Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We're an MSP, so we function as the IT company for multiple clients, and we primarily use Auvik for monitoring and troubleshooting network issues. It's deployed across various locations, from small to medium-sized businesses, plus one school system.

Auvik improved our organization by allowing us to stay on top of issues with our clients. It alerts us in a timely manner and allows us to react proactively. In many cases, we get alerts that something is going on before the client realizes it.

The solution affected our IT team's global visibility into our remote and distributed networks, which is helpful. It's great because we can access the Auvik portal anywhere in the world. The visibility it provides is essential, especially for our technicians and engineers working from home.  

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up-to-date, as it pulls in all the devices on the network and sorts them. We can filter by Mac address, IP address, type of OS and more. This helps tremendously in helping our teams focus on high-level tasks and delegating low-level tasks to junior staff. Most low-level alerts go to our junior admins, which allows them to develop experience and learn the product.    

Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date helped save us time and allowed us to find devices we didn't know about when onboarding a client.

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR), primarily because our customers don't need to call us; we get alerts and tickets through our ConnectWise portal when Auvik detects an issue. This speeds up our time to repair because we are alerted of problems almost immediately and can start working on a solution.    

The topography and historical data are excellent; the latter essentially allows us to see back in time, which is helpful as users don't always report issues promptly. The ability to go back and look at historical data is a good feature.

It's easy to use the monitoring and management functions; everything is intuitive and self-explanatory. The feature set is more important to us than ease of use, as we work with many intelligent people. However, ease of use is helpful for our level one help desk personnel, who aren't used to using network tools like Auvik. In addition to being intuitive, the ease of use flattens the learning curve for our less experienced employees.   

Regarding Auvik helping to visualize our network mapping/topology, it's elementary. It places devices logically in a topology that's easy to understand. We can collapse and expand elements, making it easy to find information and devices in the system. I rate the tool ten out of ten for the overall intuitiveness of network visualization. Everything is worded perfectly and makes perfect sense to anyone working in the IT field.     

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik; it helped us on many occasions when our clients had network problems. It assisted us in ironing out those issues.  

The performance could be better; it gets a little clunky and slow-moving at times, and I wonder if that's due to the VM or if it's just the nature of the tool.

Another issue is the solution sometimes signs users out at inopportune times without warning. I'll be working in one window perfectly fine, and I would have a second session open in another window, which can time out and force me to log back in, even though I'm still logged on to the platform in another window. That can be frustrating.

I've been using the solution for about six years. 

The stability is excellent as long as the network, VMs, and hardware are suitable. Running low-quality equipment would affect the stability and user experience.

The solution scales well. Once you reach around 2,000 devices, a second device is required on the network to offset some of the performance issues that come with that, but it scales easily. It would just be a second OVA running on a box.

The technical support is excellent and very quick to respond. They helped us with an issue concerning performance hits in some equipment due to the frequency of the scans Auvik was running.

Positive

We evaluated some trial solutions for other network management tools, and they didn't fit us. SolarWinds NPM was a resource hog, and it wasn't cloud-based, so we ended up going with Auvik because of the ability to use it in the cloud.

We primarily used the in-built networking tools from each vendor. Switching to Auvik saves us about 20 hours because we can see all the relevant data and manage the networks from a single pane of glass.  

The initial setup was straightforward; it consisted of deploying an OVA which searches for the Auvik instance in the cloud and locks it in once authorized. It's between three and five steps, so it's quick to get up and running.

After the collector code was implemented, our network mapping started to populate almost immediately. However, we had SNMP set up, which needs to be done ahead of time for network devices. The solution pulls in devices and connections via ICMP based on the network it discovers. It may draw in limited details initially until the rest of the details are set up, but IP-based devices are pulled in very quickly. 

In terms of time to set up and maintain Auvik, it's about the same as other tools. It's all about the underlying network configuration. It didn't take much time because I ensured the network was prepped for any potential security monitoring tools we put in place. I didn't have to go in on the back end and set anything up because it was all waiting to go.

The solution requires a little maintenance on the VM side. Performance-wise CPU and RAM maintenance can increase performance. Other than that, the tool essentially runs itself. 

I can't speak to the cost; I'm an engineer. Auvik has a subscription-based pricing option, and the other solution we evaluated had high upfront costs. 

We evaluated Orion and WhatsUp Gold and found that Auvik works much better for us because it allows us to have all our clients in a single plane of glass under our company. With the other products, we would have to set up separate instances at each site and manage them individually from onsite.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Auvik provides a single integrated platform, though that's not as important to us as cost, ease of use, and support, in which the solution excels. We're intelligent people who work with different platforms, as our clients don't have cookie-cutter set-ups at every location. If Auvik weren't a single integrated platform, that wouldn't be much of a hindrance for us.

We haven't used Auvik's automation capabilities.

Auvik's cloud-based solution works as well or better than on-prem network monitoring solutions. The cloud solution depends upon the internet connection at the opposite end but logging in remotely to manage on-prem tools faces the same challenge.  

It works as well, even better. But of course, your Cloud solution is dependent upon the internet connection at the opposite end, so your mileage may vary. But you're still limited by that with on-prem solutions as well, if you're logging in remotely to look at those tools. So it faces the same challenges as the on-prem solutions.

We use it for visibility into remote sites. We use it to fix misconfigurations that come up, investigate network issues or network slowdowns, and alert us if devices go down.

In terms of deployment, it is pretty much all cloud-based. There is an agent that you put on a server for your site.

We have been able to see potential misconfigurations across the network where things like STP are not set up properly. 

It has helped us to deal with issues proactively. When disk space is low on endpoints or servers, we have set up alerts to preemptively reach out to people so that we can take care of it before it becomes a bigger issue. We are able to let users know that we need to upgrade the storage on servers or endpoints.

The automation of network mapping has allowed us more time to focus on things that we deem necessary. It has enabled our junior network specialist to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks.

I am sure it has decreased our mean time to resolution, but it is something that I need to reconfirm with our local system administrators. 

It automatically updates our network topology. It has also simplified our operations and saved the time of our staff members to a limited degree. Our structure is a little bit different from most companies, so I can't describe the full impact, but it has been helpful for the visibility that it provides into local networks.

The visibility that it provides is probably the most valuable feature because we need to know what our sites look like. Understanding what our sites look like and knowing about what kind of network gear or network equipment these sites are running is very important for us. Previously, we didn't have visibility into everything.

Its network discovery capabilities are excellent. It is able to automatically scan subnets as long as they're reachable from the host machine. After you have installed it, you can choose which subnets you want to scan to build your network. It will automatically build a topographic map of the network, which is good to understand the structure of each of these networks. It does this in a fairly quick response time and with ease of use and ease of access. 

Alerting is a great feature. We have been able to set up alerts for devices to preemptively reach out to users and let them know that we need to upgrade the storage on servers or endpoints. 

It is very easy to use and deploy. You can easily configure network monitoring on the sites.

They can definitely build more alerts. Firewalls can be more integrated to provide more information, and there can be better integration with Meraki. 

It also needs ports for stack switches. Getting into the Office 365 realm would also be a good thing for them.

I have been using Auvik for about eight months.

It is rock-solid in terms of stability. We have not had any downtime. It hasn't gone down on us. Maintenance windows are scheduled appropriately, and notifications are sent out in advance.

It is very scalable. It is currently being used in 15 to 20 different networks. Across global sites, we probably monitor more than 1,000 devices.

I haven't really had to use their technical support. We've just taken help from our onboarding success manager.

We needed something that was easy to deploy and gave us visibility. We also needed something that we could standardize across the sites.

It is certainly easy enough to deploy. Our strategy was to work with each site for a couple of hours to install the agents and have the credentials in place in Auvik. We repeated this for every company that we had, and it took us about two months to deploy it to more than 20 organizations. 

In its deployment, 10 to 15 system administrators were involved. Auvik has an onboarding specialist, and this specialist was the only person whose help we required. Their specialist was top-notch, professional, and caring, and our experience was great.

It is a cloud-based solution, so we don't have to do any maintenance. 

We have seen our return on investment in terms of visibility and standardizing of platforms. Auvik has enabled us to standardize our platforms. We have replaced all of our other local network monitors with a single platform. I don't know if it has really saved us in licensing costs. It is not cheap, but it has allowed us to consolidate all our other platforms.

Taking into account Auvik's setup time, automated network mapping, and documentation,
it has a pretty good time to value.

Its pricing is a little on the high end. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. 

It is more expensive than other solutions, but their per-device model is very fair. Anything other than the networking gear is monitored by Auvik at no charge.

We evaluated LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor has a much wider breadth in what it can do and monitor. It is also much more configurable than Auvik, but Auvik is easier to roll out in a quicker timeframe. Auvik also wins with the autodiscovery and mapping features.

It is definitely for larger networks, and the ease of deployment is where Auvik shines. 

It provides automated out-of-the-box device configuration backups, but we do not use this feature. We are also not using as many TrafficInsights features as we would like to use. We are planning to use more, but at this time, we do not utilize many TrafficInsights features.

I would rate Auvik an eight out of ten.

Auvik is our monitoring solution; we're an MSP, so we use it to monitor multiple medium-sized enterprise clients. It's primarily used by the network team, though other teams log on occasionally. We have five users in our company. 

Auvik helps us manage our clients better, and it's all from one web page, so we can switch between clients easily without having to log into different systems. We can also remotely access their networks, which is handy. 

We previously used multiple solutions for managing our networks and switching to Auvik resulted in time savings of approximately 20%.  

Auvik increased our IT team's availability, especially as we can look into issues remotely and from our phones if we're away from a PC. All our teammates can log into a webpage instead of installing applications on their computers, which is nice from an availability point of view. We have seen time savings in the area of 10%. 

The solution helps us delegate low-level tasks to junior staff; we send alerts to our NOC team, and they help triage some of the lower-level ones. If they can't resolve it, they escalate it to us. The delegation capability is essential, as it saves us a lot of time.   

Auvik helps keep device inventories up-to-date; we can set it to scan the network, and the information updates automatically. It saves about 30% of our time.

The solution keeping device inventories up-to-date helps our teams focus on high-value tasks and delegate low-level tasks to junior staff.   

The best features are the alerting and monitoring. 

Using Auvik, we can remotely access our clients' devices or networks, which is an excellent feature.

The solution also allows us to do backups, check usage, and do SNMP polling for device statistics all in one pane of glass, which is nice.

Auvik's monitoring and managing functions are easy to use, especially as I did some webinars. We need the service, so ease of use is critical.  

Auvik provides a single integrated platform. 

Auvik provides a basic network map, and as long as everything is working correctly, it draws a little topology table, which is a nice feature. 

Auvik helps to reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, primarily our backups, as that's a repetitive task. From a backup point of view, the solution handles everything, and we only need to verify once in a while, so we have time savings of 90% in this area.   

I want to see improvement around backups; we had a case where we created a ticket for online support, and they were able to set up backups for one of our devices, but they were unwilling to do the same backup script with a different device. The script uses the same code, just a different model number, and the engineers weren't willing to add it to the other model.

We've been using Auvik for about a year. 

Auvik is a stable platform. 

Auvik is scalable, though we have one client with many devices, and it can sometimes be slow to load some of the data.

The technical support is excellent; I've logged several tickets with them, and they always resolved my issues.

Positive

The company previously used an in-house system, but that was before my time. Auvik has been in place since my arrival. 

I wasn't involved in the deployment, and the product doesn't require any maintenance on our end, as Auvik Networks Inc. handles that in the cloud. 

I don't have any insight into the cost, as another department handles that.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I'd say Auvik is a good solution, and I recommend it.

Comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, cloud-based is more straightforward and always available, so I prefer it over an on-prem tool.   

Our visibility into remote and distributed networks is about the same as before.

I advise anyone evaluating Auvik to try their POC, as it's straightforward to install and get working.

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 primarily use Auvik for network discovery, visibility, management, and minor monitoring.

The solution's alerts led me to discover network aspects I wasn't aware of.

The SNMP discovery features are impressive; few products are as robust in their abilities, and it discovered objects I didn't think it would.

Auvik's management and monitoring functions are straightforward to use, though I'm tech-savvy, and this ease of use is important.  

The product increased visibility into our remote and distributed networks, and that's paramount to us.   

Auvik is a helpful tool for keeping device inventories up-to-date, which helps with delegation if the organization has the staff. 

Auvik keeping device inventories up-to-date saves time, as it's much more advantageous than having to do a facility tour in person, manually checking all the devices and adding them to s spreadsheet, for example. We do that for auditing purposes, but the solution makes keeping devices up-to-date much more manageable.  

The trial could be longer, especially for attracting small and medium-sized businesses like us.

The pricing model could also be improved, as the unlimited selection isn't unlimited. The billing work on the build devices and components, and I've tried to set up the solution in a few different configurations, resulting in multiple build devices each time. Therefore, I question the cost-effectiveness for a business of our size.

We've been using the solution for over a week on a trial basis. 

The solution seems stable, though I haven't been using it for long enough to fully evaluate that. 

Auvik seems scalable, and the initial deployment was straightforward. I can see how it would be difficult in a complex environment with multiple locations.

I have never had to contact tech support thus far.

We didn't previously use a different third-party solution; we use what we built in-house or what's available as part of our equipment.

The initial setup was very straightforward; it took me less than an hour to deploy Auvik on our network. 

Compared to other solutions, Auvik is much faster to set up; it was almost immediately available for use following deployment.

For small businesses with many devices, the tool is potentially unaffordable. Auvik Networks Inc. is competing with other companies offering very expensive products. Still, there's a gap in the market and potentially a lot of lost revenue for smaller customers, especially those with complex IT environments.

Auvik would be worth the money if we continued past the free trial if we were a bigger enterprise. From a value perspective, automation and related features could be very valuable.

There are a few solutions on my list to evaluate, but I still need to get around to them.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. 

I haven't had long enough to evaluate Auvik for its automation capabilities or to determine if there has been a reduction in our meantime to resolution. 

We are a managed service provider, so we use the solution to monitor our customers' network environments.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform for network monitoring, but we integrate with other platforms for ticket generation and another dashboard we use, BrightGauge. 

The alert generation is excellent; we need to be able to look at a customer's network and see if there are any issues we should be aware of, like emergencies and offline devices. Auvik provides this and alerts us to issues before the customer calls about the problem. We had a case where a device failed, the solution notified us right away, and we were able to use the automatic backup configuration, which we restored to a replacement device.

The monitoring and alerting are the most valuable features. 

The automated configuration backups are another excellent capability. 

Auvik provides excellent visibility into our remote and distributed networks, which is especially helpful when onboarding a new customer. The solution offers great insight into the network we're taking over from a single pane of glass. This gives us situational awareness, allowing us to address issues, find credentials, configure, and correctly monitor network elements.

The solution's monitoring and management functions are more challenging than needed; the interface is sometimes unintuitive and confusing. That may be because I've never had formal training with the tool, so it can be difficult to navigate sometimes. This can be frustrating, as I sometimes need to go back to square one and follow multiple steps to get back to where I've just come from. For example, to access a list of devices I was just looking at because there isn't a direct path back.

I've had some issues where the solution repeatedly discovers a device I don't want to manage and alerts me about it. This is probably me not using the tool correctly, or it could be Auvik recognizing the device in different ways.

The solution sometimes finds networks and devices it sees, but I don't know where to begin looking to try and find out where it could have seen these from. Therefore, I want to know the path or details about the discovery, where the tool discovers a new network, and what way it takes to get to it and find that it's available to scan.

I also want Auvik to identify itself differently on networks because we have some firewalls that identify it as a potential risk, not only because of what it's doing but also because Auvik can present like a foreign intrusion into the network, which scares some of our customers.

We've been using the solution for almost two years. 

The stability is excellent; we've never had a stability issue.

The tool scales well, though we have yet to push its limits. We can manage multiple customers, and it's a tenant-based solution, so Auvik is as scalable as we need it to be.

I never had to contact tech support. 

We used MS Power Automate to monitor some of the devices we now use Auvik for, and Auvik does a better, more thorough job. We've also used the Kaseya VSA platform for monitoring. Still, Auvik is geared more towards the network, discovery, and monitoring aspects, which works better for us than other platforms.

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment, though I've been involved in the deployments to some customers' networks. In terms of maintenance, there are specific tasks we carry out as part of our obligations as an MSP around monitoring Auvik, but we don't need to do any maintenance with Auvik itself.

I'm an engineer, so I'm unfamiliar with the cost of Auvik and the other options on the market. My advice to those concerned about pricing is to do their homework and compare all the offerings. They could also demo Auvik to see if it meets their needs and justifies the cost.

I rate Auvik seven out of ten. 

A monitoring solution like Auvik is essential for any MSP, but other contenders exist in the marketplace.

Regarding reducing repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, we're not currently using the solution for that. We could benefit from this area, but we have yet to leverage the capability.

As far as helping to keep device inventories up-to-date, I imagine the solution would help, but we don't use it for inventory.

As to whether the solution reduced our mean time to resolution (MTTR), I don't have access to those reports, but it's unlikely it impacts our resolution time. We don't continually monitor Auvik or have a staff member dedicated to working with it full-time. If we took advantage of the automation, I can see how the tool would reduce our MTTR, but we're not currently leveraging it as effectively as we could be.

My advice to others evaluating Auvik is they will need the hardware to run the collector at customer sites.

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 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.