Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

It has got a lot of use cases, but in my opinion, it's probably the best full-stack network monitoring management and alerting platform that's out there for routers, switches, firewalls, and non-server infrastructure.

It makes it a lot easier for our IT teams to have visibility into remote and distributed networks. Once you get your IT team members used to it, when you're having an issue, for example, while trying to SSH to something, they will go to Auvik first just because they have the geographic map, and they have these little dummy-proof exclamation marks. So, there might be an issue here. The way Auvik portrays the network from the outside looking in is like being Zeus on a little cloud. We can see what's going on with all our devices which we couldn't see before without having to log into each device individually, or we had to use a diagram that we made when they were set up and refer to that. Now, we have a live reactive changing diagram that allows our network guys to go straight to the actual device that's causing the network issue somewhere in this region and start troubleshooting that right away versus having to troubleshoot three, four, or five devices in that general area blindly, and then, eventually getting to the device they need to work on. It has saved an insurmountable amount of hours of network outages and down networks. It has also reduced our response times. We are able to get that information really quickly, and we don't have to go back and forth. What used to be a four-hour fix is now done in 30 minutes.

It has been great to allow our teams to focus on high-value tasks and delegate low-level tasks to junior staff. It has been great just because of the integration with our PSA ticketing system and the way we can set triggers, priorities, and levels of urgency with notes and all the other cool features they have there. It allows us to route tickets appropriately and then, they already have little checklists that pop up for common alerts that say, "If it's this and this, try this. If not, escalate to senior staff." It has sped that up quite a bit. Often, there's a lot of noise, and by getting the alerting down right to where there are actionable incidents that come in, it has sometimes added a little extra time for the tier one guys because often there are just too many alerts. You have one device that brings down a whole network, but you get alerts on every single device that's inside that network, whereas you only need to know the one. Sometimes, it's not easy from the face value to know which specific device it's until you get used to the tool and the customer.

Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date has helped save us time and money. We don't miss a lot of the warranty and inversion roll-ups, and some of our commitments where we have to do quarterly upgrades of the router, switch, and firewall environment. They are the kind of upgrades that aren't done automatically for anyone because you can't do those in the middle of the day. So, our ability to track assets, models, versions, and even warranty expiration dates, which they pull from public databases automatically for you, is invaluable.

They allow for integrations into their platform via API with PSA tools like ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Automate. They have a lot of add-on integration and plug-ins for a lot of the big names and IT RMM stacks commonly used in my industry space. These integrations are absolutely valuable. With the integrations into ConnectWise, we are able to automatically create and close tickets across systems. As alerts and new information comes into Auvik, when an issue or a trigger that was alarmed has been resolved, and it detects that it has gone away, based on our threshold, it can talk back to our ticketing system and auto-close it and send a notification. It's phenomenal. You don't have to wait on an email to go to another email, and then that email creates a ticket. It's very useful.

The network visualization is great in terms of overall intuitiveness. They couldn't do any more than doing a coloring book with pop-up pictures and coloring stuff. They made it easy for you to know where to look. They guide you to the right place. I always use the term Windows 85 just because they tried to simplify it so much and make it so easy that it became difficult for people because they are used to doing more steps. They're like, "Wait, that can't be right. That's all I had to do? There have to be more steps." Some of the things are hidden in plain sight, but when you find it once, you're good. The diagrams and the groupings of the sections are very down and out. Like Merkle Tree, they are easy to navigate, and then, they have a lot of cross-referencing hooks inside those sections of the UI that lead you back to the next expected place you'd want to go after making a change in that section. It's nice.

The monitoring and management functions or the out-of-the-box functions are fairly easy to use. When you need to tailor an onboarding for a customer who wants different triggers and conditions for alerts that don't come out of the box in their default alert set for certain device types, you can make it happen and create those, but doing so isn't that easy. Luckily, Auvik support is usually the best. They respond very quickly. You can message them right on a chat. You always get someone who knows what they're talking about, and then, they get you in the right direction. From a user perspective, customizing it's not intuitive, but it can be done with their help.

Its asset inventory is amazing. The only thing that they're still lacking is the ability to make it easier to import assets into their system when onboarding. Other than that, exporting and pulling data that is set up in Auvik is very easy, and it has made QBR with customers and things like that a lot of fun.

So, there should be more custom reporting options when importing or exporting. It should have better data ingestion capabilities, and we should be able to import more than just a CSV. They should also improve it in terms of customization for customer tenants and reporting and onboarding options for migrating from non-Auvik systems or no network monitoring systems into Auvik. It's still a very manual process even with the discovery. The onboardings are probably the longest part.

There is a hidden or unspoken bottleneck that I would like to see improved. When there are 800 to 1,000 devices in one subtenant, that is huge performance segregation. Generally, you're not going to have a lot of customers that have that much, but the solution is to create different sub tenants and such, but it's more of a hassle than it's worth. In the future, I would like to see if they could find a way to break through that bottleneck for the namespace tenants or for the customer tenants to where I could have all the customer network devices in one tenant. They could even be sectionalized inside the tenant, or there could be a way to mask the US1, US2, Customer-1, Customer-2, or whatever namespace in a way that they all also show up in the same portal tenant customer organization, and they all tie into our PSA tools with same API integration. I would like to see that happen. That's been the biggest hurdle for our enterprise customers and deployments because when you're first doing discovery and you start scanning, it starts pulling in everything like printers, computers, phones, and all the stuff you don't need. It adds up to 1,000 really quickly, and then the UI or refresh rate on the tool cripples drastically. That's the biggest thing, but it's not something that can't be overcome either by the options and suggestions they provide as of today. In those kinds of situations, it just requires a little bit of extra work to set up the additional tenants and get everything integrated.

I've been using it for about five years.

Its stability is great. 

I couldn't speak on their actual infrastructure because of the hosted solution. So far, I've seen just massive fast scaling from their infrastructure side just based on namespaces alone. I haven't seen any limitations personally other than the bottleneck I have, but that's not a limitation when there's a solution to create satellite tenants that will talk to each other for the same customer. If that were to continue on, I haven't seen anything that would stop me from creating unlimited 1,000 device namespaces per customer all tied into the same functions of their stack.

I would rate their support a 10 out of 10. It's like they look out for me when I message support. For the last five years, every time I messaged them, they sent me the best guy they had, or that's the experience I've had. I have had nothing but a great experience with their support. I never had to get them on the phone either. It has always been through the chat, which is amazing.

Positive

We only use Auvik for routers, switches, and firewalls or just the network. We don't use it for any servers. We use a combined stack for that piece. Before we moved to Auvik, we used to use two extra tools, and then Auvik replaced those two. Now, we're just down to using two main tools to manage the entire customer infrastructure. We got Auvik and ConnectWise Automate.

In the past 13 years, I've used SolarWinds, NetNat, and Kaseya Traverse. We have used a good handful of managed service provider-focused tools. I used LabTech's very limited network monitoring management tool before they got bought and the name was changed to ConnectWise and ConnectWise Automate, but essentially, LabTech was the same tool as Automate. Anyone in the MSP business over in Houston was either using the Kaseya RMM tool or they were using LabTech's RMM tool to manage their customers. They mainly excelled at just workstations and server management, but they had some limited network functionality or network monitoring and management that you could do. Outside of that, this is the first one that would do it all. Usually, you had to get a vendor-specific one. You'd be doing a bunch of different vendor tools. You'd have a Cisco tool, you'd have a Fortinet tool, or you'd have a SonicWall tool. Each one of those tools monitored and managed just that class of product. It's nice to have one that does it all.

In terms of comparison of Auvik's cloud-based solution versus other on-prem network monitoring solutions, the only thing they have is collectors. They got the collectors, and all they do is that they relay information via HTTPS back to the AWS. AWS does all the magic with the databases.

Deployments are extremely straightforward. My response would be biased because I have been using it for a while, but I don't see anything that someone who doesn't use it regularly might see as a problem or hurdle. I've worked with the support and used the tool so often. So, I know the little caveats where if something is wrong with the way it's talking to a device, if I wait 30 seconds and set the device to unmanaged and then set it back to managed again, I can reset it and reconnect the service. So, it's super easy. Their level of support is quick and very knowledgeable because their support doesn't work with any non-technical people because all of their customers are IT teams. You could probably log into a tenant, and if you have no idea what you're doing, just pop in there in message chat, and you can probably have them walk you through it at a fast enough rate to get you up in line and managing the day-to-day tasks for the customer in that tenant portal in just a matter of a week or less, depending on the size of the network. It could be a matter of a couple of hours.

We have our own process. We streamlined the onboarding process. We took the bits and pieces out of the Auvik documentation that we found to be more relevant and valuable during the initial customer discussions. When you're dealing with a lot of customers who also have internal IT departments, you have to lay out a lot of different concerns, questions, and things that evolve around their specific operations that you just can't predict from the get-go. So, we have our own process where it picks out the protocols that are relevant, the level of permissions that we need, the service accounts that we need, etc. We set those requirements and expectations in our scope with the customer, and they sign off on it that they get us this information within a certain timeframe. That helps speed up the process out of the box. Assuming everything is perfect and we have all of the access and all the keys to the kingdom of someone we're trying to deploy out of the box, we should have no problem deploying it very quickly. That's because all the credentials that we need to manage those devices are automated by an Auvik service account for logins, remote sessions, and SNMP. If all those are plugged in before we deploy the collector, and as we deploy the collector, it does all that magic for us. That's the automation piece involving connecting, discovering, pulling information, and wrapping everything together.

I got a new guy who works with me now, but for the last three years, it has been solely me deploying Auvik for every customer and internally for our operations as well. I deploy it, configure it, and then I hand it off to Ops to maintain it, and they handle it from there. 

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require much maintenance. In the past few years, there were some instances where they couldn't automatically update collectors from certain versions to certain versions when you passed a certain point. So, you just have to go in and update or just redeploy collectors for customers, which is due to the nature of how they are set up. You could have one that just breaks. You can spin off a brand new one in less than 30 minutes, and you're back to where you were before.

Every time we onboard a new customer to provide our IT services, there's a kickoff call that just says, "Hey, we're doing this." Auvik provides us the ability to perform discovery as soon as we have keys to their infrastructure.

There has been a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). From incident to resolution, it has probably cut that time down in half for the operations side.

The prices change based on your partnership with them and based on the bulk amount that you buy and the account rep you're talking to. It depends on negotiations and the number of customers you have. 

It's absolutely worth the money. I would probably charge more if I were them. They don't charge you for anything that's not a router, switch, or firewall controller, or a network device. So, you can throw anything like servers and ESX hosts. You can throw network storage and all that stuff in there, and they have functionality in there for you to build out, monitor, and manage those as well, which you don't get charged for. You only get charged per device for a switch, router, or firewall, which is nice. You can have a collector for a customer, and it's just a minimal fee for the tenant. It's pretty neat. You can deploy as many collectors as you want to talk to that tenant for the customer on the fly and do discoveries. We also handle some emergency requests such as, "We need to figure out what we have on our network because we got ransomware, and we need to make sure all of our devices and all of our assets have the new antivirus. We're supposed to have 6,000 devices, but we're only showing this many." There have been times when we've literally just used the tool for discovery on a customer to collect a full report of assets and then used that to fix another whole different type of issue and provide solutions for more revenue to additional projects for that engagement. We use it ad hoc. We use it for month-to-month management of infrastructures. Now, we use it for discoveries and emergency projects where we need to collect a lot of information very quickly when we don't have any other IT at the other end to provide information on situations.

When I got hired with Computex, now Calian, they hired me because they didn't know what to do with Traverse. I made the decision and met with the engineering team. I was certainly 90% of the reason for the decision for them to move away from Kaseya's Traverse tool to Auvik's tool. I made that decision when I came on because I had a lot of background in it, and they had an acquisition where they had that tool for half of their businesses they were providing IT for, and then, they had Traverse. I convinced them to get away from Traverse because it wasn't a good tool, and then we moved over to a tool that did what we needed.

I had to do a lot of training. I had to host a lot of training and calls and some webinars for our NOC team, but once we got a hang of it, we were able to display it while the customer was at our NOC. We could display the active live network monitoring diagrams on our dashboards with all our other systems. It gives everyone a warm feeling when they can look over and see what's going on.

I would advise first figuring out what you're trying to accomplish. If you are trying to ad hoc or duct tape other tools, rethink. Auvik performs and shows the most value when it becomes your sole tool for all of your network monitoring and management and alerting. If you're trying to ad hoc, duct tape, or throw in just for a feature or a filler for another product, you're just going to run into more headache. You only need Auvik to manage all of those things. If you're looking to Auvik for server management, workstation management, it's possible, but it's not built for that. So, make sure that it's for network devices only. It's not really designed to manage storage and hypervisors and remote access. It's not a day-to-day help desk support tool for you to hop on to user workstations and troubleshoot from that standpoint.

If you want just another monitoring solution, Auvik can do it, but Auvik's magic is the fact that it's a full stack. It's not just monitoring. It's full network management, remote access, and preventative maintenance. It's a full RMM tool. So, if you're looking for strictly an alerting tool for your network, you'd be wasting some very well-engineered features on the product by going with Auvik just for that. 

Its ease of use isn't too important for us, but it depends on the kind of use because we have layered access and levels of skill sets that are allowed to do certain things in it. From a broader perspective, 90% of the engineers that work for a managed services provider and 90% of the guys on our support desk aren't going to be there changing anything. It's just going to be the project team that sets it up, onboards it, and configures it. Once that process is standardized for us, there are only minor tweaks, based on the customer type, when we set up new clients. It becomes pretty streamlined. The only time that the ease of use helps is in the beginning when you first start using the tool itself. Once you've been a partner with Auvik, you've onboarded a few customers, and you've dug your way in and out, and around it, and you do a couple hundred after that, it's not as relevant.

It hasn't helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. They don't have much automation in the platform itself. The only automated thing that they do is to monitor conditions, and then the routing of the alerts, who they go to, and how those are handled. In terms of automation of maintenance on the network, there isn't any function like that in Auvik that I'm aware of. It's mostly just analytics monitoring and a remote access tool.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use Auvik to monitor our customers' networks for performance and availability.

Auvik's ease of use is essential for our operations.

We previously used multiple applications to manage our networks. The solution provides a single integrated platform for our organization which is vital for our operations. 

It has streamlined our management of networks, time-wise. Auvik has drastically cut down our time by 50 percent.

Auvik's ability to monitor multiple hardware manufacturers in a single pane of glass makes it very easy for our engineers to respond to alerts.

The ability to help visualize the network mapping or topology allows our engineers to see what is connected to what in order to troubleshoot quicker.

We have found that being able to see the misconfigurations on network devices has lowered our troubleshooting tremendously. This is because we can quickly identify and fix any problems. The solution helps to reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation.

Auvik affects our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally, which is extremely important.

The ability to scan the network and find devices frees up our IT team's availability. 

In any engineering job, we're going to have some downtime. Being able to turn our attention to low-level tasks and resolve some easy tickets is great for our IT department.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up to date.

Rather than delegating low-level tasks to our junior staff, we use the inventory a lot for pooling devices and serial numbers. If a customer wants to know how many switches they have in place, we can pull the inventory from Auvik.

Compared to the other solutions we use, Auvik is easily the most solid.

We like the alerts, the network mapping, and the backup of configurations.

The monitoring and management functions of Auvik are extremely easy to use straight out of the box.

Auvik's overall intuitiveness of our network's visualization is excellent.

It requires very minimal maintenance.

When we deal with larger networks, the current interface is difficult to navigate around the network map because of the volume of devices. The solution can improve by providing a simpler way to display and navigate through all of the devices on larger networks. 

The stability can use improvement.

I have been using the solution for five years.

Auvik has gone down a couple of times. We haven't been able to log in, but that's common in the industry. 

Auvik's scalability is extremely high.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We have used SolarWinds in the past. We also use ConnectWise manual SNMP monitoring to see if firewalls are up or down. We moved from LogicMonitoring to Auvik five years ago. When we moved from LogicMonitor to Auvik, one aspect was immediately apparent: the notifications were a lot better. The notifications through Auvik were timely and relevant, while the notifications through LogicMonitor were often delayed and irrelevant. The interface for LogicMonitor was not as good as Auvik's. Auvik was a breath of fresh air. The notifications were clear and concise, and the monitoring of devices was top-notch. We quickly realized that there was no going back to LogicMonitor.

Once we put the collector out there and populate the username and passwords for our devices, Auvik is easy to set up. The deployment required two engineers.

It takes between 30 minutes to one hour from the time the collector is implemented to the time our network mapping starts to populate.

The implementation was out of the box and completed in-house. 

We have seen tremendous value with Auvik.

Auvik's pricing is very competitive compared to other network management solutions. We get our pricing from ConnectWise, and we also use SolarWinds. I know that their prices are higher than Auvik's, or at least what's been proposed to us was higher.

We did not evaluate other options. We were introduced to Auvik by Continuum before they were bought by ConnectWise.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We generally prefer to install the Auvik collector on-premises onto a server and run it in the Linux configuration. We do this more so than using the cloud, likely for performance reasons.

I recommend Auvik. It is a great tool for managed service providers because it works with any hardware vendor and allows them to scale their networking practice greatly.

When I started working with Auvik, I was working for a managed service provider helping several clients manage their network environments. We tried Auvik and decided to stick with it. It is used for network monitoring and different troubleshooting issues.

Previously, we were logging into a client's firewall to see what was going on for troubleshooting or trying to get some data out of that. When our clients were using Ubiquiti, we logged into their network in a tenant network environment and navigated through different panels and settings to sort things out. Gathering all that data was laborious and time-consuming. 

We saved on labor costs by making our client tech support more efficient. Auvik enables us to narrow down network issues and address them even faster because we aren't sifting through data and logs on multiple solutions or dashboards. Everything's on Auvik. From an MSP perspective, clients get a much better service, quicker response, and lower time to resolution. It saves me at least a couple of hours a day. Our entire team of network administrators is saving us dozens of hours per day.

New devices are automatically added to the network. You input the network credentials, and we get the metrics almost instantly when a new device or endpoint appears without changing the configuration because the settings are already in Auvik. We use another solution for asset inventory, but Auvik keeps track of assets.

It frees up time for your team to work on other tasks. It might even free up an entire technician. The permissions are granular. We have a multitenancy setup where you can assign members of your tech team different permissions. 

You can get junior techs monitoring or troubleshooting without affecting the principles of these privileges. Auvik thought of everything from a security perspective, and the junior techs don't need much training. It only takes a couple of hours to show the junior techs how to navigate. The rest is intuitive.
Because of the granular controls for filtering, notifications, and alerts, you don't necessarily need dedicated technicians to sift through logs. You can respond when you get an alter. 

I like Auvik's SNMP capabilities. Seeing all the metrics and analytics in one dashboard is a game-changer. The topology is excellent. I give the network visualization 10 out of 10 for intuitiveness. The UI and user interface are top-tier. None of the other network monitoring solutions I've tried has more features than Auvik. Nothing compares. 

I deployed NetFlow monitoring for one of our clients, which was great. I wasn't a cybersecurity analyst then, but Auvik helped me get into that field. The data captured and displayed and that real-time monitoring and alerting are critical for any network environment.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions aren't tricky to use. It takes no time to configure the notifications, and the dashboard is nice. The topology is impressive. I remember setting up a TV for some of our client environments to monitor. 

You don't need to interact with it much because you get those alerts and reports sent to your email when there are issues. You can customize the triggers, so you're not bogged down with notification fatigue. It isn't a complicated solution, and Auvik's training is excellent. 

Everything is a single pane of glass, and Auvik is compatible with many different network hardware vendors. We had clients with SonicWall and Fortinet appliances. We primarily use Ubiquiti devices, but it doesn't matter. When a device isn't compatible, Auvik helps us integrate it quickly using various workarounds. We can easily do a bit of programming in Linux or set up specific SNMP triggers. Auvik is the solution regardless of the environment.

Auvik is also a Canadian company, and it means a lot to us to support another Canadian company. They've grown phenomenally over the years. They're not as big as Shopify, but all the Big Tech heavy hitters are all Americans, so it's nice to see Auvik reach for the stars.

I have used Auvik off and on for five years.

I have never had issues with Auvik. It isn't a resource hog. I've never seen it crash. I don't think I've ever used a tech platform or tool that doesn't crash. The stability is phenomenal. They have their maintenance windows, but those are scheduled.

You can scale from a tiny little network to a massive network with VPLS, MPLS, and multiple branch locations. It reads site-to-site VPN tunnels. Scalability is not an issue. 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. Auvik support is phenomenal, and they're Canadians. That was a huge plus because we are Canadians. I'm a French and English speaker. I remember speaking to one of the tech support teams in French, and I was impressed with that. 

They're based out of Waterloo, Ontario. I've been there, and I'm also in Ontario myself. The French community out there isn't big, so I was impressed with that. They're friendly and knowledgeable, and you never feel like a number to them.

Positive

We used SolarWinds for a while, but the UI was not great. It did the job, but SolarWinds' feature set left something to be desired. Switching to Auvik was night and day. It was the Cadillac of solutions, and everything was on one dashboard. You have the topology on the screen and click on a device in the map to connect or send command line scripts and commands to it. We used a few different solutions, but nothing compared to its features. Auvik's UI and the UX sold me on it.

I deployed Auvik for my last company and another company I worked with. I tried to switch everybody over to Auvik. I don't get paid for that. I believe in the product. The setup is straightforward if you have fundamental network knowledge and Linux skills. A level-one tech might take a little time, but you could probably teach a high schooler to do this. It isn't rocket science.

I deployed Auvik out of the box. After configuring the collector, it takes five to 15 minutes for the network map to populate. The last time I configured it out of the box, I set it up and left it because I trusted the solution. The first time I set it up, it took around 10 or 15 minutes tops to see things show up on the topology.

They offer training for it, but it was like, "Here's the KB article. Go at it." We didn't need any support. After deployment, Auvik is pretty lightweight, maintenance-wise. It updates periodically, but we've never had issues. 

The price shouldn't be an issue for a larger organization, but a smaller organization or an MSP might struggle because the billing is per device. You're paying for your firewalls and devices that appear on the network. If you have a smaller organization with an extensive network, your revenue won't be able to support that cost. That's probably the biggest downside for me.

However, you should go with Auvik if you can squeeze it into your budget because the time savings and ease of use are worth it. In the long run, you'll end up paying for the other solutions in labor costs and other expenses. You can use PRTG, but it's a pain to configure and resource-heavy. Auvik never causes issues on the networks because it's lightweight. The upfront costs may be higher, but it will save you time and money in the long run. Your tech team will appreciate it as well because of the user experience, in my opinion.

I've tested Pulseway, ManageEngine, SolarWinds, PRTG, and Domos. Auvik blasts the other ones out of the water. In addition to the topology and the user interfaces, there is nothing like Auvik from a display or user experience perspective. 

Auvik's dashboard is clean and not too busy. It's easy to use, interpret and drill down into a device if necessary. It rapidly detects changes in the network environment and responds quickly with alerts.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. Auvik is a powerful tool, and security is critical for my clients and me. I recommend following all the steps and securing your environment. Auvik has made MFA mandatory, which is essential. It is a powerful tool, so you wouldn't want that to fall into the wrong hands. Access to the company's network map is a hacker's jackpot. Follow the steps and reach out to support if you're unsure. There's also a pretty big community now. I've seen that grow over the years, which has been great. 

We use Auvik for monitoring networks across all of our sites for alerts, reporting, configuration backups, and troubleshooting. Auvik does a little bit of everything when it comes to networking.

I'm not the only person that utilizes Auvik, but I'm the only network engineer. The infrastructure team uses it for server monitoring. Security guys can also access it, but I'm the primary caretaker.

I monitor 34 sites with 200 managed devices, and about another hundred are unmanaged. Altogether, I have over 2,600 devices that are not networked. If you subtract the network from that, it's about 2,300 devices that aren't network devices, including printers, servers, and computers. Auvik crawls and finds those kinds of things on the network. That's what I mean by total picture.

I previously used SolarWinds, which I call a Swiss Army knife of network monitoring systems. SolarWinds is great. It does many things, but it's gotten too bloated and slow. It's not as intuitive as Auvik. SolarWinds didn't do mapping on its own, and the mapping provided was kind of clunky to get running because you have to manage the licensing and everything. Even after tweaking SolarWinds, I couldn't get the mapping capabilities Auvik gives me. 

Also, SolarWinds wasn't a one-stop shop. Auvik is the closest I've gotten to a single pane of glass. It's hard to judge whether Auvik has saved time over SolarWinds after two months because I'm still doing some slight tweaks. It took me months to get SolarWinds the way we need it here. Auvik is still a pretty new product for us. Though it's meeting our basic needs, I'm the kind of guy who likes to squeeze every bit of juice out of my fruit.

The out-of-the-box alerts were pretty on-point, so I've only had to create two alerts on my own. The reporting is easy to access, so pulling reports is more straightforward. That saves time. 

Also, I don't need to add devices to Auvik. It automatically crawls, finds them, and puts them in the inventory. I don't have to go back and draw maps. Auvik does that. Mapping in SolarWinds requires their map tool, a separate product you must install on the server itself. Drawing maps on that was painful. Discovery isn't something I need to do anymore. When I added five new devices to a site, it found them all and brought them into inventory. I didn't have to do that.

Auvik automatically keeps the device inventories updated. I'm shutting down SolarWinds this week. On Friday, I did my final inventory comparing SolarWinds and Auvik. I have not been updating SolarWinds, and Auvik has about 20 more devices on the network side alone because I don't have to go back through and update the inventory. It'll pull it in itself. When something is added, I get an alert saying the new device has been added to the network.

Auvik has sped up my resolution time because you can drill down in Auvik and look at the net flow information faster. The alerts also help, but if this is a data-driven event, I need to look at the net flow, which is much quicker. 

The monitoring and alerts are easy to use and set up. Discovery is the first step in monitoring, and that's a piece of cake with Auvik. It'll scan your networks once you get the credentials set up and automatically find newly added equipment as long as the same credentials are already on that gear. Auvik makes my job a lot easier. I don't have to keep going back to a monitoring system to add devices each time we bring something new. That part alone saves me time.

It's all intuitive and straightforward. The out-of-the-box alerts provided everything I needed, but I've made a couple of additional alerts. You can schedule maintenance windows in Auvik, and the solution won't send any alerts during that time. With other products, you have to turn off the alerts on each device if you don't set it up correctly. Ease of use is crucial because I'm the only network engineer at a company of 900, so I have many things to do. 

I have a single pane of glass. It's easier to go into one system where everything is easy to find. It's a one-stop-shop with everything you need instead of going into multiple products to get it done. I don't consider Auvik entirely cloud-based because you have collectors onsite. The portal for viewing your infrastructure is cloud-based. You don't need to get into a VPN or anything like that to get to it. It's two-factor authentication, so it's a little harder for bad actors to get to your data.

The ability to log in and run commands from the cloud is helpful. You can access a full command line on the device, so I don't need to VPN into the infrastructure, which helps when troubleshooting. It's also beneficial that it's not on-prem. If my leading site, where the on-prem solution is located, goes down, no place is being monitored. As long as the internet connection is up and the collector is running, all my sites are being monitored.

The mapping automatically finds all the interfaces but tags some of them incorrectly. For instance, if it can't find how a CPU interface is connected, it will use the MAC address last seen on the router and sometimes attribute cloud-connected devices to the route, but it's not actually there. That's not a true connection.

It isn't going to the cloud. It's going directly back to the router. I've talked to Auvik support about that already. They're looking into it. Overall, mapping could be a little better. Though they do a great job, there's still room for improvement. It's 100% accurate for some sites but only 90% for others. It gives you a complete view of how things are connected for the most part. Auvik still struggles with wireless bridges and things of that nature. However, Auvik isn't the only product missing that, and there is a simple way to make those connections myself.

I did a couple of trials with Auvik, but we've officially been using the solution for about three months now.

I'm through my testing phase, and now that I'm in my third month using Auvik, I can say it's pretty stable. I had one issue with Syslog, but they fixed it. They made a change that caused an unforeseen issue in Syslog. They resolved the problem in the next release.

Auvik's scalability is pretty good. I'm monitoring 30-plus sites. I was running 30 of them off one collector, so the scalability is pretty good.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. 

Positive

SolarWinds does many of the same things, but Auvik has a different approach. If we have some networking event, we can find the problem machine in Auvik and see what it has been talking to a lot faster. 

Auvik is a little more agile. We can find things a little faster with Auvik than in SolarWinds. We don't need to dig as much. The graphical nature of the product makes it easier to navigate.

Deploying Auvik is very straightforward. I implemented it pretty much out of the box. When I had my customer success meetings with Auvik support, I had already done everything they told me to do. I'm experienced in setting up things, so I had it up and running by the time we met to review our technical onboarding.

I can onboard a small site in 10 minutes. Once you input credentials at the top level, it's only a matter of putting in subnets that you want scanned, waiting for them to be scanned, and verifying everything is there. It's about 10 minutes per site once your credentials are squared away.

Once that is ready, it takes Auvik an hour or so per site to stitch everything together. Much of it is on the backend because it makes all those maps and everything like that, which takes time. It has to pull in the data from SNMP and CDP. It looks at all the interfaces and stitches together maps, so it depends on how many collectors you have. It takes longer if you're running a couple of collectors for an entire enterprise because a few collectors are doing a lot of work.

It's much faster if you have a collector at every site. It's probably 15 to 20 minutes per site. I only used one collector when I started because I wanted to see how hard I could push it. It took much less time to set up than SolarWinds. The discovery is pretty simple for what you have to do from my end. As long as you have your credentials at the top level, you add a new site, throw in your subnets, and it finds them for you. 

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance after deployment. I wanted to stress test the collector to see what might break it. I had 30 sites on one collector at one time, but I decided to go back to the suggested implementation.

With a single collector on 30-plus sites, the daily tasks were completed, and we weren't close to using up the CPU or memory on this device—this wasn't a beefy server. It was built to their specs but not overly powerful. Once your collector runs, you don't need to do much with this product because the brains are in the cloud. If your collector goes down, bringing up a new one is a piece of cake.

It's apparent off the bat how much time I'm saving by doing tasks because of the ease of use. Once I got everything discovered, it was evident that I would save time by automatically drawing maps and keeping them updated. I immediately noticed that I would save time, and time is money. I always have several projects and no longer worry about my inventory because Auvik does this for me.

Once the devices are configured, and the collectors are installed, I don't need to add anything to the monitoring system or make sure the backups are there. Auvik grabs it for me.

It's worth the price, depending on how you use the product. Price is a significant component of any purchase; for me, it all goes back to visibility. I have more visibility into everything now than I had before. SolarWinds was on every node, and every interface had to be licensed. With Auvik, the cost could be the same or more depending on the level of visibility you want. The price and value vary according to your network infrastructure and the information you want.

If you want a complete picture of your entire network, then Auvik is a better choice. SolarWinds is a better option if you're only looking at network devices. I think Auvik's price per node is a tad high. That's probably my only knock against Auvik. Your network nodes are billable, including servers, printers, or other devices. You have visibility into those things as well. In other products, each one of those devices is a billable node, so Auvik gives us a little bit more visibility than we had before because now we have more devices in the system.

We looked at Entuity and Datadog. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I deduct a point for the mapping and reporting. I like everything else that Auvik does. The only aspect I don't like 100% is the mapping. Also, they have canned reports instead of a built-in report builder. You have to extract the data in Power BI or some other way. They have great pieces, but I can't customize them and create my own within their system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik for about six years.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it for monitoring network infrastructure and network servers.

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

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

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

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

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

Among the most valuable features are the 

• remote browser
• remote terminal
• remote tunneling.

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, reporting on alerts could be a lot easier.

We have been using Auvik for about three years.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're in the healthcare industry and in our organization we have what we call a "backup machine" to be used in emergency scenarios. Should there be a brownout or internet service provider disruptions or any major catastrophe, we can move digital charting to paper charting for a certain duration of time. We have the Auvik probe installed on those backup machines, and it sends feedback back to the main Auvik dashboard where we monitor such things as ISP latency, devices on the network, and certain network elements like switches and access points.

We also have a probe sitting in one of the servers in the data center and it performs a similar function, helping us review our network infrastructure within the data center and to see where potential bottlenecks are, at what times of day, and to analyze trends.

We use it for basic troubleshooting as well because you can see everything on the network within a particular facility. At sites that don't have Cisco Meraki within the building, we use Auvik to isolate which ports' devices are connected to and for general troubleshooting. If, for example, an uplink port on one of the switches goes out, we can see, "Oh, that was port 26. Please switch it to port 25." We can duplicate configurations from one port to the next port and make sure that the facility is up and online.

It's been a very useful tool for us.

We can automate alerting systems based on certain criteria. For example, if a switch is undergoing high CPU usage or access points show high CPU or memory usage, we'll get the alerts for those and address them accordingly.

Auvik also sends us a text message whenever one of the internet circuits goes down, as we have a main fibre circuit at every building and a coaxial backup. That helps us ease the burden in switching over the necessary connections or the tunnels back to our centralized data center.

In addition, the network discovery capabilities are very insightful, coming from our previous situation where we had absolutely nothing. They have made us aware of certain switches within certain parts of the building that we may not have known existed. They have also helped because in our industry we're built by acquisitions. Oftentimes, we find an acquisition has an IDF and MDF in a particular building. With Auvik installed, we might find there are two more switches around that building. Sometimes these switches can be in the ceiling, but even being able to isolate what port they're connected to, disconnecting them, and finding where these items are has been extraordinarily helpful to us.

The solution has ultimately improved the response time of our help desk team when troubleshooting issues. It has also helped to identify older equipment when doing a refresh. We've been able to find 100-meg switches and old Cisco switches that are in places that we didn't anticipate they would be. We have also been able to isolate key pieces of the infrastructure within a building, pieces that needed to be replaced to provide a more friendly user experience.

Another benefit is that the automation of network mapping enables our level-one network specialists to resolve issues directly, and frees up senior-level team members for more important tasks. Our level-ones have read-only access, but that allows them to see the different topologies, see where things are connected, and then help facilitate a solution, either remotely or with the help of onsite personnel. It's kind of like having Cisco Meraki insight without actually having Cisco Meraki. While we only use Cisco Meraki gear at our HQ location, which provides us a high level of insight within one portal, Cisco Meraki is fairly expensive and it's not something that we can afford to put into every building. Auvik provides us with all the features that Cisco Meraki might have to offer within one pane of glass. 

The solution also automatically updates network topology, although it requires SNMP to be enabled on a particular network device. So when we're provisioning things that are going out, we have to pre-program that information into the switch and make sure everything is compatible. But once it's in place, it provides us the same level of insight that the previous network device did.

Also, in the cases where we've used it for resolving issues, it has reduced our MTTR. We're using it more as an insight tool. We don't have a lot of network-related issues within the environment, but in the instances that we have used it for resolution, it has helped us resolve the issues a lot quicker, on the order of 40 percent quicker.

It helps us to put out fires before end-users even know there is a problem, especially when it comes to internet service provider latency on a particular circuit. It alerts us to high bandwidth usage or increased latency and allows us to flip the connections from fibre to coax in anticipation, and then dispatch a fiber technician to resolve the issue on the primary line. All that can be done without any user noticing an impact at the facility level.

We use Auvik's TrafficInsights feature in the data center, but not the facility level. TrafficInsights is really the most beneficial within the data center because that's where high bandwidth is going and that's where it's most important to know exactly what's going on at all times. It shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, and with the projects that we currently have on our plate, that's incredibly important. We're currently transitioning data centers right now, and being able to isolate what traffic is going where and what's taking up the most bandwidth helps us put in certain traffic shaping rules. If something were to potentially impact at the facility level, we can get ahead of the curve and make the appropriate changes as necessary.

TrafficInsights also helps show where our system is experiencing performance issues, because we're using fibre optics within the data center as the backbone for everything. Whenever we're moving virtual machines, it helps isolate which ports are experiencing the most usage. We correlate the ports that are used to the host machines themselves and determine what virtual machines are reliant on the host that's using the most bandwidth, and we then see what services are impacted from there. TrafficInsights enables us to prepare ourselves to minimize end-user performance impact. We make changes based on what we see through TrafficInsights. It's a useful feature for doing exactly that. It allows us to maintain a steady level of performance within the data center.

There are also the automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups which have saved me quite a few times. The ability to back up a configuration from a firewall and have it housed in one central location where we can get the backup config and restore it to a new device, should a firewall or a switch blow out, decreases our restore time significantly. We don't have to figure out which rules, traffic shaping, or port-forwarding were on the switch, or what was on the firewall. We confidently know that the backup being pulled from Auvik is the most recent one.

Typically, before we had Auvik, when a firewall went out, it would take us a full day or a day and a half to turn around another firewall, to make sure it would be plug-and-play. With Auvik, that time has been reduced to a few hours. That's what it takes to procure the actual equipment and get it sent out, because we just pull the backup, restore it, and send the equipment out. No one from our networking team is then working, via tickets, to discover what was on the device previously. It's all in one place. If it's local, we have the building up and running within two hours of equipment configuration.

It's hard to say how much the device configuration backup saves us because every scenario is different. But if we're paying someone $45 an hour, instead of 12 hours of their time we're only using four hours of their time.

The alerting feature has been a very key piece for us, especially in the data center because we manage it ourselves. It gives us special insights into how certain projects and migrations are impacting the center of our operations, out in the field. Within the data center, we have an RDS farm that all the users from the facility connect to. Whenever something may be slow, we can look at the alerting and it helps us troubleshoot whether the issue is at the facility level or at an infrastructure level.

Also, the audit logs it provides are very detailed and can be tailored to our needs within the organization for things like management audit logs and user activity. The TrafficInsights have been really helpful.

The deployment of the probe onto a particular device could be improved. That usually requires one of our level-two people to step in from the help desk team. It would be much better if it were a click-and-go deployment. What I would like to see in particular is the ability to download an MSI builder for a probe for a particular building. We would simply double-click and install it onto the machine and have it work. Having to roll through with the entire API key is a little time-consuming.

I have been using Auvik for about two years now.

We've never had issues with it until recently when we started to see a lot more maintenance come up because the dashboard might be unavailable. But its uptime is about 99 percent.

Scalability is dependent on cost because they charge by network elements. In some of the nursing homes we handle, it's very cost-effective because they only have three switches, a firewall, and about 20 access points. But in larger facilities that have three or four IDFs, it becomes a little bit more costly because you have the additional switches and access points.

Since we don't have a lot of networking issues within the building itself, Auvik is being used as a general guidance tool, and to help the level-one help desk technicians troubleshoot a couple of things a little bit quicker, figure out where items are attached, and help the onsite maintenance director swap a cable or something of that manner. Our use of Auvik will be expanded based on acquisitions. If we bring on a new nursing home, we'll configure all the equipment into our network ahead of time and it will be plug-and-go. We'll just pay for the additional licensing for the network devices.

The first couple of times that I tried to get in contact with the tech support, they were very responsive. With every third-party vendor, wait-times can vary, but the tech support has always been good. I have recently noticed a little bit of a slower response time.

One thing that would be nice would be for them to reach out to us once in a while to check in and see how things are going, rather than only being reactive. A little bit more of a proactive approach would help. Outside of that, I haven't had any issues with their support or their customer team.

Overall, I would rate their tech support at nine out of 10.

We used to use OpenNMS for WAN connectivity purposes but with Auvik we were able to replace that. As far as backups go, we used to use an in-house-built solution for automating an SSH protocol into the firewalls and doing manual backups from there. But that took time to maintain. Auvik has consolidated those two things in one place. And the additional features of network insights for an entire facility is something that we didn't previously have. Auvik is saving us $3,000 to $4,000 per year in licensing costs.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. From start to finish, it took us about five days to have the entire environment up and running. We're a fairly small team. For organizations that have more dedicated team members, such as a NOC team and a server team, it would probably be a lot faster. But we were all filling in for those roles.

Our implementation strategy was simply to make sure that we had the different sites built out within the Auvik collector, entering in the IP information for each site, and then installing the probe facility by facility.

There was a time where it was a little confusing to get set up, but Auvik really helped to bridge that gap in knowledge by providing training to our end-users, meaning me or someone on our help desk team. They gave us more in-depth information and helped us to really understand the product features and to ensure that we were using everything to the best of its capabilities within our circumstances.

We have 10 users of Auvik: three system administrators, two level-two help desk technicians, and about five level-one help desk technicians. As a cloud-based solution, once it's deployed, unless we're making certain IP schema changes, it doesn't require much maintenance at all from our staff. On occasion, a backup machine needs to be replaced and we have to reinstall the probe. But outside of that, it's really click-and-go. The Auvik probe will pick up on a new subnet too. It's all available within the dashboard itself. You can literally turn off the old subnet and turn on the new one and begin scanning those elements just like they were before.

We did it on our own.

We've seen ROI in terms of the time that Auvik has saved us in the instances where we've had configurations that needed to be cloned, for example. I don't want to say the product is stale, rather it's insightful. You get from it as much as you want to get out of it. For us, the insights, manageability, and troubleshooting go a long way because we're saving man-hours.

When it comes to time-to-value, the setup time is fairly easy and the network discovery is very helpful. 

Because we had nothing previously, it's a very valuable tool. Having everything in one place, enabling our teams to react faster, decreasing the time to resolution, as well as identifying weak places within the infrastructure—it's hard to put a value on all that it gives us.

It has saved us a considerable amount of money, given that everything had to be done manually before, such as FaceTiming with a member of the facility and trying to get a physical view of a particular issue. Just having a central pane of glass that easily identifies various pieces of information goes a long way. We're saving tech time which can ultimately then be better spent supporting the organization and end-users. As far as infrastructure planning and rip-and-replace go for certain network technologies, it's provided much better insight and we can plan for which network switches actually have to be replaced. There are cost savings there because if we've got gig switches here and we're only looking to replace 100-meg switches, we can really drill down and know what we need ahead of time, going into a particular building, when we redo some infrastructure.

The solution is billed per network device, so there are devices that are not subject to billing in your environment, such as dumb switches because they have no higher reporting protocols. If you do have those, Auvik won't report on them in the same way. It won't give you port-based or traffic-based analyses.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We initially looked at SolarWinds and, thankfully, we didn't go with that product. Its setup time and configuration were pretty extensive and we never fully finished it after putting about 10 days' worth of time into it. As much as I'd like to say some good things about SolarWinds, it really wasn't for us because of the lack of communication and support that I got from them in helping to set things up. Ultimately, we steered away from that product.

The biggest pro for Auvik is its ease of deployment. It was as easy as I've personally seen a setup of this type of solution to be. It has an abundance of features and functionality. The only con is that the install is a little bit more tech-intensive as far as time goes.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Auvik is that every organization should have something like this. From our perspective, it isn't very expensive, although in smaller organizations it might be considered more of a luxury. But every luxury has its benefits. All the aspects it helps us with make it phenomenal. It's definitely a "need," not a "want."

I would advise making sure you have a very good, thorough count of the SNMP-enabled devices you have within your network. Also, be cognizant of whether you have any non-managed switches because you can't really get visibility into them. 

Also, make sure that you have full control over your network elements within the environment. We had a couple of switches that we had to factory-reset to get back into them, because there were lost credentials. Assuming that your infrastructure and your documentation are good, you really shouldn't run into any terrible issues. If you're sound on documentation, credential handling, and credential guarding, this tool will be very easy for you to implement. And if your infrastructure is pretty sound and everything is consolidated, this will be a phenomenal tool.