions we looked at were much more expensive. 

The initial setup was very straightforward working with our Auvik tech. We walked straight through it. I think it got done fairly quickly and fairly easily. We had it up in less than one day.

It requires no maintenance. With me not having to manage it, it's something that's always available. So the fact that I don't have to take my time away to manage it, is always a bonus.

The time savings that the setup has saved us comes out to around $2,500 per year. 

With the troubleshoot time being lessened, we were able to get a pretty decent ROI.

When taking into account Auvik's setup time and automated network mapping and documentation, if I were to compare setting up a map, how we did it previously with Visio, that would take at least a few days of my time versus having it done automatically for me with Auvik. I'm not quite sure how that equates to dollars and cents. But it's at least three or four days of work that's not needed to be done.

Pricing makes sense. I know they do it by managed device. Compared to everything else that we saw out there, they were very competitive with how they ran things. I think what they charge and everything makes sense.

There are no costs in addition to standard licensing. 

The only difference between Auvik and the other solutions that stick out is that a lot of the more expensive ones have more AI built into them to allow better troubleshooting of network issues. Auvik doesn't seem to have that, but I'm sure that for the price, you get something very good. Auvik has less AI than what's readily available. I'd like for Auvik to incorporate more AI. I'm definitely a fan of more AI being integrated.

Keeping in touch with our original Auvik rep has helped. He's been my main point of contact when it comes to anything else I've needed with Auvik because obviously, they know. Instead of going through the standard support stuff, actually having somebody to email and contact has always been beneficial. 

I would rate Auvik a nine out of ten. AI implementation would make it a perfect ten.

We're a cloud service provider, so we wanted a solution that would proactively be able to notify us of potential issues. We have four core cloud platforms that we provide. We wanted something that could look at both the network connectivity as well as the infrastructure and storage layers.

As a cloud provider, it's of paramount importance that we're connected to the internet and the cloud in general. If the data collectors ever go offline, there's an alert that's actually sent out to us. Because of the alert tiering, we can have it so that that's treated as an emergency alert and it goes to a different set of critical recipients. We've had it where it's assisted us when we were having issues with one of our IP transit providers, and we were able to use the logs that it provided to demonstrate that we had a definitive issue with the provider and their connectivity. That actually enabled us to push back on the IP transit provider and get quite a substantial claim approved because we were able to demonstrate how unstable the link was.

The other element that it's helped us with is in predicting the future. And another thing that it allows us to do very easily is to track our bandwidth usage that's going in and out of each of the data centers. We've been able to use that information to trend and predict when we need to get upgrades in place. Funny enough, we have an order now where we're increasing our connectivity at one of our data centers tenfold and that's being driven because Auvik's enabled us to understand that we're rapidly approaching our threshold.

The mapping tool does make it easy and convenient to access and get console-level access quickly and easily because of the way it works within Auvik, it embeds the credentials. It's a couple of clicks of the mouse button and you're on a console session. You don't have to go through that rigmarole of what's the IP address, how do I connect, what do I use PuTTy, do I use Telnet? What are the credentials? With Auvik it's very streamlined, click, point, click and you're on.

We've saved on intangible costs. The overhead of managing three different open-source platforms has now completely gone. We just have a SaaS platform, we pay our fee, and it does exactly what it says it will do.

It carries a high value ratio on time-to-value. The interesting thing with the price model is that that value ratio could change. It depends really on if you have a hundred switches, it's going to be a lot more expensive than a client that's only got two large switches. But for us, we find it's very high value for money and good value for money.

The auto-discovery and the mapping are quite nice. We can see how our data centers are connected. That was one of the immediate appeals. 

The change control that's built into it for picking up network device changes and recording is something else that we found to be extremely useful.

It's extremely easy to use, although sometimes some features can be a little bit hidden. You have to know where to look, but generally nine times out of ten, it's very straightforward and quite intuitive.

Network discovery is very good. Like anything that does auto-discovery, it can at times get confused, but it's very easy to select to do an override. If it mis-detects a firewall as a generic network device, it's very easy to correct that on a manual basis. But that happens quite infrequently.

It automatically updates our network topology. We're quite lucky we don't have too many issues. It has given the guys on the desk confidence that they can see very quickly and access any system that we've got monitored. In the early days, we had a hesitancy to know if we could rely on Auvik, but over the last couple of years, it's proven itself time and time again. If it tells us there's an issue, we trust that.

In certain circumstances, it has decreased our mean time to resolution. The bulk of our issues unfortunately tend to be more of an application layer, which Auvik doesn't have visibility into.

Auvik enabled us to consolidate or replace other tools. In the early days, we used to use a SaaS platform called LogicMonitor, which we then reverted from and pulled to an in-house solution. That ultimately became three open-source in-house solutions. It was at the point that we wanted to look at something that could consolidate and give us more intelligence and that's where Auvik came into play.

We use network mapping slightly differently from a lot of MSPs who are more focused on using Auvik to maintain end-user environments. We're looking at it maintaining quite a complex data center environment. The mapping is good, but that can mean that it can get a little bit unwieldily. So having the ability to be able to have more manual control on how the map is organized, would be really useful for us. 

It uses SNMP in its discovery process and how it pulls in data. But today it doesn't have an SNMP trap facility so you can't have your infrastructure devices push alerts into Auvik. And that for us would be a big feature that we would like to see.

The single sign-on piece that they have is really good. That works really well for us. Everything else we're really happy with. They have the chain of control stuff and configuration management piece, which was really nice to discover. We never knew about that. That was one of those things that we fell across and then make use of that quite extensively.

We've been an Auvik customer for approximately two to two and a half years.

We haven't had any issues with availability. They do regular maintenance, but we always get proactively notified of it and it's never caused us an issue.

We use it to monitor two data center sites that have somewhere in the region of about 300 to 500 infrastructure devices in each and we never had a problem with it. My understanding is that if we went out to 20 data centers, it would scale without any issues.

It requires zero maintenance. We would have to do regular patch management with our on-prem solution. It wouldn't take up a huge amount of time, but it was something that had to be scheduled on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

Technical support is extremely good. Any ticket that we've raised, whether it's a query or we feel that we've hit a bug, has been responded to promptly. They have an extensive knowledge base set of articles, which are invaluable for pointing you in the right direction.

We saw Auvik through one of our partners. We sell to IT resellers, and it was seeing the ease that they could actually access some of the information for a shared client that put us onto doing the evaluation. The one-week evaluation turned into a purchase.

The initial setup was very easy. We downloaded an OVF file, deployed, and connected. We had someone from their tech teams, once we had done the deployments, work with our service desk team and work through doing the initial config.

We had the collectors deployed in under a couple of hours and the configuration for each data center to set things up took us a week for each data center. That was a process that was hindered by us because we had to tweak and tune things to meet our requirements.

Compared to LogicMonitor, my experience was pretty much on par. The SaaS providers tend to have quite a streamlined model. You deploy a data collector, which they have as a single download, and then it starts to consume data into the SaaS platform. For SaaS to SaaS, it was pretty much the same. When you're doing your own on-prem deployment it's vastly more efficient. 

We think the pricing is actually really cool. Only certain network devices make the pricing really cost-effective for us. We can monitor 50 servers and essentially one server or 50 servers has no impact on costs. The one thing I think that's crucial is just to make sure that you understand how many billable network devices you have in your estate before you move forward.

Typically, in our environment, VM hosts, storage arrays, virtual machines, or physical like Windows or Linux machines, all have no impact on cost. The only things that really impact costs are our network switches and our firewalls.

My advice would be to verify that it can cover all the devices that you want it to monitor. For us, it does virtually everything that we need and the odd exception hasn't caused us any major problems. We're still able to do basic monitoring. We just can't sometimes get the level of detail that we want. Go back to the environment and make sure that you understand your network and your network devices so that you can make sure that it's going to give you the value that you want.

The biggest lesson we've learned from Auvik is that we had an assumption that because it talks to the devices and discovers them using SNMP as one of its main mechanisms, we assumed that it would do this SNMP trap feature. We were surprised that it didn't. It hasn't caused us any major issues, but we do welcome the day that that's actually added as a feature.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because of the lack of the SNMP trapping and the fact that it's got a lot of flexibility on the devices it monitors, but there are a couple of holes. It's not a big issue for us.

We have a medium-sized business. We have two data centers and two small physical offices. Our main goal is to monitor the traffic between the data centers to get an idea of the traffic, and our current firewalls don't offer that as a solution.

The main selling point was the traffic insights feature, which better explains our network traffic. Auvik has many different features, but we primarily want it for traffic insights. It has monitoring and network discovery. Network discovery is useful, but we already have a monitoring solution. The network map is easy to use.

The onboarding could be a bit better for Auvik. We've had a few issues out of the gate because we already had an existing Auvik setup that was invalidated. Given that we're a new customer, it's taken a while to get support for these issues. It's taken a couple of days, but I would have thought that as new customers, we'd get priority support until the solution is running. 

I would like it if you could filter out workstations. We've got Windows workstations and servers, but we only care about the servers. It would be nice if we could filter out devices based on the operating systems, so we don't have to see the workstations, but you can't. 

We used the Auvik trial for about three weeks and then purchased the full product after a couple of months. We're now a week into using it.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10 for stability. I haven't had any downtime. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10 for scalability. It has the potential to scale because you can add collectors or create new sites as needed. 

I rate Auvik support seven out of 10. The people I've spoken to have been pleasant, but it's taking a while to deal with our outstanding issues. 

Neutral

We also use PRTG for our network monitoring. We invested a lot of money in PRTG, so we can't replace it all yet. We adopted Auvik for its traffic insights. 

It should be straightforward, but some things don't work, and the guides aren't necessarily correct either. We've used it for a week now and don't have much in there because there are a few teething issues that I've opened tickets for. 

The price is what I expect for a product like Auvik. It's reasonably priced. 

I rate Auvik eight out of 10.