As an IT company, we rely on Auvik, a network monitoring tool, to support our many clients. We install an Auvik agent on their networks, which then provides real-time monitoring. This allows us to be alerted of any issues, like a downed server, so we can promptly investigate and resolve the problem.
The interface is straightforward.
After familiarizing myself with Auvik, I could see the many benefits it offered.
Auvik empowered our entry-level technicians to resolve more tickets independently. It complements our existing internal monitoring tool. While the existing tool might initially flag issues like a server outage, Auvik provides additional insights for our technicians, helping them verify the information and identify potential false positives. This allows them to tackle problems more effectively without needing to escalate to senior staff.
Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution.
The most valuable feature is the alerting system. This ensures we're notified immediately of critical events, such as a server failure, allowing for a swift response and minimizing downtime.
I find the network map confusing and believe it could be improved by simplifying its layout or using clearer visuals.
The quality of technical support varies greatly. Some representatives are very helpful, while others are less so.
I have been using Auvik Network Management for three years.
There have been one or two instances where the Auvik website or portal seemed to be unavailable, but the actual appliances themselves seemed to be functioning normally. Overall, Auvik has been stable.
Auvik Network Management is scalable.
The technical support experience can be inconsistent. Sometimes we connect with fantastic technicians who solve our problems quickly. The customer service representatives are always friendly and supportive. However, occasionally we encounter technicians who suggest basic troubleshooting steps I've already attempted, like restarting or pinging. In these situations, I prefer immediate escalation. Thankfully, the escalation process through chat is usually swift, and the escalated representatives are very effective.
Neutral
While the initial deployment is straightforward, the overall deployment time will vary depending on our chosen option. On Windows machines, the process takes just five minutes, while Linux machines require approximately 20 minutes.
I start with a pre-configured Auvik collector packaged as an OVA file. I upload this file to VMware to deploy the collector. Once deployed, I SSH into the Linux machine and execute the necessary commands to update its firmware to the latest version. This completes the deployment process.
The implementation is completed in-house.
I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.
No maintenance is required.
I recommend spending some time familiarizing yourself with the portal. Once you're inside, you'll find it to be quite intuitive.
We are a small MSP and we use Auvik Network Management to monitor the networks of our clients.
The network map is essential – without it, we'd be lost quickly. Fortunately, it provides us with a convenient and near real-time view of the system, allowing for optimal monitoring.
The Auvik network map offers complete visibility of all devices where we have established credentials.
We started to see the benefits of Auvik as soon as we added an Auvik specialist to our team.
Auvik has helped reduce our mean time to resolution. It is now almost immediate. When a cluster goes down, we receive an alert almost immediately.
The most valuable feature of Auvik is the comprehensive network management it provides. While we initially had someone install it for our client, it wasn't set up correctly. Thankfully, our new Auvik specialist came in, cleaned everything up, and configured it properly. Now, we have clear visibility into our network, including breakdowns of VLANs, device locations, and communication paths. We even discovered a built-in GUI traceroute tool that helps us pinpoint network bottlenecks with ease.
The interface could be more user-friendly for getting to our clients. While the overall experience is positive, there's room for improvement. The main client pages load slowly, but interestingly, navigating through drop-down menus before reaching the main page is faster. Scheduling maintenance would be much easier if there was a dedicated section readily visible on each client's main page.
I have been using Auvik Network Management for one and a half years.
Auvik Network Management is stable.
Auvik Network Management is scalable.
We transitioned from SolarWinds Orion to Auvik Network Management due to its wider range of features. Beyond core functionalities, Auvik provides backup and restore options for configurations, and to our delight, we recently discovered the ability to remotely manage firewalls directly through the platform, eliminating the need for on-site VPN access.
I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.
We maintain the server we host Auvik on.
I recommend Auvik Network Management. Once you get to know the solution, you'll be able to utilize its full potential.
Auvik is a monitoring solution for our infrastructure. We needed a tool to monitor the network, tell us when something is down, notify us when resources are low, and functions like that.
Auvik has helped us become proactive rather than reactive. We immediately know when something is down, so we're not finding out from users calling to complain. Auvik has made it easier to get the information we need. It's a significant improvement over our previous solution, which was completely useless.
It automates tasks like obtaining the switch configs. I no longer need to go into the switches and manually download the configs, then save them in a certain spot. It's a time saver. The configs are automatically updated and saved in the cloud, so if something were to happen on-prem, we can log into that portal from anywhere and get our configs back.
It's a great solution for that. We don't have to worry about what happens if we get wiped out. We'll always have our switch configs in the cloud. It also helps keep our device inventories updated because it's automatically scanning, but it hasn't saved us much time because we're fairly small.
It's easy to get the information I need. I don't need to hunt for it or run queries to get it. It's fairly important to have a single interface. I don't want to check multiple places to see what's going on in my infrastructure.
When credentials are rejected, I'd like to get a little information about why in the error message.
We've been using Auvik for nearly two months.
Auvik is stable. It's good.
We previously used OpenManage Network Manager from Dell EMC, but we got rid of it because it was too large and cumbersome to utilize effectively. It was pretty awful. It was on-premise and unwieldy. Auvik's cloud-based solution has been great.
Setting up Auvik was a piece of cake. This was an absolute breeze to set up compared to my last solution. We had the last solution for three years, and I don't think it was fully set up. With Auvik, I installed the collector, pointed it at my networks, and away it went. There was nothing to it. The network map started to populate in less than an hour. It was probably less than 20 minutes.
Auvik is fair compared to LogicMonitor, which I used before OMNM. I think it's a good price.
We looked at LogicMonitor. It was super pricey and wasn't as good of a fit as Auvik. Auvik does more for less money. Auvik has all the features that LogicMonitor has for half the cost.
I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. It has been fantastic so far. I recommend Auvik for its ease of use and the information that you can get out of it. The price point is also fantastic.
We use it mostly for monitoring. Also, we're pretty big on getting device configs from it, but I don't know if we have used any of those configurations to roll anything back. For a lot of our network equipment, whenever you update the firmware, part of the feature of updating it is that it backs that up automatically for us.
There are around 20 or more clients in Auvik that we monitor. Mostly, it's just for alerts if things go down, but with firewalls, we specifically have alerts that monitor memory because we have a problem with a couple of firewalls that go into the conserve mode if their memory hits a certain percentage. It's a huge part of our monitoring. Half or more of the alerts that come in, come in through Auvik.
It has made monitoring a lot easier. It has made finding devices and charting network maps for onboarding companies easier. If you are a tech and looking at a company for the first time, you can just look at the network map and quickly get an understanding of how big it is, how complicated it is, how many network tunnels there are, and what's the main firewall or the center of the network stack. It's super easy to quickly acclimate to a new network and troubleshoot up or down a network stack. I find that fantastic.
Being able to visualize the network mapping/topology for the organization is its best feature. It's very reliable. It'll more likely add a device that's not important than it will miss an important device. It does it so quickly and automatically, and not a lot of time is spent managing the network map. Every once in a while, once or twice a year, there'll be an alert, and we investigate it and we find out that it's just an obsolete device that was never removed from the map. So, you just delete the device. Other than that, it takes care of itself. It's fantastic. I don't have a lot of criticisms of it other than just keeping it up.
It's very intuitive when it comes to network visualizations. It is very easy to pick up, and it's great that there's a little key there that always tells you exactly how it's connected. It was probably the easiest thing to learn. If you aren't accustomed to Auvik, you can just look at it for 5 or 10 minutes, and you can absorb it. You're then good to go. You can very quickly and easily understand what you're looking at.
It has helped reduce repetitive and low-priority tasks through automation. It takes a lot of tweaking to get the alerts just right, but a lot of the repetitive tasks that we do have been automated. They've been automated for a long time, and they exist in very niche parts of our business that aren't really related to Auvik. The reduction is hard to measure, but it's a good percentage. In terms of the after-hours calls, with the emergency issues coming in, after two or three guys who set up Auvik went through the alerts and optimized it, with the number of things that took care of themselves and alerts that took care of themselves, we started getting fewer calls. Percentage-wise, there is a 20% or 30% reduction. It wasn't a huge chunk at the beginning, but it was noticeable once they got everything ironed out with Auvik.
It has affected our IT team's visibility into remote and distributed networks globally. We're a service provider. We manage a lot of networks. They range from a single network stack to multiple locations with multiple distribution frames that are all tunneled into each other. Before Auvik, it was pretty difficult to get an idea of how something was set up because we were just looking at configurations and talking to other people. It took a lot of experience to get used to a single client. Now, when everything is set up, if we want to understand the network, we just go into Auvik, and we can see the whole network.
It's a big part of our networking and monitoring. I'm in Auvik a couple of times a week. I don't specialize in networking, but I still end up looking at Auvik a couple of times a week to solve something, or I have to work on an alert that came specifically from Auvik, and I have to investigate. Aside from the UPS battery alert issue, which is obnoxious, most alerts are pretty easy to understand, easy to follow up on, and easy to resolve.
It has had an effect on our IT team’s availability. It makes the work of the IT team easier. We spend less time troubleshooting, and we are more available to work on other things. It has saved a considerable amount of time. We only have one network engineer, but everyone else is capable of working on networks. Auvik has made it easy enough to point to the issue. So, the network engineer can just focus on the really important and really intensive things, and everyone else can work on the intermediate things by using Auvik. Previously, it would take twice as much time for somebody like me to figure out a network problem.
It's very easy to delegate low-level tasks to junior staff. The API is integrated with ConnectWise. So, the alert comes in, and the dispatcher lets everybody know, and then any of the techs here can work on the alerts. With the information that we have in Auvik, we're able to very quickly assess the first thing that we need to do. We almost always get it resolved in time unless it's an ISP issue.
I really like the network map. It's probably the most useful feature because we have monitoring set up in other systems too, but seeing what's connected to what and where it is makes a lot of things a lot easier to troubleshoot.
The uptime and downtime information is valuable. It is pretty reliable to know when something goes down.
I find it pretty easy to use the monitoring and management function of Auvik. I passed the test on the first try, and it's all very intuitive. I like the menus, and it's pretty easy to get through things. There are some things that are a little bit more complicated, but there was nothing I wasn't able to figure out. Rarely, I would have to reach out and ask somebody to show me how to find something in Auvik or how it works. In terms of accessibility or how easy it is to get into it, it's pretty easy. Even setting up devices for configuration polling and SNMP is pretty easy.
When it comes to monitoring, Auvik provides a single integrated platform, but I feel it could do more things. If it could facilitate device upgrades, that would be great.
It also has a feature where it passes alerts along. So, a device will have an alert, and then Auvik will pick it up, and then the API will create a ticket through Auvik, but the alert will be very vague. The one with which I had the biggest problem, more than anything else, is the alert specific to a UPS. There is a specific alert when a UPS's battery hits five years old, which means it needs to be replaced regardless of whether it's alerting or not, but the way the Auvik finds the UPS and gets the alert makes it almost impossible to tell which UPS it is. If the UPS has a web portal or a web GUI that I could go into and take a look at the battery, life is great, but we had one tenant where all the UPSs didn't have that. It took forever to figure out which one had a battery that we had to replace. Its monitoring is great, but the integrations could be better.
Overall, it hasn't provided a single integrated platform for us. We still have to use other tools to shore up where Auvik is lacking. For the most part, Auvik helps keep device inventories up to date, but it's not perfect. One of my least favorite things is that people bring in devices, their devices get retired, and then they just go off. A lot of times, we wouldn't know if it is something that we need to get back online as soon as possible, or if it's something that just went down. There were times when little switches that are under people's desks would be mislabeled with critical network infrastructure. Someone kicked a switch or something like that, and it went offline. We got the alert, and we wondered where it is and how could we get it back online. We called the company, and they were just like, "Oh! It's this little thing in here. Just plug it back in." It was just used for the printer. There would also be devices that were being retired, but the service desk or other teams wouldn't know about it. They would spend half an hour trying to figure out what was going on. So, even though it takes care of the inventory, there is a small amount of auditing that we still have to do. That's normally done because we're getting a lot of false positives, which probably is a good thing. It's better to get a false positive than for it to not alert when something important has gone down.
It's as good as anything else out there. It isn't better or worse than the systems that we already have in place. We don't use it for device inventory because we have other systems that keep track of devices and configurations. When I think of device inventory and Auvik, it is to know whether something that's currently online needs to be online. I would never look at Auvik to determine how many computers are currently at a location. I have two other systems that already do that for me, and they do a better job than Auvik. For the systems that we use, we have agents on computers. So, they give us an enormous amount of information about computers and things that are available at a location, or just an asset list for a client. Things that we can do remotely through them are pretty incredible. If Auvik wanted to be competitive, they would have to get into an area their competitors or the other companies do in terms of putting agents on things. That's a whole different thing than just SNMP polling.
We started Auvik at the beginning of 2020 because I remember taking the Auvik test while working remotely during COVID.
Their support is fantastic. If I have a problem with Auvik, I just open up a chat to interact with somebody, and they get to me in a minute or two. They almost always get it resolved just through chat. I don't remember ever having to call Auvik.
The central services people tell me that Auvik has quarterly reviews with our company. So, they follow up with us all the time.
I would rate their customer service a 10 out of 10. They get to me immediately, and they always help me solve the problem, and they're always nice. I've probably talked to the same three guys every time.
Positive
We were using Audit API, which was pretty useful, but they were mostly Windows machines that had our agent servers and workstations. So, a server workstation would go down, but all you would know is that the server is down, or the whole site is down. We would have to do a lot of digging on our own to piece together:
We definitely tried to make the Audit API work, but the consensus was we needed something better to get these things done faster so that we weren't spending so much time during discovery especially, or we weren't spending so much time chasing alerts after hours.
Once we got Auvik, that became way easier. Instead of having to dig to figure out how it's set up, we could immediately look at Auvik and determine what the first step needs to be. It has cut off a huge amount of discovery. We have so many clients, and you have to be here for a long time before you know everybody, and even then, some clients don't really have problems. You're only looking at them a couple of times a year. So, if you have a great memory, good on you, but Auvik really made it a lot easier for service desk techs. We're not in the network all the time, but we troubleshoot networks frequently enough, and it's important that we are able to do this quickly and correctly.
For us, it's better that it's a cloud-based solution. I don't know about other companies, but we're remote to almost all of our clients. So, it's all cloud.
I did a lot when it comes to getting configuration polling working for firewalls, but other than that, I haven't been a part of its initial setup. The central services and networking teams got it set up, and then once it was ready, the techs like myself took the Auvik test. Once we passed, there was some tedious work that needed to be done at first setting up SNMP on networking equipment and making sure configuration polling was working, but that was about it.
It did take a while to set up Auvik, but that's because we have a lot of companies that we monitor. Everything was running smoothly within about six months we started working with it.
We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. It has cut down after-hours support. We're spending less time in the middle of the night trying to figure out why a network is gone so that we'll be up in the morning by the time people arrive for work. That was just huge for us. There are fewer tickets on the board during the day, or we can resolve the tickets we get faster.
We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution. In my experience, it has just cut that in half. We can just look at Auvik, and we know what a network stack looks like. We can begin planning how we want to approach the problem.
I don't know anything about its pricing, but I would say Auvik is worth it.
I would rate it a 9 out of 10. It works superbly. It has made my job a lot easier. It made me understand networks so much better and more quickly too. I love Auvik, but they could do more with integrations. If we could just do everything through Auvik, such as push firmware through Auvik, and if Auvik was better at telling me which UPS has a battery that needs to be replaced, I would give it a 10 out of 10.
We are using it for monitoring and troubleshooting. It is cloud-based, but the collectors always have to be on-premise. We must be using its latest version.
It automatically updates your network topology, which has made any kind of troubleshooting or planning way more efficient. To make sure that everything is up for you, every 15 seconds, it checks for a device to be online and any network element to be up or down, and every minute, it checks for your other devices, such as your PCs or IP phones. It does a subnet scan every 600 seconds to see if thresholds are being pegged or have fallen off in certain levels. If you don't want to have so much ping traffic on your network, you can change that to whatever value you want. All that is customizable. It kind of becomes something you depend on when you're looking for a device. If I want to find out where a device is plugged in specifically, Auvik is the first place where I would go to check if I can see it there. Earlier, if I'm looking to see where a device is, I used to check my windows DHCP server and look for an odd or new IP address that had appeared. In Auvik, I can filter the map based on a device, subnet, or VLAN, or I can see all devices that are plugged into a specific switch, which is really convenient.
It has significantly decreased our mean time to resolution. In the past, sometimes, it took us a long time to come to the conclusion that this is the problem. When trying to go through the troubleshooting steps to know what the problem is, when Auvik has that information for me, troubleshooting is significantly quicker. I don't have to go through an entire department and look at their connections to see how they're impacted and then decide that everything they have in common is this switch. Auvik is able to tell me that this switch isn't online anymore. I can then say that we have a problem with a switch, and we're working on it to kind of calm folks down.
TrafficInsights dashboard is one of the first things that I log into every day in Auvik. Before going with Auvik, I tried a different solution for it, and that solution was just terrible in comparison. It only permitted five interfaces for traffic insights, and if you wanted more than five interfaces, it costed more money. It was just completely unreasonable. Auvik doesn't limit you on the number of interfaces for traffic insights. I get a better idea of the type of traffic on the network through Auvik than anywhere else. I can look at the type of traffic through my firewall monitoring, but I'd have to go a lot deeper into the protocols and ports that are being used just to see what's going on in the network.
With Auvik, if I look at traffic insights, I can get a good graph of how much traffic is happening at specific times a day. I can lay out the type of traffic and break it down based on the applications. I can then filter from there. If I'm seeing that we have a lot more web traffic or media streaming traffic, I can look a little bit deeper and see the exact applications, such as Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok. I can then see who is watching Netflix. It makes it a whole lot quicker than watching my firewall because I'd have to filter by a domain or IP address to come to the conclusion that someone is watching Netflix on the network. In Auvik, based on the filter, I can get all devices involved with that conversation to Netflix, which is a really nice feature. The other menus within TrafficInsights allow you to keep it all relative, so you're not resetting or recreating those filters. I can just filter based on Netflix and see who are the top users. I can see who is using Netflix and on which laptop they are using it.
The TrafficInsights feature helps in improving our overall network performance. It allows for me to look at a month's worth of time, and then I get an idea of what's the normal baseline. It helps me in getting a good baseline for expected backups because I can see when the backups are happening and how much traffic is related to backups. So, I can see when things are normal or abnormal. For example, when media streams are a little high, that's abnormal, so I will look into it a little bit deeper. It helps with this kind of stuff, and if there is any kind of impact on overall throughput for other users, I get to nip it in the bud right away, which is valuable.
The out-of-the-box device configuration backups save time and money too. With Auvik, I can see the configurations even if I have them saved on the file server or something like that. If I got a protected share that has configuration backups, being able to deploy that configuration or even save that configuration as a text file from Auvik is a time-saver. I am not paying for the other product any longer just because Auvik handles that. Previously, I would have been paying for both. If Auvik couldn't do that, I'd have to pay for two products, so it saves money, but more importantly, it saves time. I don't have to spend so much time going switch by switch.
The best feature is the support access. Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom, you push it, and you get connected with a support agent. They can see your internet. They help you out, work with you, and answer your questions right there. I don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and try to explain anything, which is a great feature. I can get someone in less than a minute, which is really helpful.
It is very simple. It is very easy to learn how to navigate, and their knowledge base is a good resource.
It is an SNMP-based platform. It can communicate with almost any device that you're trying to monitor, such as a switch or a router, through SNMP. If you're trying to monitor Windows machines, it uses WMI. It gives you a good layout of the sensors for a lot of devices. It can generate alerts based on if the fans are working, CPU is hot or highly utilized, or RAM is highly utilized.
The Syslog feature is also really valuable. I don't have to go into each individual box, so I have it all centralized. Everything is in one pane of glass. When I first started using Auvik, they didn't have the Syslog fully deployed. It was a beta. Now, it is fully deployed, and it is a great feature. Auvik really relies on SNMP in order to give you good information about a device, but our IP phones, for instance, don't support SNMP. With a phone pointed towards Auvik for the Syslog info, I can see the stats within Auvik, whereas before, I would have to go into the phone server and the phone to get an idea of what's happening with that phone. So, if someone is telling me that his phone keeps restarting or has bad call quality, I can go to that phone's Syslog within Auvik because even the phone itself doesn't store that information. Our phones only show the last six reasons for a reboot, and if someone is saying that reboot is the issue, then that's not good enough. You want to look for a pattern. You want to look for what might be happening internally on the phone. For that, you would have to go into the phone server and then get down to those logs. If the log info is already sent to Auvik, I don't have to go into the phone server and then write up a command to filter it down to just this little tiny query here. I could just look at that device, access the log info, and get what I need, which is very valuable.
It also gives you a live or close-to-live topology map. So, you can get down to things. For example, if all of a sudden a machine is really slow during the day for someone, or they lose connectivity, you can check out the machine baseline by name or by IP. When it is on a switch, you can check the port it is on and get the logs on that switch to see if there are any errors being generated on that port. So, it is just a lot quicker than going into the switch's interface. You can get information on the device via Auvik without going into each device separately. You can get a log, but you can't do any configuration changes. You can just get information on the devices, and then if you see that you need to make a configuration change. If you want, you can also tunnel in through that or do it externally. The ability to launch a console session to your switch, router, or any device that you're monitoring (if that device supports it), or launch a browser session through Auvik to that device is a nice little feature they have. You can interface right there through that single pane of glass.
It backs up my configurations for me. For the routers, I have a cloud-based subscription, and it backs up my configurations every 30 days. So, I can see the changes that were made, and then I can do an A/B comparison of the configurations and identify exactly what was changed. I can even redeploy the configurations from within Auvik, which is pretty handy.
I liked the Teams integration that exists in Auvik. We have Office 365, and I can create a channel within Teams where my alerts from Auvik pop up in Teams so that I can see a feed of different alerts. I have a feed of different levels of alerts such as emergency, critical, warning, and informational that are generated in Auvik, and if I'm not viewing the tab in my browser that has Auvik, and they pop up as alerts in Teams on my desktop. I might have a ton of tabs open, and if I am not viewing the tab that has Auvik, these alerts will pop up in Teams, and that'll get my attention. It also has the ability to send a text alert. It is indirect, and even though it comes to you in SMS or MMS format, Auvik sends it to an email address, and you can get around by using your MMS email address based on your service provider. So, staying informed about the environment when I'm not directly looking is definitely a valuable resource for me.
One of the great things about Auvik is the shared collector mode, which is useful in an environment that has more than one physical location. We have 15 different locations, and I can have all of those locations pointing to one collector. So, all these locations are sharing this one collector, and I can get a map, which is way out on top of the map that you would see in Google maps, to see all my locations. I can see alerts on that map for any of those 15 locations. I can zoom in right there to the location, and from there, click on it. It is really handy.
They don't let you customize the dashboard, which is like the homepage of Auvik. There is one feature that I don't use that's on the dashboard, and it is for SSL VPN services. The way it is designed is that if you have a separate, dedicated SSL VPN appliance, they can see that. I'd rather not have that take up any space on my screen because it never is going to populate with any kind of information. I'd like to move some things around on the dashboard, but I can't do anything like that. I know that they don't plan on doing it, but if they could open the dashboard just a little bit and allow us to customize it a little bit, it would be incredibly helpful, but it is not something that I feel I'm truly missing.
I wish they did have a few more integrations, and I'm sure that they're going to have more coming down the line. It was last month when I had a meeting with them, and their goal is to just kind of make it as universal as possible. So, they take some customization features or limit some customization features just because they feel that if they make it something you can customize, it might make it less universal. You can use their integrations with other applications. It integrates with the popular RMM solutions, and that's great, but when you are viewing Auvik through that integration, there is no way for me to limit or control how Auvik sees a location. So, I can't just have it default to a certain view. If you're looking at a specific department, I can't have everything automatically filtered down to that specific department. I'd have to go through and add those filters for Auvik to do so.
Most of the issues that I have had are related to the dashboard and wanting a bit more customization available through the dashboard because that's where you'll spend most of your time. Auvik is on the dashboard, and you can create and save these filters, which is great, but if I were to filter the map by all switches, the information below doesn't reflect the filter. I have to select the device within the filter, and then it starts to show the results. I can then see the dashboard of that device. If I were to filter by switches, I would like my top device utilization to only show me switches from my alerts and anything related to my map filter. That was something I asked about in one of the meetings with Auvik last month, and I don't think they have any plan to expand the dashboard anytime soon or at all. So, that was a little bit of a letdown. So, I am adjusting my workflow to fit the product and its abilities, but it really makes sense to me to expand it over time within the TrafficInsights dashboard. If I filter by my access points, then it should only show me the information related to my filter.
Another limitation, which is probably still under customization, is related to the reporting features. It doesn't really give you the ability to customize reports, create reports, or schedule reports. Adding those kinds of elements to it would really take it over the edge. It has some built-in reporting, and you can generate a report based on just a few things. You can do 10 reports that are built-in, but you can't create a report, and you can't customize a report. You can export the reports. It is designed that way. I would like to be able to create and schedule some custom reports. There should be the ability to do a temporary report. For example, if I am monitoring one or multiple devices for a week and I had the map filter to these devices, I'd like to be able to just quickly generate a report to be able to see how this device communicates, or how these devices are communicating over the course of a week. Such a feature would be really good. Reporting is the main thing that you're looking for in a monitoring system, and Auvik falls short there.
I probably have to look through the knowledge base to see if it does exist, but I do not believe there is a way for me to set a threshold for certain types of traffic. For example, when media streaming gets to a certain percentage of network traffic, I get an alert. That's why I'm kind of in it all the time. It is one of the tabs that I have open, and then I just take a look and see what is a little high and then zoom in.
Auvik doesn't deploy firmware upgrades and things of that nature. I don't know what would be required to allow them to be able to handle firmware upgrades for all these different devices, but it is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors.
I have probably been using this solution for a little bit over a year.
It has been incredibly stable for me. They do maintenance just about every weekend for adding new features or just cleaning some bugs up.
The whole ability to add more locations is really impressive. I know that people can have multiple collectors, but for me, I just have one collector and 15 sites sending information to that one collector. I can expand if I need to add more devices at a location or add a new location entirely. I can even reduce, which is great.
When I first set up Auvik, during that trial, I was seeing everything from one site. After a discussion with the guys in support, they recommended that I basically change the mode of Auvik to be a shared collector and make the other locations sites. This way I can just look at one site at a time, or I can come to the main dashboard and see all the sites from a bird's eye view. I can just continue to expand or compress based on my needs and preferences.
Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom that you can click to connect with a support agent. You don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and explain anything. You can get someone in less than a minute.
They've been great. All of my questions have been answered, and any issue I've had related to a feature within Auvik has been resolved for the most part.
The other product that I was using was a product created by the manufacturers of the devices. It was something that I thought would be perfect for the devices, but it wasn't. Auvik is superior across the board in comparison to that device. The only thing that Auvik doesn't do, but the other device can do, is deploying firmware upgrades and things of that nature. It is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors. I was using a vendor product for certain devices, and it wasn't reliable and viable.
I was involved in the initial setup of Auvik at my location. It was straightforward, and I was surprised by how much information Auvik can give you. The way they deploy is the smartest way to deploy anything. You go through that trial period with them where you'll give it all the time to gather the information about your gear. When you're actually talking to the guys, they give you a demonstration of Auvik in your environment related to your gear and the information Auvik will use, which is very important.
Before we got down to the purchase, I wanted to see information related to the gear that I actually have, and that's important for anybody. I didn't want to see the hypotheticals of if we had a specific gear. Instead of deploying it in my environment with the belief that it is going to be great, and then realizing it is not compatible with this, I wanted to know that first, see it, and then decide whether or not that's going to be a deal-breaker. For example, I might get to know that Auvik is not going to show me information about the access points that I have because the manufacturer's access points don't have a feature that allows Auvik to see that information.
In terms of the duration, we gave it a weekend. There are different methods for using Auvik, and you can spin up a Linux box and install Auvik that way, or you can use their appliance. Based on your environment, they have their recommendations, and then you just let it sit for some time while you configure all your devices to communicate with Auvik. The setup configuration took me half a day. I had to make sure that I had the traffic all permitted through the firewall, the switches and routers were all set up to send information to Auvik, and SNMP communication was all good. After all that was set up, I just had to wait for Auvik to gather the information. I come in on Monday, and I saw all the information Auvik gathered about the network topology and other things over the weekend.
Comparing Auvik's setup time with other solutions, I haven't seen better. Auvik does the work for you. I spent half a day setting up the SNMP information and entering whatever credentials I needed to enter into Auvik for the WMI communication. After that point, you'd have to kind of trim it down. You have to say that I don't want to see the subnet because it'll scan everything. When you give it the information to look at your route, it'll be able to grab any route that your router can see. If you're not concerned with the public WiFi that you might provide and that your router might handle, you can just eliminate that from the map. You just say don't scan the network, and this way, you're only looking at the data that you want to see, which is really handy. So, in terms of the setup time, it is about how fast you can get into your devices and how quickly can you enter the credentials into the devices that you manage.
Its pricing is very reasonable. We had looked at other solutions where you pay based on the amount of traffic that was filtered through and analyzed. With Auvik, we pay by a billable device. For one of the locations I have, one network element would likely be a billable device. So, every billable device has a network element, but not every network element is a billable device. If I have a location that has 50 network elements, then maybe 30 of them are billable devices. PCs, VoIP phones, and access points are monitored at no charge.
You pay based on billable devices, and that is very reasonable. You can control that to a certain extent and make a device unmanaged, but you don't get the benefits of Auvik being able to collect all of the information to make it useful. It'll tell you that this is an unmanaged device. You might know it is a switch, but it is not giving you any switch information.
When you make a device managed, then it is a billable device. It is important to the whole cost of trying to replace your devices or expand your locations. You have to consider the cost of that switch. You have to think that if you are going to buy a switch, it is not just the price of this switch; it also becomes something that's billable in Auvik. Would you buy another switch, or would you replace the switch and buy a bigger switch? Auvik just continues to collect the data and continues to give you traffic insights, Syslog, and all other features that you want. It is worth it.
There was one other solution that was evaluated in terms of install, deploy, and configure. Other ones for which I had seen demonstrations weren't what I was looking for. They could do things similar to Auvik, but they weren't what I was looking for at the time.
When you're doing the trial, the trial is using your info. I would just say at least do the trial and see what it shows you and really explore all of the sub-menus. If you're looking for insight and alerting based on thresholds and health checks, it is definitely something worth looking at. It might take you some time to configure devices to communicate with Auvik, and then just let it do its thing and watch.
It is a little difficult to say whether Auvik helps us in putting out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. If you are at your computer and your switch goes down to which it is connected, you're going to know at the same time I get to know, but I will know what happened. That is the kind of fire that it helps me put out. When I'm not looking at Auvik or any kind of monitoring system, if your switch goes down, you would come up and tell me that you don't have internet. I won't know why you don't have internet until I go in and see that all people don't have internet, and that switch is offline, but Auvik will let me know if there is an outage right away.
I would rate Auvik a nine out of 10. The only thing that keeps it from being a 10 is just the lack of some customization in certain areas. That has really been the main limitation for me. It is not that big a deal, but that would just get it right to a perfect score. I find it very valuable in terms of how quickly you can set something like this up and how much information you can see within your network from a single pane of glass. I still open up my other monitoring tools that are built into the devices, but I don't really view them as much as I view my firewall monitoring in Auvik.
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.
We use Auvik as a network scanning tool so that we can detect devices that are connected to our office network. We can get information from those devices and track them down. It's a network monitoring and scanning tool, so we can detect rogue devices and network traffic as well. It's essential to see what's on our network.
Auvik provides a single integrated platform from a network monitoring perspective. Having a single integrated platform is important for our organization because we obviously don't want to check multiple systems.
It's deployed in a single location with multiple networks for different departments. There are 200 endpoints in our organization.
Credential management is the most valuable feature. It's helpful to have everything in one essential place. The traffic flow is also a valuable feature. I haven't been able to use it yet, but it's been demonstrated to me and looks very good.
It's easy to use the monitoring and management functions.
The user interface could be less cluttered. There's a lot going on, which is good because there's obviously a lot of information displayed. Sometimes I feel a little bit claustrophobic with the user interface. It can be confusing at times because there's so much going on. Once you know how to use it and navigate, it is easy to use.
I've used Auvik for two weeks.
From what I have seen, it's stable.
It scales very well, from what I can tell.
The setup is really easy. We implemented Auvik out of the box. It took 15 minutes to install the virtual appliance. We were able to start scanning, and it took 20 minutes to start retrieving information.
Auvik requires maintenance. The network appliance needs to be updated. Obviously, the credentials need to be updated whenever they change. It's a small amount of maintenance. We don't have to worry about it too much because it's cloud-based. The updates are simple, so it's really easy to maintain. You just log in, click a button, and it will update.
We looked at Lansweeper. I'm still in the process of evaluating other solutions.
I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten.
Auvik's cloud-based solution is easier to use compared to the on-premises network monitoring solutions. We don't have to maintain anything, which is nice.
My advice is to deploy Auvik wherever you can to get as much data as possible.
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.
