Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

I use it as a first line of information gathering. When properly configured, I am able to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot issues from the network's infrastructure level and go up to servers and other devices.

Auvik has helped to decrease my mean time to resolution. If configured correctly, it definitely takes 10 to 20 minutes off resolution. I am able to diagnose things at least 15 minutes faster than I would manually.

I like the feature that allows us to remote access and remote troubleshoot many of the devices, including terminal Windows.

When it tries to build the topology, it does it in a way that is usually incorrect. It cannot validate VLANs correctly, and it is a bit cumbersome. When we have a known topology, it makes it completely different. The network maps are not accurate.

It does not always give a real-time picture of your network. It all depends on how it was configured. I have seen proper configurations, and they look fine, and then there are other ones that are completely broken. For example, I have several clients with mixed equipment, but the topology map shows switches that are on top of the map, whereas firewalls are technically on top. It does not see them correctly. At times, it puts random switches not even connected to anything, even though we know they are physically connected in the topology.

If we are able to manually move devices on the topology, that would be great. It would be amazing if the network map could be manually redrawn. I have submitted this as a request previously.

I have been using Auvik for the last five years.

I have not seen any stability-related issues.

In my opinion, it would be a very scalable product.

I have not contacted them in more than four years. I only contacted them once very early on when I was asking about being able to move things.

To my knowledge, we did not have any solution that would be a comparative analysis of what Auvik provides. In recent months, I have come across a similar topology and diagnostic tool that is built into Fortinet's security appliance. It is a bit similar.

A similar networking map topology that I used to use was when we would build things in Visio and have them as interactive maps.

I was not involved in its deployment. 

In terms of maintenance, it does require maintenance. We have to update devices. When there are changes being made, we have to go back in and make sure that things are updated. Password maintenance needs to be done every so often, and our collectors need to be changed out every once in a while. We have some communication errors with them, so we have to do some troubleshooting with those. That is a bit of internal maintenance.

I was not the person who made the choice.

If you are a managed service provider, it is one of the best tools, and I believe it is worth the investment for senior engineers to do critical troubleshooting. It will take an application champion to make sure that it is configured properly, but it is very powerful for those who deal in the managed service provider workspace.

Auvik has not empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own because we do not allow our entry-level technicians access to Auvik.

It took me some time to learn the product and know exactly how it worked and how it was deployed. After I learned some of the nuances that were inside of Auvik, I was able to see remotes and things like that. It did take a few months of training to really understand it. A lot of it was self-paced. There was no sponsored training, so I had to learn on my own.

I would rate Auvik a solid seven out of ten.

Its main use case is network monitoring, specifically for some of the essential elements of our network. It monitors more, but we're really after those essential elements.

We were able to track down a couple of misconfigurations that were minor but we had missed. We now have a much stronger, clearer understanding of network health at a quick glance, and we're quickly able to diagnose.

It provides a single integrated platform. That was one of the reasons that we ended up checking it out. I had too many network elements, and I couldn't monitor it all from one place.

It has affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks. 

Automatic alerting is probably the most valuable. Its network visualizations are fairly intuitive. It's pretty straightforward. 

The setup was not difficult. It was time-consuming. It took a little time to get it set up, but once it's all set up, it's pretty simple.

I'd probably like a little bit more mapping functionality. It gives me a visual overlay of the way that one network segment links to another, but I can't adjust it. Everything is at an equal distance, which makes sense, but I'd probably group some of the things closer and further as it reflects in reality, but I can't do that right now on their system.

We've been using it for about six months.

They're very good at alerting us to weekend maintenance. It seems to only be weekend maintenance, so I think highly of their stability.

We only have two sites, and neither of them is huge, but so far, the scalability seems just fine.

I've contacted their tech support. They were fantastic. I'd rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I did previously use a different solution. I had tried a similar competitor. I cannot remember the name of it, but I wasn't happy with it. Once my year expired, I decided to not keep it.

It was very straightforward. It was time-consuming but not complex.

We were able to use elements of it immediately out of the box. VLANs, some of the fine-tuning, and some of the more minutia definitely took some legwork, but immediately out of the box, some of the elements started popping up. It was pretty cool to see items popping up right away.

To fully deploy the solution, it took a couple of weeks, but that was not a couple of weeks of only focusing on that.

When comparing the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solution, it was faster in terms of time, but the cost was higher. However, it was worth it.

We did it all by ourselves. It was just me. I probably spent two or three days of full-time work doing it.

It is deployed at multiple locations. In terms of maintenance, there is a collector that runs on our server. I don't know if I'd call it maintenance, but it is somewhat dependent on at least one piece of hardware staying up here on our campus.

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution. 

I appreciated the way Auvik's pricing scaled with the size of my network. We're a non-profit, and they gave us a non-profit discount. I didn't do an exhaustive comparison, but I felt their pricing was pretty reasonable. I'm a cheap guy when it comes to spending in a non-profit, but I did feel that what I was getting out of them was a good value for my dollar.

I've tried prior applications. I had been trying to find one single method. We went for Auvik because of the good support and good sales. They did a good job at sales, showing me the system, and walking me through things. They were very responsive and good at follow-up. They took good care of me.

I'd advise being aware of all of your VLANs and making sure that the server you're going to run or the machine you're going to run the host on has proper access to all elements of the network. If you have separate segments, it's not going to catch those things. So, you may have to open up some pathways from various VLANs back to whatever server you're running this on.

We haven't done a ton of automation, but it looks like it could help to reduce repetitive low-priority tasks through automation. Similarly, we haven't utilized device inventory much from them. I suppose it would be network device inventory. It wouldn't be endpoint inventory.

In terms of comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus the other on-prem network monitoring solutions, I'd probably consider it to be a hybrid. That's because there is still monitoring software that has to run here, but the GUI is all in the cloud. It's similar, and it's nice, but it's not life-changing.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

I use it to monitor all the activities in our office, including printers and the internet. It gives notifications for each device.

As a single, integrated platform, it's easy to track all the devices in the office. That decreases the time it takes for people to work together to find a problem. In some ways, it improves efficiency. 

It keeps our internet safe and helps us to protect our data.

The monitoring is really good. It tells us when a printer is out of ink or paper, so we don't need to check it and can deal with the device as soon as possible. It also monitors the internet so that we know whether there is a virus or it is safe. It also backs up our files, which is good.

The topology map is good. It shows each device and whether it has a safe connection, how long it has been connected, and its activities. That's really helpful. Knowing the map helps our efficiency.

It also breaks down priorities, giving us much more time and space for priority jobs. Each day, Auvik saves us at least one to two hours.

Their system is a little difficult because it shows a lot of LANs and it's a little difficult to find each device. In our system, we have over 20 devices showing and it really takes a long time when I want to find a particular device. If it's easier to use, it will improve work efficiency.

I would like to see a much simpler platform so that we could learn it faster.

I have been using it for one month, on a trial basis. We have 12 users of the solution.

I tried another solution, but it was not very good. The functionality was too simple. Auvik provides more detail and more functionality.

The price of Auvik is okay. It is appropriate for the market.

I prefer a one-time cost and buying something once. I do not like to subscribe.

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance.

The primary use is for notifications and alerts, but also to get a feel for the network because I can see it all on a map, and it looks nice. We don't only use Auvik. 

To paint a picture of our environment, we deploy Auvik for some of our clients, and some of them own multiple facilities, so we have sites for them. Within our company, different individuals have different access levels, some with read-only. We also give some of our clients read-only access so they can see their network if they are curious.

We are an IT company, so notifications and alerts are essential for us. We can preempt problems because the solution alerts us before the customer even contacts us, so by the time they call, we already have information and an ETA on the fix for them.

Auvik affected our IT team's visibility into remote and distributed networks globally. Everything we do is remote, including initial onsite setups, and we can see how a network looks from the perspective of a nice-looking map. This visibility is important because it helps us see the network more clearly and provides a more physical feel instead of just seeing numbers and settings. Having an actual map of the network components and connections helps significantly.  

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik; it's a beneficial product, and we use it daily. 

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR) because the solution allows us to begin troubleshooting very quickly.  

The extensive personalization and customization options are great because it lets me do a lot. I can set up different permission structures, assign various staff members read-only access and others full access, and customize my notifications.

Auvik's UI is beautiful. 

The solution's monitoring and management functions are relatively straightforward; with ten being the most difficult, I'd rate Auvik three point five or four. This simplicity is important to my organization.    

Regarding Auvik helping to visualize the network mapping, that's one of the features I love most about it. It shows the network on such a simple level, with the firewall on top, the switches, types of connections, devices, and so on.  

Auvik has excellent integrations with other solutions we use. 

A feature I'd like to see is a stat breakdown of our networks at the end of every month, showing package drop rates for each network and so on. For example, this data delivered in an email would be a good feature.

I've been using the solution for four to five months. 

Ten out of ten, we've never had an issue with the solution's stability. 

Auvik is highly scalable. 

I've never needed to contact technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward, largely thanks to Auvik's knowledge base. They provided an excellent knowledge base, exact instructions, and courses, which made the process very simple.

Deployment of the solution to a site requires one staff member, and the process includes the following:

• Installing the connector on a local device.
• Getting it signed in with the SMPP protocol.
• Creating the sites and the multi-site.

Following the deployment, we monitor notifications; no other maintenance is necessary.

Auvik assisted us with the initial deployment. 

I rate the solution ten out of ten. We don't use it to control every aspect of the network, but I'm satisfied with what we use it for.

Auvik is the solution for those looking to monitor their networks. It's incredible; my advice is to go for it.

Our primary use case is to have a monitoring solution for our managed service clients. That was something we were offering, but we weren't really doing well on that front, in terms of having a proactive monitoring solution. That was the primary pain point we were trying to fix.

The main benefit is that we are able to offer better proactive support. Previously, we would deploy a lot of Meraki firewalls and we wouldn't really have proactive support on that. Meraki only offers email alerting, so alerts would come in by email and we wouldn't see them and we'd have to devise other means. With Auvik, we provide a quicker turnaround time for network issues. 

It also enables our lower-tier techs to support everything. Normally, especially on the network side, the lower-tier techs are not as able when it comes to conceptualizing the network and visualizing how it's set up. Auvik's dynamic mapping really helps flesh that out. Even less-technically-oriented clients are able to look at Auvik and understand how their network is functioning, at least at a basic level.

In addition to the overall efficiency improvements due to the proactive alerting and the dynamic mapping, the ease of exporting the data that Auvik provides is a big benefit. There are several options throughout the product that allow you to export your data as an Excel spreadsheet. That means you can get the data that Auvik is using to show you everything. That makes it very easy to do asset inventory or to assess the end-of-life of certain products. It takes a lot of the human involvement out of those processes.

Also, in the past, there was a lot of effort that we'd have to put into keeping assets and inventory up to date, and it was mostly through manual data entry. Auvik cuts a lot of that out. Once you have the network monitoring set up, it has all that data that we would normally have to manually enter into ConnectWise, specifically. Now, that information can carry over automatically. So instead of having to do 10 or 15 clicks, and a bunch of typing for each configuration, you just get the network monitoring set up and set up the inventory syncing, and it happens in a couple of minutes.

By keeping inventories up to date, it saves us time. We heavily utilize ConnectWise configurations for determining contract renewals and we're able to focus more on that aspect, and less on ensuring accurate counts.

Another benefit is the ability to use the connector as a "jump-box "and get into other devices. Previously, we would have to either VPN into a network or get into the network through some other remote means, to troubleshoot and configure. But with Auvik, you have the ability to do quick, one-off troubleshooting commands. A technician can do that. You can also get into all the network devices and computers through Auvik itself.

And given the way it alerts, and how it shows the product, it does produce a lower mean time to resolution. 

Auvik has a dynamic mapping feature. Once you get things loaded, it will show you how everything is connected. It also shows the alerts on that map, making it a very quick and human-readable way to dig into it. Overall, that visualization is really nice, especially the dynamic facet. You don't have to make those connections manually. Auvik does all that automatically. The mapping is very intuitive. The filters have a little learning curve, but even the part that isn't immediately intuitive is not hard to pick it up.

Other useful features are the typical ones, like configuration management. It will keep track of configuration changes on devices and log them.

The alerting is also definitely important. The solution integrates well with ConnectWise Manage and with Opsgenie, which we use for alerting techs after-hours.

It primarily monitors network devices by SNMP and command-line interface. They only charge for network devices, such as wireless LAN controllers, firewalls, switches, and routers, but they'll also grab and monitor printers through SNMP, Windows devices, and Windows hypervisors through WMI credentials.

Auvik also has a really good feature for keeping device inventories up to date. We haven't used it too much, because of the way that we've set it up. Auvik ends up overriding some of the stuff we do internally, but it has a very good way of keeping assets and inventory up to date. The most useful is the ConnectWise integration. It can find certain values, like serial numbers and it will either produce it if it doesn't exist or create a configuration in ConnectWise to match the device. It's really good for keeping all of our products up to date with the information.

I would like to see more extensive syslog capabilities. It can ingest syslogs and I think it can alert based on quantities of messages. You can also look back at some of the messages, but it's not a forensics level syslog.

Also, when it comes to mapping and visualizations, there are some imperfections. If Auvik can't exactly deduce how something is connected, it will show an inferred connection and that makes the map a little messy, but with the preset filters, which you can use to only look at network devices or known connections, you can get all the clutter out of there. Overall, it does a great job, but it would be nice if it had a better export feature. You can export it in a usable format, but it's not on the level of a Visio drawing, if you are trying to produce a network diagram. There's a lot of "in-Auvik" usability, but not necessarily outside of Auvik.

I've been using Auvik for a little over a year.

We have had no issues of note, in terms of stability. There may have been one incident, but it was so minor that we don't even remember it. We have not had outage issues. They're usually pretty good about notifying you about outages and, usually, there are no adverse effects.

The scalability is great. It's designed for an MSP, so adding more clients is extremely easy. We have yet to have an issue. Granted, we're probably not one of their larger deployments. Maybe at scale, when you get bigger, there are some issues, but so far, with our setup, we've never had any issues with scalability.

It is a cloud solution with an on-prem agent that you deploy at each site. We have it deployed for about 30 clients, and there are multiple collectors per client.

So far, the tech support has been great. The only issue is that they have up to a 24-hour turnaround. Typically it's not that long but it's only available during business hours. For any type of issue we have, we can typically wait that long.

There would be an issue if a high-paying client had some sort of emergency situation.

Positive

We were dabbling in PRTG Network Monitor. We were not using it in the same way but we would use it for occasional troubleshooting and gathering the same kind of data. That was what we would recommend before having our own product: to do a PRTG instance, given they give you the first 100 sensors for free, which covers a lot of niche issues.

The initial setup is a straightforward process. After the Auvik code is implemented, it starts to populate network mapping within 10 minutes. Our average time for a full deployment is about an hour and a half.

At a lot of the places where we initially put it in, we didn't have great documentation on what was in that environment or how to get into the devices. If that information is already there, and especially if you have already had a solution in place, it should take less than an hour to get a site completely into Auvik.

There is no maintenance of the solution required at our end. Our support team of about 10 utilizes Auvik pretty frequently in the day-to-day. And client-facing managerial types, like chief information officers, use it quarterly to pull data and information. Other users include anyone else who needs to do troubleshooting or needs information. We have systems and network administrators who occasionally look at it, just to get a feel for the network.

The time-to-value was instantaneous. Once we got the deployment done, it immediately allowed us to better support networks in a proactive manner.

We were looking at a few options but it was hard finding the right balance. Some options had a lot of customization and you could get into the nitty-gritty. LogicMonitor was the primary example, but price-wise it was too much.

The other ones were open source and would have taken too much of a personnel investment. We would have had to dedicate someone to the role of understanding, maintaining, and updating the product.

Auvik hit a really good middle ground in that it had the usability and the features that we needed. And it's updated by them so we just have to use it. It's really an ideal solution given our setup.

Another reason that we picked Auvik was that its pricing is very good. The only non-open-source solution that had better pricing was PRTG, but Auvik had it beat in ease of use. All-around, Auvik has a really great price for the market.

In addition, the cloud aspect of Auvik is extremely useful in that we don't have to worry about downtime. We had a bunch of on-prem appliances at our main site, which wasn't really set up to be a data center. There would often be issues with unexpected downtime that would affect us, client-wide. Having Auvik in the cloud helped us immensely. Not having to worry about the infrastructure or the updates definitely takes a load off of our team. Those are areas where we previously had to put in notable effort.

The deployment of Auvik is much quicker than PRTG, given how PRTG sets up its agents. And once you pay for Auvik, there is no additional cost. SolarWinds is a little more complex and doesn't fit the same niche as Auvik. SolarWinds is more focused on a single enterprise, whereas Auvik is more MSP-focused.

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.

The primary use case is network monitoring.

One of the things that I like the most is being able to see what is connected to each switch port. If there are 300 switch ports, I can find out which port any given computer is connected to on the network, assuming it is physical. We then can label certain ports as uplinks, servers, or storage. It is easy to find where a lot of traffic is coming from because we can get to that individual switch level, which is a lot easier to do in Auvik than it is to do native in the equipment.

Remote accessibility of the network devices is the most valuable feature. I often have to log into switches and routers to make changes, and I can do so from any computer as long as I have an Internet connection. I don't need to have my laptop or a VPN. Auvik is faster.

Auvik automatically updates our network topology. The topology map is drawn in real-time. Seeing the network versus visualizing is helpful. With real-time and historical monitoring, we know when devices are offline or if there is high utilization, specifically with the SNMP monitoring and SSH monitoring.

Its network discovery capabilities are really strong. With the right access, it can detect additional networks, then scan those networks. 

It is easy to use, yet not easy to administer. If I am a technician, then I just need to log in to a switch or see what the network is doing and what it is connected to, which is very easy to do. If I am an administrator, then I have to maintain, clean, and label that environment. Auvik's utility in that regard is cumbersome. It is hard to find where certain things are configured. Also, it is sometimes hard to figure out why Auvik is doing what it is doing.

There is a weakness with the network discovery capabilities, e.g., if it has access to virtual machines, then it is picking up on networks that don't matter. These are private virtual networks on individual computers, but Auvik doesn't know the difference. So, it is constantly coming up with new networks that it thinks it needs to scan. In my environment, I have 250 computers with probably 100 people who are running Hyper-V. Each one of those instances is creating virtual networks that it is getting discovered, then I have to tell it to ignore it. I have never seen the ability to say, "Ignore the networks or submits that look like this."

Sometimes, the UX is difficult to navigate for certain aspects. For example, I like to keep the generic devices out of the topology, so I often will purge those, but I only want to purge the ones that are offline. In the managed devices section, although you can filter by generic device, you can't filter by up or down status. You can only do that in the device section, not the managed device section. So, I have to take a picture of the generic devices that are offline, then navigate to another area where I can actually delete these objects, then select them using a picture. I can filter in one place, but I can't delete. Then, in the other place, I can delete, but I can't filter the same way.

At this company, I have used Auvik for a year and a half. Prior to that, I would say that I used it for about three or four years.

The stability has been fine. I get notifications for network maintenance and there hasn't really been an issue with that.

It requires no maintenance.

The major limitation is the multi-tenant aspect. For example, if I was to put this in a business that had six corporate offices, which is a pretty big business, I wouldn't want all of that under one tenant. I would want that under separate tenants for each location, but there would need to be an eagle eye view of the six locations from a high level, and you wouldn't get that in multi-tenant.

Auvik for MSPs is great because you can segment/isolate the different clients. However, Auvik gets overwhelming when it is a big business with multiple locations, hundreds of networks, and thousands of ports. I think that would be difficult to manage. If you are talking 5,000 to 100,000 switch ports, then you are talking about a lot of networks with a lot of different viewings and protocols. There really is a limit. There is almost no support for any kind of routing protocol. Where there is the Layer 1 and Layer 3 bars that tell you if it is physically connected or Layer 3 routed, the Layer 3 router should really include things, such as, what is the routing protocol that it found or the ability to see a trace route of how it is routed.

Sometimes the technical support is really good, and sometimes it is just terrible. Some of the gentlemen and gals are extremely knowledgeable when it comes to networking. They know the product and are very helpful. Then, some of them don't really get engaged in the support. They will just send an article/link, like, "Read this and do it on your own." I don't reach out to support because I can't find an article or do it on my own. I reach out because there is something I don't understand or don't know how to do. Making sure that they understand what it is that I am trying to accomplish requires a conversation, and some are willing to get on a phone call and some of them are willing to. The ones who are willing to get on a phone call are the ones that I have the best experiences with.

The initial setup was pretty complex. The company that I work for moved out of an office where we had 60 to 70 switches. Now, we are down to about 12. Therefore, the setup was more complex back then, although we only had one location. Now, we have one location and one data center. The deployment took four to six hours.

Auvik's setup time and automated network mapping and documentation provides time-to-value. It is very valuable in that sense. For a small environment, it rolls out for you very quickly, e.g., five minutes. Roll out the collector and let it do its scan, label one or two networks that are there, throw in the credentials, make sure it is identifying everything, and you are done. Then, it just kind of works. The amount of value that you get then in perpetuity to the relative installation is very high, but as a single IT company or an employee in a single company, that quick rollout isn't as valuable because I am only doing it once.

I did the deployment myself. I have used Auvik before, so I just set the collector using VMware OVA. I put a collector in our office, labeled the networks and set exemptions from the scan, and then just let it go. Obviously, I tried to enter all the credentials that I could at the time, but then I found I had to make modifications to group policy so the computers and servers could be accessed. So I probably just threw it out there and then added the credentials later. If I had to do it again, I would have put the credentials in first then threw it out there.

We are not making a profit on Auvik. It is an expense.

Although networking is only a small piece of what I am doing, it can be a time-intensive aspect. So, the time required is significantly less using Auvik than it is to manage the devices individually.

As an individual IP company, Auvik is a little bit pricey. It is a little expensive, but as an MSP owner, I have a small side business. So, I'm an Auvik customer in that sense too. In that, I think it's reasonable to pay $10 to $15 a device or less depending on the endpoint. For the amount of capability that it has, it is very reasonably priced.

There are devices monitored at no charge, such as:

• UPS batteries
• VMware ESX hypervisors
• Wireless access points
• Printers
• Dell EMC iLO cards.

I would probably compare Auvik to PRTG Network Monitor. I think Auvik is a lot faster than PRTG Network Monitor. I am not a very big fan of other solutions. I have never really tried them. 

Auvik gives us inventory. I don't think PRTG Network Monitor does that. So, I can integrate Auvik with our IT Glue cloud status, then we have an inventory of network devices that we don't have to manually create. It saves some time there. PRTG Network Monitor doesn't do that.

PRTG Network Monitor is easier and simpler to set up because it is not trying to do everything that Auvik is trying to do. Once you point it at a device and give it the credentials, it just starts monitoring. At the same time, it doesn't show the relationships between other devices; it doesn't show those connections. It is not an apples to apples comparison. 

We haven't had any SolarWinds Orion products. Now, we wouldn't buy that at all. Auvik is far easier than Orion.

My team members aren't really using it. The other guy is kind of a junior IT guy, and I think it is still intimidating to him. My boss is a higher level engineer, but he is too busy managing to do anything technical. He just relies on me to tell him if there is anything he needs. He mostly wants the solution for the monitoring. He wants to know when a hypervisor module is failing or a hypervisor server goes down.

If you don't put in the credentials, Auvik can't log in and grab those device backups. Once you put those in, then it is automated. It logs in and grabs the configurations. Although, Auvik doesn't support all devices. So if you don't think you have certain types of hardware, it doesn't do anything for you.

Networking has a high learning curve and Auvik lowers that learning curve. It doesn't eradicate or eliminate it though. You still need a pretty strong level of understanding of networking in order to understand the GUI visualization that it is presenting. Just like any other tool, the time invested is largely going to determine the quality of your return.

Auvik has a little ways to go, but I still highly favor it, so I would rate it as an eight out of 10.

I'm a system administrator. I use it to monitor and automatically draw a network map of our network.

It has helped us determine better ways to organize some of our physical networking, and it also allowed us to locate and troubleshoot issues more quickly.

It saved me at least a couple of days of work in regard to network mapping. There's a lot of detail that it figures out automatically that otherwise, I would have to do manually. It definitely helped that way. The monitoring is a little bit redundant. We already get emails for some of the things it warns us about, which is fine, but it also warns us about other things that we are not aware of. It saves me some time that way as well.

The network visualizations are quite intuitive. It comes with a number of different controls to manipulate, monitor, and change the visualization of what you're seeing. They're pretty intuitive and don't require many instructions.

We recently opened up a branch office, and it allowed us to visualize that remote network in more detail than we would have before. This visibility is quite important so that we have a better understanding of the way the network is configured and if there are any problems with it. Before, we had no way to visualize which devices were connected to other devices. It just had to be common knowledge or certain documentation, but now, we can visualize our network in real-time and troubleshoot if any issues arise.

Automatic network mapping, alerting functionalities, and TrafficInsights are valuable.

The monitoring function is quite easy. It's already set up with a lot of good defaults. So, I didn't have to change too much. The management function is also pretty useful. The interface sometimes takes a little bit of learning to navigate, but besides that, it has been pretty useful so far.

I like the methodology of its deployment and how it's set up. I like how we simply have to put a simple virtual appliance in our environment, and it figures out everything for us. The methodology of how it's designed to be used from that cloud environment works well. 

Some of the network map customizations could be improved to show or hide certain components if desired. There are already some tools built in to do that, but they could be improved upon.

Some of the discovery methodologies could be improved upon. It removes the device that is offline, but when that gets added back, if there is any custom information saved for that device, such as it's a smartphone, you have to change and reenter the information all over again. It would be nice to not have to manually modify certain devices that get added to the network.

I would give it pretty good marks in terms of helping to visualize the network mapping or the topology of our organization, but sometimes, the map refreshes in a way that doesn't always make sense. I have to create a support ticket to ask why the map is showing things the way it's showing, but that's more of a learning curve related to learning about the tool itself, but for the most part, it automates that whole process quite well and makes it easy to see what's on the screen.

There could be a mobile app or some type of mobile interface to review details on the go. I haven't tried it yet, and I am not sure if there's one.

I have been using this solution for approximately three to four months.

For the most part, it has been quite reliable and stable. There have been a few maintenance windows recently where they needed to fix some issues. It didn't affect me per se, but there was a little bit of downtime for the problems they were having with the collectors. They had to push an update for it, but it didn't concern me too much because it was over the course of a weekend. So, I wasn't paying too much attention to it. I would rate it an 8 out of 10 in terms of stability.

It seems it would scale very well to a large network, but I don't have experience with it in that scenario. From the way the tool works, it seems that it would be able to map out quite complicated networks and all the details.

Currently, Auvik is monitoring about 220 devices in our organization.

Their support is excellent. I've reached out to their support a couple of times, and every time, they've been very professional and quick to respond. 

I reached out to them recently, and there was very quick detailed research done into the issue. It wasn't a simple issue, but they were able to dig into it and get back to me with some good detailed answers.

I would rate them a 10 out of 10. So far, my experience with their support has been good.

Positive

We used PRTG, but we didn't necessarily switch. We're using both. We're still using PRTG, and we're also using Auvik. So, for managing the network, we are now using two tools. Previously, we used one tool, but now, we're using two tools.

It was straightforward. We implemented it out of the box. Network mapping started to populate in less than 15 minutes after implementing the collector. So, once it's configured, it does the job very quickly.

Its setup time is similar to other solutions. It takes a few hours of installation and configuration and then going from there, you just wait for it to collect the data.

It takes a little bit of time to configure and make sure that it's scanning and pulling in the right information. Some of the information, such as the system name and the type of the system, needed to be updated manually. So, a little bit of manual work needs to be done after the setup, but once it's properly set up, it does help to save time. It took extra three to four hours just for configuring and manually making changes to improve the data collected.

In terms of maintenance, it does require maintenance. On occasions, I need to clean up and monitor unknown and generic devices that show up in the list of devices just to determine if they are trusted devices that should be on the network. So, it's used for seeing what's on the network and paying attention to those devices that get added. We then ensure that they're trusted and should be on the network.

I implemented it on my own. I also take care of the maintenance. I do have other users with access to the service, but they only use it for monitoring. They don't make the changes.

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik. It's able to automatically make network maps that otherwise would take a lot of time. It would also take time to customize them manually. So, it has helped automate that task for sure. It has definitely saved about 48 hours.

We haven't seen a reduction in our meantime to resolution (MTTR) because I can't think of any situation where the tool has been involved in those types of scenarios per se. It's more to show the information that we were already aware of. So, it didn't necessarily change that for the better or worse. In the future, there might be a problem where it'll help us troubleshoot deeper by using some of the tools that we didn't have before, such as TrafficInsights.

It's quite reasonable, although it's reasonable for us right now only because of the small number of devices we're using. If we had a lot more to monitor, then I'd have to double-check the pricing and compare it with other solutions to see if it would be competitive.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would suggest that trying the product first is key and based on that, you can determine the value. I find the pricing to be reasonable, and I was able to try it first to make my decision.

We didn't evaluate other options. I knew about using Auvik from a previous employer. They had a good trial setup. The reason why I used it in the first place was that I was looking for tools to do network drawing or mapping, and I was aware that Auvik could do that type of work automatically. So, I just signed up for the trial and went from there.

I would suggest letting the tool add all of the networks automatically first as opposed to manually adding certain details and letting it fill in. Just let it gather all the information it can and then worry about cleaning things up. 

Also, I would advise monitoring generic and unknown devices just to understand what is present in the network. I would also advise getting familiar with filters and setting up filters in a way that allows you to customize the tool to suit you best.

Auvik has a single site that allows us to perform a number of dedicated tasks. Having this single site is moderately important for us because we do use other tools as well to collect data on what we're looking for. We're always looking for tools to add to our listing. We don't just always rely on one tool to do all our monitoring. This is an additional tool that we're using, but it offers functionality that our other tools don't necessarily have. That's why we're using it.

Auvik hasn't helped reduce repetitive low-priority tasks through automation because we're just using it for some passive monitoring. I can't think of a situation where that's had to occur per se.

Its automation hasn't had an effect on our IT team's availability. More time has been spent in the software configuring it, and now that it's set up the way we want it, we just go into it every once in a while to browse and see how things are going.

I would rate it an 8 out of 10. There are a few things to improve on, but for the most part, it does exactly what I'm hoping to do, which is automatically help generate a visualization of a network to better understand it and troubleshoot it.