What is our primary use case?
We're an MSP, so we function as the IT company for multiple clients, and we primarily use Auvik for monitoring and troubleshooting network issues. It's deployed across various locations, from small to medium-sized businesses, plus one school system.
How has it helped my organization?
Auvik improved our organization by allowing us to stay on top of issues with our clients. It alerts us in a timely manner and allows us to react proactively. In many cases, we get alerts that something is going on before the client realizes it.
The solution affected our IT team's global visibility into our remote and distributed networks, which is helpful. It's great because we can access the Auvik portal anywhere in the world. The visibility it provides is essential, especially for our technicians and engineers working from home.
Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up-to-date, as it pulls in all the devices on the network and sorts them. We can filter by Mac address, IP address, type of OS and more. This helps tremendously in helping our teams focus on high-level tasks and delegating low-level tasks to junior staff. Most low-level alerts go to our junior admins, which allows them to develop experience and learn the product.
Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date helped save us time and allowed us to find devices we didn't know about when onboarding a client.
We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR), primarily because our customers don't need to call us; we get alerts and tickets through our ConnectWise portal when Auvik detects an issue. This speeds up our time to repair because we are alerted of problems almost immediately and can start working on a solution.
What is most valuable?
The topography and historical data are excellent; the latter essentially allows us to see back in time, which is helpful as users don't always report issues promptly. The ability to go back and look at historical data is a good feature.
It's easy to use the monitoring and management functions; everything is intuitive and self-explanatory. The feature set is more important to us than ease of use, as we work with many intelligent people. However, ease of use is helpful for our level one help desk personnel, who aren't used to using network tools like Auvik. In addition to being intuitive, the ease of use flattens the learning curve for our less experienced employees.
Regarding Auvik helping to visualize our network mapping/topology, it's elementary. It places devices logically in a topology that's easy to understand. We can collapse and expand elements, making it easy to find information and devices in the system. I rate the tool ten out of ten for the overall intuitiveness of network visualization. Everything is worded perfectly and makes perfect sense to anyone working in the IT field.
We have seen time-to-value with Auvik; it helped us on many occasions when our clients had network problems. It assisted us in ironing out those issues.
What needs improvement?
The performance could be better; it gets a little clunky and slow-moving at times, and I wonder if that's due to the VM or if it's just the nature of the tool.
Another issue is the solution sometimes signs users out at inopportune times without warning. I'll be working in one window perfectly fine, and I would have a second session open in another window, which can time out and force me to log back in, even though I'm still logged on to the platform in another window. That can be frustrating.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for about six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is excellent as long as the network, VMs, and hardware are suitable. Running low-quality equipment would affect the stability and user experience.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution scales well. Once you reach around 2,000 devices, a second device is required on the network to offset some of the performance issues that come with that, but it scales easily. It would just be a second OVA running on a box.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is excellent and very quick to respond. They helped us with an issue concerning performance hits in some equipment due to the frequency of the scans Auvik was running.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We evaluated some trial solutions for other network management tools, and they didn't fit us. SolarWinds NPM was a resource hog, and it wasn't cloud-based, so we ended up going with Auvik because of the ability to use it in the cloud.
We primarily used the in-built networking tools from each vendor. Switching to Auvik saves us about 20 hours because we can see all the relevant data and manage the networks from a single pane of glass.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward; it consisted of deploying an OVA which searches for the Auvik instance in the cloud and locks it in once authorized. It's between three and five steps, so it's quick to get up and running.
After the collector code was implemented, our network mapping started to populate almost immediately. However, we had SNMP set up, which needs to be done ahead of time for network devices. The solution pulls in devices and connections via ICMP based on the network it discovers. It may draw in limited details initially until the rest of the details are set up, but IP-based devices are pulled in very quickly.
In terms of time to set up and maintain Auvik, it's about the same as other tools. It's all about the underlying network configuration. It didn't take much time because I ensured the network was prepped for any potential security monitoring tools we put in place. I didn't have to go in on the back end and set anything up because it was all waiting to go.
The solution requires a little maintenance on the VM side. Performance-wise CPU and RAM maintenance can increase performance. Other than that, the tool essentially runs itself.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I can't speak to the cost; I'm an engineer. Auvik has a subscription-based pricing option, and the other solution we evaluated had high upfront costs.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Orion and WhatsUp Gold and found that Auvik works much better for us because it allows us to have all our clients in a single plane of glass under our company. With the other products, we would have to set up separate instances at each site and manage them individually from onsite.
What other advice do I have?
I rate the solution eight out of ten.
Auvik provides a single integrated platform, though that's not as important to us as cost, ease of use, and support, in which the solution excels. We're intelligent people who work with different platforms, as our clients don't have cookie-cutter set-ups at every location. If Auvik weren't a single integrated platform, that wouldn't be much of a hindrance for us.
We haven't used Auvik's automation capabilities.
Auvik's cloud-based solution works as well or better than on-prem network monitoring solutions. The cloud solution depends upon the internet connection at the opposite end but logging in remotely to manage on-prem tools faces the same challenge.
It works as well, even better. But of course, your Cloud solution is dependent upon the internet connection at the opposite end, so your mileage may vary. But you're still limited by that with on-prem solutions as well, if you're logging in remotely to look at those tools. So it faces the same challenges as the on-prem solutions.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP/Reseller