Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution always provides strong customer support.

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it for network monitoring. We don't do a lot of systems monitoring with it. We predominantly use it for core switches, external network adapters, and other similar things but not for the endpoints or server hardware.

We are currently not using any of the automation functions.

It definitely assists with visibility into our remote and distributed networks. We don't necessarily use the Windows side of things, but we do have a couple of systems that are monitored. It is almost like a ping test or just a sanity check. From that perspective, it definitely helps. This visibility is 100% critical.

It helps keep device inventories up-to-date. It has saved us time because we have pretty much everything at a glance. It does allow us to prioritize what needs to be replaced or anything that would be necessitated by the device inventory, such as software updates or vulnerability patches. It definitely helps, especially with the end-of-life hardware. We're able to determine that and apply a device lifecycle to it.

In terms of helping our teams focus on high-value tasks and delegating low-level tasks to junior staff, in our network team, we do everything. There are all types of tasks that would be normally assigned to juniors. It definitely provides a lot more visibility and helps in delegating specific things. For example, when an interface is flapping or a port is shut down, it is a lot easier to delegate such a task. We're an MSP staff that doesn't necessarily deal with high-end network equipment. Turning a port back on is something most of us can do as long as we can log into a command prompt. Even the server admins can do some network tasks if need be. Within that, it does allow us to prioritize and state, "Okay, a senior network admin can figure out why this entire site is down," versus, "We need to update a switch."

Our mean time to resolution has reduced due to the alerting system.

We are seeing that the monitoring is very accurate. We are seeing that in terms of problems and solutions, there is a lot of functionality to it, such as APIs. So, you can dig down. You can dig deep into it. It does provide very useful metrics, and it has improved a large portion of our day-to-day operations.

The network monitoring portion of it has pretty sane defaults, and it is fairly good as a product. It is probably one of the better ones that I've used.

The visibility on the site itself is a bit of a problem. We do have the alerts panel, but there is no central monitoring. When we had requested how we would do this to place it up in the NOC and how we would view it and everything else, their answer was to use a third-party tool, such as Power BI. That was the response that we got. A front-end component to show the actual NOC operations at a glance is not present. That would be a major con in my opinion, especially for what we do as a data center. 

The actual adding of networks, systems, and everything like that is fairly easy, but the problem that I have is getting the metrics out. Specifically, if you go to the Auvik webpage, sign in, and go through the alerts and everything else, they don't offer any plasma display with a red light, green light, or stop light indicating this device is in an error state, down, etc. To get around this, we have to use their API. I had to code an entire interface to work around that lack of information. 

One of my major concerns or my major problems is the API hasn't always been super reliable. Sometimes things get broken. Sometimes it is down for a little bit. It doesn't seem to have the same reliability as their primary service, the actual web page itself. The API reliability is problematic when you apply a user account. I have a super admin account, and I have an API user that is a super admin as well. I create a new site as a super admin, and you'd expect everything to fall through, where the top level is the super admin and the subsites don't have access. We have network admins that create sites and DCOM sites and everything else all the time. When that happens, it breaks the alerts API and gives a 403, forbidden error, and that's across everything. If it can't access the top-level tenant, it just breaks the site. There are ways of counteracting that, and we're aware of the pitfalls there. 

We have had the API function in erratic ways where we do filtration based on various criteria, for example, if a ticket has been dismissed, if it is in maintenance, or if it is critical. We have filters for all the metrics. Sometimes, we had a couple of tickets where it doesn't acknowledge those filtrations or the filters, which causes a little bit of a problem, and we have to do a little bit of a sanity check within our code itself. It almost seems a little bit like they do focus on the front end and making it visible, but it seems like the API is almost a second-class citizen.

We've been using Auvik for about two years.

Because the API is what we use frequently, we've had various issues. It could use some work, but in the front-end portion of it, where I'm assuming most of the customers would be looking, we haven't had any downtime that hasn't been pre-planned and reported to us in advance.

Its scalability seems to be fairly good. We're not having any real problems. With the way we're doing things now, it seems to be fairly scalable, and I don't think we'll have any problems.

In terms of our environment, we have operations predominantly in New York. Specifically, there are a few in Manhattan. We have a few in Queens and Suffolk County. We do have one location that is in Singapore, which is one of the smaller operations that we have, but it is predominantly located in the New York, Long Island region.

They were very friendly. They were very good. Generally, if there was a problem, I was able to talk to an engineer on their side relatively quickly, which was a good thing. I was able to very easily prove the point that I had with the calls and everything else, and it worked flawlessly. After I was able to show them the output and everything else, they were able to resolve the problem. I believe they were able to resolve it after six hours or eight hours of having the call with them. That was a pretty good response time in my opinion.

I would definitely rate them a 9 out of 10. Getting a 10 is almost unheard of. All things considered, support is one of the better parts of Auvik in my opinion.

Positive

We have been using OpsRamp. We got Auvik because one of our larger customers used OpsRamp and then changed to Auvik. In our case, my boss said, "Well, why don't we use it too? They seem to be really enthused by it." However, that customer doesn't use it with the same use case. They monitored a lesser number of sites and locations. Their use case is slightly different and their monitoring is not the same, so it works for them, but it doesn't necessarily have the same impact on us. 

In terms of the consolidation of tools, we are still using multiple software types. Auvik is what we use exclusively to monitor network areas. We are currently using OpsRamp with which we are monitoring network hardware as well. We also used Kaseya, which was the worst software for monitoring anything. That was the reason why we immediately binned it as fast as we could, but we also have a couple of other different software. We are using an application manager. We do have Zabbix, and we monitor some things through that as well. That's mostly the ESXi and servers that are on-prem. We are a data center, but we also provide managed services as well. We have a lot of different systems within a lot of different operating systems and environments. Some are PCI. Some are non-PCI. So, we do use other software, and Auvik fulfills some of the same monitoring purposes but for different clients or different hardware.

In terms of time-saving by switching to Auvik, the OpsRamp software has some faults and after the actual interface that I wrote was deployed and started to be used by our NOC, there have been time savings. However, getting to that point took a little bit more frustration in setting up compared to some of the other products that we've used.

We spent substantially less time with Auvik than with our previous solution. The initial setup was relatively straightforward, but my experience level is closer to DevOps than a traditional Systems Administrator. Between my own level of experience and my network team, it was fairly easy to get it deployed.

We were able to deploy it, but then we found that for our monitoring needs, it was a little bit lackluster. I had to code the webpage.

In terms of maintenance, with regard to the API and the coding work, maintenance is required, but it is infrequent.

We did it by ourselves.

There were quite a few options that we looked at. It has been a while, but there was a large selection of software that we've tried, both on-prem and cloud-based. We did monitor or look at NinjaRMM and ScriptLogic. There was Nagios for the on-prem and Applications Manager from ManageEngine. We checked out Enable as well.

When comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus the on-prem network monitoring solutions, they serve different use cases, but the cloud-based Auvik has its advantages due to the fact that we don't have to have firewall ports opened. We can very easily monitor various devices and various client sites without having to be concerned about any leakages because we have the accumulator of the agent gateway and whatever the terminology that they use. It definitely has its pros and cons in the sense of firewall access, deployment speed, and monitoring aspects. We can apply a template across all different types of devices, and the scanning works perfectly in that sense.

My advice would be dependent on how many sites you are monitoring and what you are intending on monitoring. For network equipment, Auvik is very good. For hardware and software, such as Linux, Windows, ESXi, and other similar things, it is very poor in those regards. That would be the major thing. If you are intending on having one tool to rule them all, I would probably steer you toward that limitation because it is quite limited in the endpoint monitoring and server monitoring, but it very well exceeds in network monitoring.

In terms of providing a single integrated platform, the API access to it is good. It does provide that, but the actual OS and software side of things that are not network devices is a little bit lacking.

Overall, I would rate Auvik a 7 out of 10.

I run an engineering team with a dynamic cloud-based environment. I was interested in tools that can help me understand what we have deployed. 
There are about five people administrating it. In terms of the number of locations, it's hard to say. We're a distributed remote team, but we have multiple cloud environments. We don't have locations in the physical sense of the word anymore.

One of our core objectives is to understand the services and systems deployed in the cloud. It's not always obvious. I'm hopeful that Auvik will help.

Having a single platform is somewhat important. It's also essential to integrate Auvik with other solutions. However, I don't think there's a situation where one tool can be the single integrated platform within a space. I checked out the API and the integrations around that. It all looks good, but I didn't use it that much. I did some basic integrations, but I don't think having a single integrated portal product is everything. The right amount of features are integrated into Auvik, but it doesn't need to have everything integrated, and nothing ever will be fully integrated.

We use various tools, including our homebrewed management scripts, some monitoring tools, and cloud portals. They aren't all applications per se, but we have various overlapping tools. Switching to Auvik would save us some time, but some key hangups prevent us from proceeding with it. 

The automatic discovery would help us avoid repeated configuration steps. The automated device inventory feature is potentially valuable. Employees are expensive, and we want them focused on high-value tasks. 

Visibility is crucial. Auvik has alerts that help us be proactive by telling us when something is behaving abnormally. 

The automatic discovery feature is the most valuable, but I've got some issues. The monitoring and management functions are effortless. It couldn't be more straightforward. We use lots of tools, and they need to be as simple as possible. Auvik has an advantage there because I certainly would pick it over something else. However, we often find ourselves using functions that aren't so easy to use because we need them, and they're the only option available.

The network visualization was intuitive enough, but it's hard to say because the network I was testing had a reasonably flat structure. It was good for what I was doing, but I don't know how that scales.

We use a service called Tailscale, a peer-to-peer private networking tool. My biggest issue with Auvik was getting it to scan devices across the Tailscale network. I suspect it's not supported there. That would be a valuable extension for us.

I haven't used Auvik for long. I did a demo for about a day where I set up the features and played with the interface extensively.

Auvik is highly stable.

I haven't stretched Auvik's capabilities, but it's been fine.

I rate Auvik support a six out of ten. They were very responsive, but I didn't feel that the answer was quite accurate.

Neutral

We had a mixture of cloud consoles and self-management scripts. I saw Auvik advertised and thought the automatic discovery sounded handy, so I took a free trial.

I run the engineering team, so I wouldn't do the deployment, but I manage the people who would. It's pretty straightforward, and I implemented Auvik out of the box. It takes very little time to deploy. I could see devices within an hour. I spent most of the day playing with configurations, adding SNMP credentials, and exploring. I could get something running in half an hour to an hour. Auvik was much quicker to set up than some other tools. 

I'm concerned about the price. It seems quite expensive.

I rate Auvik a seven out of ten. Currently, it doesn't work for us because of the limitation on Tailscale. If it weren't for that, I would give it a perfect ten. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet our needs, so I can't score it too high.

The setup was smooth, and you can tell they've put a lot of thought into helping people with that. I'm curious why all the devices have API keys next to them when I know some devices don't have APIs. It wasn't clear what that meant. Maybe the way the APIs work could use a little bit of polish.

My company is a managed services provider managing network infrastructure for multiple clients. We use Auvik to monitor firewalls, routers, or switches. When network devices go offline, get instant email notifications so we can investigate the issue. We also use it to manage devices directly through a web browser remotely.

Auvik makes everything more manageable. The alerts come in overnight, enabling us to look into the issue as soon as possible. We haven't experimented with Auvik's automation features. The primary benefit for our organization is network visualization and monthly reports for our clients. If our clients want to know what happened during the month, we can just gather that information and send it to them.

The network map has all the devices organized by the core, distribution, and access levels. Everything is evenly lined up, so it's easy to look at and it makes everything a little easier on our team.

The device inventories help us on the auditing side. Our customers want to know about changes in interface usage and quantity. For example, if we have some switches that are typically off and others on, we can track the changes in usage and all the inventories we manage. If we have the inventories off the bat, it saves us a few hours because we don't need to count manually. Auvik also reduces our resolution time by about 30 to 60 minutes.

I don't have much experience with on-premises solutions, but the cloud is much easier to use because it's available anywhere, so it takes less time to connect. 

The instant email alerts Auvik sends are valuable because every second counts when a device is down. Everything is in a single pane of glass, so it's easy to use and manageable. 

When everything is centralized, it becomes easier to use and coordinate among team members. There's one panel that can show everything. It's easier to train others to use the platform in terms of managing all the passwords for various microservice accounts. It's all there if we need to check the configuration of files. We don't need to go through multiple levels of access.

The network map is interactive and has all the details, so that's essential. The statistics and reporting features are also crucial. When we create reports, we have all the data, including a graph of network usage, bandwidth, etc. 

Auvik could be better integrated with our ticketing system ConnectWise Manage. We tried integrating Auvik to create tickets, but working to implement a more granular classification system based on priority. The important thing is that we get the alerts, regardless of priority, but that's something that can be improved.

I have used Auvik since I started my current job. It has been about two and a half years.

I can't recall any significant issues with stability.

I'm impressed with Auvik's scalability.

I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I used their live chat once when we had an issue with a firewall that had two instances. We were doing reporting and needed to get the statistics for that month. Once, it failed over to the second secondary device of that firewall, so we could no longer get the information from the firewall that went offline. Auvik support helped me merge statistics from both into one. They resolved our issue on time. 

Positive

We use other network solutions, depending on client preferences. We have another one called Zabbix that might be used for more granular use cases. It's up to our management to decide. We compare the features of Auvik and Zabbix and pick the one that fits the client's business requirements. 

I wasn't around for the initial setup, but I've installed agents. When we install an agent, we turn off the Linux box and install it, then it's good to go most of the time. Another person on our team is the architect, and I am the person who deploys the agent on each server, switch, router, or firewall. There are various steps, but it doesn't take much time. After deployment, the solution is very low maintenance.

Auvik takes less time to do the reports, respond to alerts, set up the agents, and directly access devices, so its time-to-value is good.

Pricing depends on the client's budget and needs. Is it worth it to pay more to save time setting things up? Zabbix is an open-source solution, but it takes much more time and expertise to set up, whereas you can set up Auvik quickly. 

In terms of results, Auvik lets you see everything in a single pane of glass and the reporting is more accessible, so you save time in the long run. That's what I would tell someone if they're exploring their options for network monitoring.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10 overall. It's low maintenance, provides prompt alerts, and requires less expertise. Everything you need to set Auvik up is in the documentation, including guides for configuring network switches and routers. 

Auvik integrates well with various vendors, including Microsoft, Cisco, etc. It's well-documented. Go with Auvik if you want fewer headaches. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance.

We use it for alerts, to a degree, but we mostly use it for networking, monitoring, and triage.

Originally, what really was good about this particular solution was its ability to give us an alert, should something be down, based on simple networking such as pinging. There are a lot of other solutions out there now, but Auvik was, originally, the main source of our networking alerts and it automatically gave us tickets so that we could triage issues.

In a specific service situation where we have a failure, Auvik can save us a lot of time because it can remotely give us a picture of where the communications have stopped in an environment. It gives us the opportunity to put the eyes of a more senior team member on it, someone who is more experienced in networking, to assist somebody who is onsite to determine where the problem is likely to be occurring so that they can solve it much quicker. Many hours are saved for a higher-tier technician because they don't have to be physically onsite. They can use this utility to assist somebody who is there and helps reduce our MTTR.

Another benefit is the reduction in time spent doing repetitive or low-priority tasks, thanks to the automation. By also alerting us when an issue has self-resolved, it saves us the time of triaging an issue when it's not necessary to investigate it. It's helped us be more proactive, and at the same time, has given us an overview of things that have self-resolved.

The visibility we get is vital to my team. Any type of clarity, communication—even background monitoring—are all important. There are a lot of other tools, including SIEM and monitoring tools for networking, that are more advanced and have a better outlook on what's going on. But all the communication, information, and metrics are important for us to get a better picture, even when we're looking back to try to figure out client stability and hardware needs.

And Auvik has probably had an effect on our IT team's availability by helping us know about a client's problem and enabling a proactive approach to resolving it. If, for example, something is going up and down, up and down, we will get an indication of that via the alert system and the way it notifies our ticketing system, giving us trends. That gives us the opportunity to be proactive because we can resolve a problem before it becomes a complete outage.

When you have the alerting set up properly and you have the integration set up properly with a ticketing system, the end result is that, if you have a service desk triage team to determine who gets assigned a ticket based on the criticality of the situation, everything works together. The alerts notify us by creating a ticket. A ticket is then triaged by my service desk team, and they send it to a responding team. Human interaction is necessary in our design, but it does help that Auvik has a lot of automation in it.

Port mapping is probably the most vital purpose that I use it for. My team has a lot of different needs and they will use it for monitoring server performance issues and the like. But the most important functionality for me, over the years, has been port mapping when I'm trying to figure out where a network has stopped responding.

And as an MSP, we have an overall client management portal through Auvik, so we can get to everything from one spot. That's important when we are looking at solutions for clients, giving us some sort of unified reporting and access to clientele.

It's also pretty good when it comes to visualizing network topology if you take the time to manually make sure the access to individual hardware is configured. On an automated level, it helps to some degree, even for sites that are not fully configured or maintained. It's pretty helpful. And from an experienced-networking-engineer standpoint, the intuitiveness of the visibility is pretty good. From what I've seen from my entry-level technicians, their first response is that it's a bit confusing. But I don't think this is really an entry-level program.

It requires a lot of hands-on maintenance when it comes to cleanup. That's probably the biggest problem I've had because I don't have a dedicated resource to manually clean up stale records. I have a customer where it shows 4,000 devices because of the duplication of devices that I have to clean up.

I have recently found that the way that they bill, based on what they detect and what you're managing, is not self-cleaning. It requires that somebody intervene to resolve that. I'm a little challenged with the cleanup of devices for a client and the need to manually maintain it. A lot of manual cleanup is necessary.

We have been using Auvik for over five years.

I don't think I've had any outages with Auvik. I have to give it a 10 out of 10 for stability.

It has the ability to scale, but with the number of billable and managed products in mind, and the fact that it takes so much manual cleanup to get it properly situated for a larger client, I would knock the scalability down to about a seven out of 10. We have to manually figure out the billable devices and manually clean up configurations all the time, making it less scalable.

We deploy it to any client that has advanced networking. If they have multiple sites, that's where the design is most effective: larger clients that have multiple sites, even a dozen sites. We utilize it for networking that has switched stacks or multiple locations.

The communication with their technical support has been pretty solid. They usually respond quickly.

Positive

When it comes down to it, sometimes we require direct access to networks. We used other utilities like N-able products. Other types of programs like that would be useful. Otherwise, you're doing port scanning, either from the switches themselves or from third-party utilities on individual sites, from whatever server or access you have to the site. It's much better in that respect.

Prior to N-able, we used basic utilities, launched individually at customer locations, such as Nmap and Wireshark, where we were looking for network activity and details. All of them were manual applications that were installed and run at the time of need, instead of automated reporting.

I don't know why we moved to Auvik specifically, but we review products regularly. We probably had a presentation by the vendor and then there was agreement that it was the best way to move forward. But we utilize it at the same time that we use many other products for network monitoring.

If Auvik is properly manually managed by my team, there is value from it. If it's just left to run and not manually configured, monitored, or adjusted, then we don't see value from it.

From a client perspective, pricing is always an issue. Nobody wants to pay more than necessary. You need to be aware of the number of billable managed products, because they will greatly increase the cost of Auvik, based on your clientele and what you're managing.

I don't think pricing and licensing are communicated well by the Auvik team, as far as billable products go, until you get the bill. Once you get the bill and you realize you're being monitored for a bunch of things you didn't necessarily want to manage or control, you then have to take the time to manually reduce those managed products so that they're not part of your cost. It's clunky and not quite what I had hoped for.

Overall, I think it's been much better than other utilities I've used previously as far as giving me an overview of switch stacks, switch connectivity, and access to networking.

Maintenance is very manual. It's not the agents that require installation updates, it's the general interface. The configurations, or the inventory, have to be cleaned up manually and that's a lot of work.

My advice would be to keep an eye on billable products, most importantly, and be prepared to assign a resource who is dedicated to cleanup and configuration.

We are using it for more visibility on our network devices.

It did highlight a few things in the very beginning. When we were in the trial, it highlighted some misconfigurations, some of which were quite important to fix immediately. It has brought us to a better place from that perspective. There is comfort in knowing that there is something watching the devices. If a site was to go down, or something was to stop working, or someone plugged in something incorrectly where they shouldn't be, we would be notified, and then we could figure out how to fix it straight away, whereas before, we would be in the dark. We didn't have visibility on that before.

It provides a single integrated platform, which is very important because it saves time and it gets to the point very quickly. If there is something that's not quite right, we can find it and figure out a path to resolution.

It's very good for visualizing the network mapping and topology for our organization. It's really helpful. We do need network diagrams to be accurate and up-to-date for certain accreditations that we have. As we are still in our infancy with the product, with the diagrams that we've got, we do need to do a little bit of work. They are very detailed. They do show the connectivity parts, and once I tighten them up, they'd be sufficient for us to use for our audit purposes. They're good.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is pretty good. They are quite intuitive. It gives you the option to drill down into certain sites and see their connectivity and see what goes where. It's pretty good, especially when you get stuck into the filters and you start adding devices and adding different bits and pieces. It works well.

We've got various sites across the country. We aren't global, but in the UK, we've got various sites. It's very helpful to see the topology and what's going on in our other sites as well, whereas before, we had little to no visibility. This visibility is very important.

It helps keep device inventories up-to-date. It has saved time when it comes to us having audits and interrogations.

The alerting has been really useful. The integration with other vendors, not just using their SNMP feature, but the actual integration to other cloud-based solutions is also valuable. We use Cisco Meraki, and integration into that has been very helpful.

It's very important that it's user-friendly and easy to understand. They've got quite a good knowledge base as well. Their resource center is pretty helpful. I had to go there a couple of times.

The deployment could be better. It's something that we've done recently. Auvik uses something called a collector, and I added a collector to our main site. I only added it to the main site, but when it came to adding additional sites because this was in the testing phase, I had to reconfigure that collector. It wasn't overly clear about how to do that and how to share. They call it sharing a collector. I had to mess around a bit to reconfigure that collector and add some new sites. I originally set Auvik up as a single site and put the credentials. We share the credentials across the other sites as well. I did the credentials onto our headquarters, and then I realized that I could have added the credentials at the very top level or the organizational level. I had to do a bit of reconfiguring to move the credentials over, and then it scanned the device again to make sure they were the right credentials. So, reconfiguring was a little bit of a pain. In the initial setup phase, if it was described a bit better that if you use the same credentials, you can put them here instead of at the site level, that would've been quite beneficial. They could also mention that you can set your collector up as a shared collector from the very beginning. It could be that it does that, and I just missed that step. If that's not there, then just the description as to what it could do and how it would benefit, instead of having to retrospectively change it, would be useful.

There should be a slightly clearer understanding of how devices are charged. We integrated the Meraki system, and certain devices are chargeable and certain devices aren't chargeable. It would be quite useful to have some kind of message saying, "Right, we've discovered these devices on Meraki. Once you are monitoring them, you will be charged this per device, and there'll be an uplift of your billing every month." 

I have been using Auvik for a couple of months.

Although I haven't taken too much notice of these emails, I have received a fair few in our short period of being with Auvik that describe system outages and maintenance windows and changes. I was a bit surprised at how many I've had, but every time I've wanted to use it, it has been there. It's nice that they email to say that there are potential issues, but there seem to have been a fair few. The downtime hasn't affected us directly, but it potentially has been a fair bit.

It appears to be very scalable. In terms of usage, it spans the whole company's infrastructure. We've got five locations. It spans across all of those and most of the subnets at those locations as well. There are some irrelevant devices that don't need to be monitored there, but we have Cisco switches, and we have Meraki firewalls and wireless access points. We have also got some Polycom and Yealink desk phones that it monitors. It monitors our HP printers, and we've got some Lexmark printers. We monitor those across the sites, and obviously, we've got all of our end-user devices. So, we've got phones, laptops, and a whole mixture of tech that is connected to the end.

We are looking at expanding one of our warehouses to have a lot more infrastructure inside it. Its usage will be expanded. In terms of users, we've only two users who log into the dashboard.

It was pretty good. I only got in touch with them once about the collector we put in. They were pretty helpful. I'm happy to give them a 10 out of 10. They got to the point and helped me out.

Positive

We used PRTG, but it was decommissioned. It was only a free version. 

The initial setup was straightforward to add the single site, but when I wanted to change that collector to point at multiple sites and move the configuration of the credentials over to the top level, that was a bit of an arduous task.

We implemented Auvik out of the box. It took about an hour after the collector was implemented before our network mapping started to populate. I had to authorize the networks that it was detecting, and it took about an hour.

Overall, the deployment probably spanned over a couple of weeks. If I had dedicated time for it, it probably would've taken only a day or so to add all our sites and get everything as it should be.

In terms of the implementation strategy, there wasn't too much of a strategy because it was a trial that we then continued onward. We didn't really have too much of a strategy devised.

I deployed it myself. For maintenance, there is just our team, which includes me and my colleague. Maintenance is required only when we have changes on our network.

Personally, I have seen an ROI, but I am not sure if the decision holders who deal with spending money have seen that yet because it has not highlighted any issues. It has not had that value in their eyes. It will probably show its value when it highlights what's gone wrong and how quickly it could be repaired due to the information that it provides.

In terms of time savings as compared to our previous platform, the platforms that we used in the past were decommissioned. We were looking at finding alternatives, which is when Auvik came around. I'm not so sure it has had a chance to save too much time just yet because it has not highlighted anything that needs to be repaired. I can imagine it being a great time saver should something go wrong, but because we are only in our early stages of use, we've not been able to benefit from its fault finding so much just yet.

We have not yet seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR) because we've not had any problems.

Auvik has got quite a unique pricing model where you can spin up and spin down devices monthly. Obviously, there's the option to have a yearly commitment, but you can add different tiers of monitoring on devices. There are lots of bolt-ons and bits and pieces that you can choose to have. You can slim it down to something very cheap every month, or you can spin it up to whatever the requirements are, whereas others are a bit more finicky to set up and understand the billing.

The pricing could be tiered so that you get a discount for more devices. We're fairly early on in the billing process, but it could be slightly cheaper.

When we first signed up, it wasn't overly clear in terms of the devices that were chargeable. They seemed to be on the performance plan for some reason, as opposed to essentials, which had a higher tier of cost. So, I had it switched down to essentials. We use Meraki, and we also use another product called Cisco Umbrella. So, there are some aspects that we already have in other products that are a bit more detailed. I don't need additional functions, such as NetFlow, because we got Meraki Firewall, and we use Cisco Umbrella and all of their devices. We've already got the visibility that Auvik has, and we didn't need that portion of the billing. So, it cost a bit more initially because we were on this performance plan.

We did look into other products, but we didn't do a trial of them. I can't remember the name, but there were a few open-source products that we were considering for which we would have needed servers and other bits and pieces. Auvik being cloud-based was very appealing because we are very cloud-first. We did the test, and we liked it. So, we decided to carry on.

I would advise giving it the time it deserves to set it up correctly. Make sure that you are not preoccupied with other things. It doesn't take a lot of time, but just make sure that you aren't doing other things, and then you'll get it right the first time.

It's pretty straightforward. It takes a little bit of concentration. It's not something you could just set up in a rush. You would need to make sure that you're doing everything properly and giving it the attention it deserves, which sometimes I struggle to do because I multitask quite a bit.

It hasn't yet helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, but I can see it being able to do that. Similarly, its automation hasn't yet had an effect on our IT team's availability.

Comparing Auvik’s cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, I personally don't see any downside to it being in the cloud as opposed to being on-prem. It has security for logging in, and it's normally always available. It's easy to spin up collectors that will talk out to the cloud. You still have a small on-prem application, but the whole infrastructure, the system, and the database are all living in the cloud, which really helps. Personally, I find it brilliant. It's great having a cloud-based solution that is powerful, like this one.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use Auvik as a dashboard in our service desk department to monitor the network status of our clients, as it helps us with real-time connectivity. We use the solution for our service desk and applications and infrastructure team, including all the managers, so we have it across almost the entire technical support team.

Auvik improved our monitoring and awareness of our networks and helped us be more proactive in dealing with issues as a company. It gives us a clear understanding of what's happening on networks and what goes wrong, and the solution provides detailed data about events.

The solution helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, which saves us a considerable number of hours between all our clients.  

The product positively impacts our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally. We have more awareness of our networks, a visual representation to aid us, and more detailed information when something goes wrong.  

Auvik increased our IT team's availability through automation, especially around alerting. Previously, it could take 15 minutes to figure out what was happening with a downed device, but Auvik detects an issue and automatically alerts us through the ticketing system. It tells us exactly why a particular switch has gone down or when a specific firewall loses connectivity. We know exactly what the problem is right away, which saves us a lot of time.  

Auvik helps keep our device inventories up-to-date, which saves us a lot of time because it provides us with serial numbers, IPs, and other device information which we would previously have had to find ourselves. It helps with firewalls, access points, and servers; all the device data is kept up-to-date in the background, and that's excellent. For a new client for whom we haven't documented any devices yet, that's 15 minutes saved per ticket or logged device, which adds to a significant time-saving. 

The solution provides detailed device information, including serial numbers, configurations, IP, warranty status, and when the device was purchased. This is very helpful when it comes to replacing old devices.

The visual layout of the network provided by the product is a nice feature, almost like a family tree for the network.

I'm impressed by the way Auvik helps visualize the network mapping/topology, which is one of the features I like most. It isn't 100% accurate, but it helps us understand the network by displaying different components with different icons, like APs, machines, switches, and servers, and the connections between them.  

Auvik allows us to do SNMP checks and load separate accounts on all the devices. 

The monitoring is excellent because it helps us stay proactive all the time. 

Using Auvik's monitoring and management functions is straightforward and comfortable, and we have it integrated with our billing system. If a device on the system goes down, has an alert, or packet loss, a ticket is automatically logged into our ticketing system, which is very convenient. The management side takes a little getting used to, but with training and after a few days of experience with the product, it isn't too tricky, so it's pretty user-friendly. 

Automatic configuration backups would be an excellent feature for network devices and access points. The solution could take a backup of the configurations weekly and store that, which would be very nice.

We have been using the solution for three to four months. 

The solution is very stable; we didn't have any issues with the dashboard, ticket logging, or anything like that. 

The deployment team manage the scalability, so I don't know about that. 

We have about 40 end users in total. 

I never encountered any issues requiring a ticket to technical support.

We previously used PRTG, and it wasn't ideal. I don't remember precisely why, but it was either too expensive or didn't give us the desired results, so we switched to Auvik.

I wasn't involved in the deployment, but our applications and infrastructure team found it simple enough, and they like the solution too. From my perspective, it didn't look like a complex process; it seemed seamless.

I don't work in the finance department, so I'm not familiar with the pricing details; however, I know some clients declined Auvik due to the pricing, so they found it expensive. Other clients have adopted it, so they think it's worth the cost.

We evaluated another solution I don't remember the name of, but Auvik was on the cards for quite some time, so we ended up going with it. 

I rate Auvik eight out of ten.

I advise those considering Auvik to thoroughly read through the alerts if they have a ticket, and they'll know what the issue is.

As we are early in our integration with the solution, we have yet to integrate with much, just our ticketing and billing system.

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik.