Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We are a managed service provider. We use it for our customers, and we use it internally for our own network as well.

By implementing this solution, like most people who have to manage networks, the first thing we wanted was to monitor and see what is on our network. 

The network map along with its dashboard gives full network visibility.

Auvik Network Management is helpful for our engineers. We are structured a bit differently. We do not, as such, have entry-level engineers on our team. Our engineers already have pretty good knowledge of these things, but it does help them quite a bit. They do use it.

It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution, but it is hard to compare the numbers. From the time I have been here, we have had Auvik. I do know that we use it quite often when there are issues. It is most likely the first place we check to make sure that the device is offline or to check for any alerts that might have been generated.

Auvik Network Management has helped us quite a bit with the issue resolution. It helps us trace certain things. It tries to map out as best what devices are connected to certain interfaces. In the past, we have used that quite a bit to troubleshoot when certain things were down.

Its user interface is easy when it comes to where things live. Navigating to certain places and things like that is easy. The other part of the user interface is their map, which has not been the greatest. When I had to search for a device using the map, I found that difficult. They have implemented something to address that. It came out a month or two ago, where when I search for a device, it will automatically bring up that device. I can click on it, and then it will zoom into the device, whereas before, I had to go look for it.

Being able to terminal into the devices without going anywhere else is valuable. All of it can be done within Auvik.

The backups of the configuration seem to work for the most part. I have not had any issues with them. I have used a couple of other solutions, such as WhatsUp Gold which had a lot of issues with making backups, and so far, from what I see, Auvik just works.

Auvik's network map along with its dashboard gives a real-time picture of our network. However, if a device is unreachable, there is no indicator for that, at least from what I have seen. If it is offline, there is an indicator for that, but if it is unreachable, there is no indicator.

The network map is hard to use to gain real-time visibility into our network. We have some bigger sites, and we have all of it in one Auvik site instead of having multiple. If I am trying to look for devices in a particular building, I have to do a couple of different things. I wish there were views that I could save and say, "This view is for this first floor." They do have views, but there is no easy way for me to go and find those views. When you have too many of them, that becomes an issue because they start getting cut off by the pages.

Alerting can also be better. There are limited options. We cannot create alerts that are not there in the system. There are no custom alerts. That might be something that I would like to see more.

I have been using this solution for a year and a half.

So far, we have not had a whole lot of issues with stability. I know that there were a couple of times when Auvik seemed very sluggish and slow, and we did not get any notifications about it. Later on, when we reached out to support, they said that they were experiencing some issues. Over the year and a half that I have used it, that has probably happened twice.

I find it pretty scalable. Because we are an MSP, we are having to add multiple customers. We do not have a whole lot right now; we only have three, but so far, there are no issues there. I do not see any issues there for adding more customers.

I have interacted with their support. Their support is not that great. Usually, I use the chatbot on Auvik's portal. Most of the time, it is very difficult to get a full answer to what I am looking for. They usually have to take it back and research or discuss it with their team. They will send an email for the follow-up, but sometimes, it takes a really long time to get a follow-up email about the resolution. Usually, by that point, I would have already figured out the issue, or the resolution is no longer needed. It could be because we decided not to do that. I cannot remember exactly what type of resolutions those are, but I know that sometimes, it just takes a long time or it does not point me to the right resolution.

In terms of speed, they are pretty quick in answering, but the resolution can take time. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I am not aware of any other product being used in my current company.

I have used alternatives to Auvik in other companies. I have used WhatsUp Gold. I have used Zabbix. I have briefly used SolarWinds.

To me, Auvik has been better in almost everything. Zabbix is a very powerful tool, but at the time I used it, it required a lot of setup. Getting it to work required a lot of setup work. Auvik also requires some setup work, but it is a little bit easier. You just have to get the credentials in. Everything is scanned. The collector does the rest once you have everything in there.

One thing that I do not like about WhatsUp Gold is that you have to install it on a Windows machine. It uses a SQL database to store all of its information, so you have to do upgrades or migrations. I had to do that. It is just more work, whereas, with Auvik, if you need to move something or migrate, you just spin up a new collector and shut down the other one. There is really no impact. WhatsUp Gold also had issues running backups of configuration, whereas, with Auvik, I have not had any issues on that front. The only thing that WhatsUp Gold does better is to allow you to do an SNMP walk on your devices, so you can see the OIDs and all the information that is being pulled, whereas, with Auvik, you do not have any of that on the portal itself.

When I joined the company, Auvik was already in place. 

Its deployment is easy. It is more about making sure that all the devices on your network have everything configured. Auvik just takes in whatever you provide. You need to set up new SSH credentials on every device so that Auvik can read it. So far, I have not had too many issues with the setup.

It takes some time to see its benefits after the deployment. I came into Auvik pretty new. At the initial stage, you have all your devices there. They are all being monitored, but once you start getting all the credentials, traffic insights, and Syslogs and you get all the information configured, you start seeing the full benefit of Auvik.

It does not impact the setup of devices at all. I cannot do anything unless the device is connected to Auvik. We need to use the terminal session on that, but not every device is supported in that way. It is pretty limited, but it helps out a little bit on that. In terms of Auvik setup, if we are putting devices in, as soon as the device is scanned, it automatically gets put into Auvik. Maintenance-wise, there is very little required on the maintenance side. The only thing that we need to do in terms of device maintenance is to put the current firmware. If we are going to be implementing a patch, most likely, we are doing that on the device itself. We can terminal in from Auvik itself without having to VPN into the client network.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the environment. It depends on how many devices are on the site and how much access we have. It generally requires two people.

The time taken for deployment also depends on the size of the site. It can take ten hours if we are just straight working and trying to get it set up.

There is no maintenance as such. The maintenance is mostly in terms of cleaning up devices. There can be devices that need to be removed from Auvik because those devices have been removed from the network.

I do not have a whole lot of information on the pricing, but our pricing seems to be okay. Internally, we have not had any issues with it, so we have not had the need to discuss pricing.

My advice to new users would be that in order to have a smooth setup, they need to put in the time to set up their devices. They have to make sure all the devices have proper login credentials, SNMP credentials, and NetFlow setup if you are using NetFlow. After you have all of these set up, it is very simple. From what I have seen from other deployments, when those things are not set up, people seem to think that it does not work. It all depends on the devices.

We used Auvik's SaaS Management product for a month. To me, it seems like a whole separate module. We only used it for a short period for demoing it internally, but I did not see any benefit from having them together. It almost seems like a separate product. Overall, as a product, we definitely liked it. It provided a lot of information. We were testing it internally for our own company before trying to sell it to our customers, but it came back to pricing in terms of whether it was worth it to have this information on our users based on the price. For us, there was not a use case for it. Also, none of our customers have reached out with any interest in having SaaS management. The Auvik rep that I had talked to had mentioned that this came out because a lot of people were asking about it, but none of our customers asked about it. It just did not seem like a product we could push. I would recommend Auvik's SaaS Management product if someone is looking for this type of information.

Overall, I would rate Auvik Network Management a nine out of ten.

Auvik's time-saving features allow us to focus more on critical projects and business initiatives, particularly during our company's renewal phase. Instead of spending time on setup, maintenance, or issue resolution, we can now dedicate our efforts to developing new solutions for managing our next-generation infrastructure, which is crucial in the telecommunications industry.

In terms of improvement, while the network map and dashboards are generally easy to use, the NetFlow app can be a bit compressed and difficult to customize for better readability.

I have been using Auvik for a couple of weeks now. We initially tried out their trial and found their network management features promising, so we decided to subscribe for a month. Since our network infrastructure has grown organically over time, we need a clearer picture before implementing any updates. Auvik is helping us understand our network better.

Auvik's support has been excellent right from the trial phase. Even though we were only at tier one, they were very prompt and helpful. They even helped us solve some tricky configuration issues by granting them access to our dashboard. Their support team is top-notch and very capable. I would rate the support as a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before using Auvik, we tried Zabbix and PRTG for network monitoring, but they didn't provide the topology insights we needed. They focused more on receiving SNMP traps. Auvik stood out for its ability to give us a clear view of our network topology, which was our key requirement.

Setting up Auvik initially was a breeze and it took less than an hour. Whether you are installing it on a physical or virtual machine, the process is straightforward. I used a Docker release on my old Mac desktop and it ran smoothly right out of the box with just a few clicks.

I find Auvik's pricing to be a good value for the features offered. With the professional plan costing around $15.30 per month per device, it is affordable, considering you only pay for active devices like routers and switches. For us, considering our network costs around $400 per month, which we see as a worthwhile investment for the benefits it provides.

I find the Auvik user interface easy to use overall. However, one drawback is that once the network topology map is generated, it is a static view and you can't remove or rearrange devices. This makes it a bit cumbersome to navigate, especially for networks with multiple devices. Exporting the map as a PDF also maintains this static view, which isn't ideal. To work around this, we export the data to Excel and use other tools like draw.io or Visio to redesign the topology for better understanding.

I use Auvik's dashboards, and they generally provide a real-time picture of our network, which is quite accurate. However, there can be some false positives, especially with older devices. The dashboards help understand overall network health. 

Auvik offers free monitoring for all devices except routers and firewalls. This includes devices like network-attached devices, PCs, and printers, making it cost-effective for monitoring a wide range of assets. Additionally, Auvik provides monitoring alerts for device issues, such as low printer paper, adding value beyond just network monitoring.

Overall, I would rate Auvik as a ten out of ten.

Auvik is our primary network management tool. We utilize it to ensure all systems and remote sites are seamlessly connected to our central office. While its core function is network management, we leverage its capabilities for deep-dive technical analysis when needed.

In our setup, Auvik itself is deployed in the cloud. I'm not sure if they have a hybrid or on-premises option available. However, we do require a collector, which is a virtual server we own. This server stores data that Auvik accesses for network management and discovery. If the collector goes down, Auvik won't be able to report any information to the cloud. Although I manage everything through the cloud interface, I never need to log into the collector itself.

The UI can be easily navigated by new users. 

Auvik offers a network map for improved visibility. However, I'm unsure if our current setup allows us to take full advantage of this feature. While I can access the map, it sometimes displays inaccurate connections, with devices either incorrectly shown as connected or missing entirely. While my initial suspicion is a fault on our end, I believe the overall concept of the map is good and has potential.

Using the network map is easy. Auvik has a helpful key that explains what each line represents and what different devices look like on the map.

The network map provides full visibility without the need for other tools.

Auvik helps decrease our Mean Time to Resolution and allows us to spend less time on setup and issue resolution.

I like how Auvik gives us a quick overview of the overall situation. With a glance at the main page, we can see the most utilized sites, the overall bandwidth usage, and even identify the top bandwidth consumers. The color-coded map with green for online and red for offline sites is an intuitive way to get a high-level picture at a glance.

I requested that Auvik implement an alarm system to notify me immediately of any disruptions or anomalies. While email alerts are currently in place, I believe audible notifications would be more effective in attracting my attention.

I appreciate the notification that they're addressing the recent service outage. While I understand being kept informed, multiple emails for every impacted device seem excessive. It would be ideal if notifications were consolidated into a single update once the issue is resolved. Hopefully, they'll have it fixed soon.

I have been using Auvik for one and a half years.

Overall, I'd rate Auvik's stability a solid nine out of ten. While occasional downtime is inevitable, they're smart about scheduling it for minimal impact - typically early Saturday mornings when most users are offline. Of course, like any technology, unforeseen issues can arise, but these are rare and Auvik keeps users well-informed throughout any downtime occurrences. Infrequent hiccups aside, Auvik has proven remarkably reliable.

Auvik is very flexible and can scale to anything we have.

The technical support has been able to resolve all our issues promptly.

Positive

Previously, I used SolarWinds, which worked reasonably well. However, after experiencing a security breach, I decided to move on due to concerns about continued vulnerabilities. Although SolarWinds may have taken corrective measures since then, I opted for Auvik. My primary driver for this change was the map functionality. While SolarWinds displayed individual sites and color-coded lines depicting connectivity, highlighting downed circuits with red, Auvik's map features are tied to external providers like Leaflet or OpenStreetMap. This limits customization, preventing me from using my background image and manually connecting elements. While longitude and latitude coordinates are available, I find this approach less intuitive for my needs and potentially confusing for the general user base. Additionally, SolarWinds' technical support proved unhelpful after the breach, refusing to assist with resolving issues related to device recognition. This lack of support contrasted starkly with Auvik's customer service, which readily helped me ensure all my devices communicated seamlessly with the platform. The responsive customer service led me to switch to Auvik.

The initial deployment with Auvik's support was straightforward. They provided clear guidance and assistance to get our systems up and running. While we assumed ownership gradually after mastering the basics, Auvik stayed readily available for ongoing support. Whenever we encountered hurdles during implementation, their tech team promptly cleared the roadblocks. To finalize the process, Auvik conducted a comprehensive review, ensuring everything functions flawlessly. The smooth deployment took a month with moderate effort, and it could have been significantly faster if needed. Me and my system admin completed the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house with the help of an Auvik technician.

The initial offer was high, but I was able to negotiate it down. The final price is quite competitive compared to other options. Auvik offers a robust feature set that can be further expanded with add-ons. I'm particularly interested in their inventory asset program, which appeals to me because it conveniently bundles all the software we need. While I'm leaning towards adding it eventually, additional funding would be necessary. Furthermore, Auvik offers an optional "Traffic Insights" add-on that provides comprehensive data on all connected devices. It's important to note that these add-ons come at an additional cost on top of the basic Auvik license.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of ten.

Network management can be a bit of a plunge. We dive in, test the waters, and then see if it works for us. We didn't fully grasp the benefits of Auvik until we had it up and running for about six months to truly understand its impact. One thing I've noticed in the past year or two since we adopted Auvik, is that they were initially rough around the edges on some things. But they've stepped up their game since then. Their upcoming release sounds particularly promising, especially for remote desktop functionality. We currently use other software for that, but Auvik's new feature will allow us to do it directly within their platform, which I'm excited about.

We were able to get Auvik up and running and see the value quicker than we did for SolarWinds.

Maintenance is occasionally necessary. If we add or remove devices, adjustments are required to ensure proper system recognition. However, when no changes are made, the system functions autonomously daily.

To avoid initial frustration, it's crucial to ensure proper device accountability and the ability to identify elements like SNMP. Verify everything is running as expected. Auvik's lack of visibility might stem from our recent router replacements and mass equipment installation within the past six months. It's important to remember that if our configuration isn't accurate, Auvik is not at fault. Therefore, having everything properly set up beforehand would be the best approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using it for about five years.

Its stability is great. 

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I was looking for a solution that we could use to catalog and keep track of our inventory. I thought about using Auvik in our lab environment to see how it would work for tracking inventory in a production setting.

Auvik's ease of use has bettered our operations by allowing us to add or remove platforms as they get added in or get deprecated, improving quality of life.

The solution was able to integrate with most of our platforms. There were a couple of vendors that were not added in yet, but it wasn't an issue.

It would be beneficial having a single integrated platform for our organization but no solution is able to fully integrate with every vendor. We work with what we have.

If I can deploy the solution into production, it would be beneficial because we can also upload documentation to the Auvik page so we can have quick access for our support team. If our organization leverages Auvik to pull down documentation on the specific vendors as well as just our internal processes, workflow, and troubleshooting approach, Auvik would improve our organization.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventory up to date. After adding all the necessary information, the quickest way I could see the code versions running was by querying the SNPs.

In the long run, the time Auvik would save us quickly pulling the information required to keep our inventory up to date would be a lifesaver. 

Using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik is easy. The solution is straightforward to set up. It communicates well with the SNP and some of the cloud platforms via API keys.

I like the view Auvik offers to help visualize the network mapping/topology for our organization. When we have a large deployment with tens or hundreds of devices, the view can get a little cluttered. The fact that the view is there and we can zoom in and zoom out still makes it valuable to see how things are interconnected and laid out.

I am sure that if we moved forward with the solution it would affect our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally, but for evaluation purposes, I was the only one using Auvik.

The fact that Auvik can be accessed anywhere is a good benefit. Not having to use a VPN to access the solution is advantageous. If I'm at a customer site or I'm on vacation, and I need to pull information up because I get an email or a phone call from somebody at work, having Auvik is beneficial because it is cloud-based compared to on-prem network monitoring solutions. 

Auvik mostly supports large vendors such as the Cisco Aruba networks, Meraki, and Extreme Networks. They have the ability to tie into Meraki's dashboard, which is a subsidiary of Cisco. We're using some of the Ruckus hardware. If Auvik can add in some of the smaller vendors to be able to work with their products or even Extreme Networks' cloud platform, that would be beneficial for our organization. 

I have been using Auvik for a couple of weeks.

It is stable and we have not encountered any problems.

I added a Meraki platform with 20,000 access points to test Auvik's scalability. The platform accepted the additional access points without issue and was able to handle the additional load.

The technical support was good. They responded quickly to my question and helped me resolve the issue.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. I had to set up a VM in our network that acted as the collector of the data. I didn't read the directions well enough myself and tried to install Auvik on a newer version of Ubuntu. Once I realized my error I moved the solution back down to the correct version and it was up and running within a few minutes. 

The deployment took around two hours. We deployed the solution in a single location for one of our departments to conduct initial testing and proof of concept.

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

It seems that the pricing is a little higher than some of the other solutions, but it also offers more value and data. The pricing shown on the website goes up to 40 devices and for anything higher, we are required to contact the vendor.

We also evaluated PRTG Network Monitor.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We need a better system for tracking inventory and assets in our production world. Currently, we have an Icinga instance that is not suited for this purpose.

The biggest challenge I faced with Auvik was configuring SNP for devices that did not have it pre-configured because some versions need to talk to the crawler or collector. Once configured, we can add as many devices as we can and view the data Auvik feeds back to us.

We are using Auvik specifically for monitoring network devices. We are an IT company that's focused on network integration and monitoring for our customers. We use Auvik to monitor routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and other network devices.

If there is an alert, we can just click on it in the email, and it redirects us to the Auvik page where we can see what's going on with that device. That makes it quick to find what's going on in the network.

And the visibility into remote and distributed networks globally was one of the reasons we moved to Auvik. The cloud platform means our team can work from home and it takes seconds to access a customer's network to see what's happening. We don't have to deal with VPNs and go through something on-prem. That has saved a lot of time. You access Auvik and you are good to go. Everything is there.

It also helps keep device inventories up to date so that we can pull this information and have it ready. There is no need to engage someone to have them reassess the inventory or split inventory into categories. You already have all the categories and you can just export the information. For example, when we want to renew a support contract with a customer and we need to know their inventory, we can use Auvik to export it and we are good to go. It saves us 90 percent of the time it would otherwise take.

The first feature that I appreciate is the topology drawing in real time. If our NOC wants to troubleshoot, they can go to the topology map and see that this access point is connected to that switch via that specific port. And when something changes in the topology, it's dynamically updated.

The network mapping is such a great tool. We have some customers for which we manage access points and switches. The management platform for those products, like Meraki, shows you topologies on their cloud dashboard. But if you look at the topology in the Auvik, it is much better with colors. It shows Layer 1 and Layer 3 connectivities and provides you with a view that has a look and feel that is better than what the vendor itself provides. Its overall intuitiveness is excellent.

The backup feature is also important. Once we have access via SSH to devices, Auvik will detect if there are any changes and will back up the configurations.

And using the cloud ping feature, it will monitor WAN circuits. It sends a ping and alerts you if anything goes wrong with your WAN. It will also give you the speed and the round-trip time.

Comparing Auvik to SolarWinds and other platforms, it is pretty straightforward when it comes to monitoring. The people we recruit in our NOC learn how to use Auvik very fast. It's a core element for our NOC service. Before, we were using legacy vendors for NMS. When we moved to Auvik, things became more flexible and easier. We can onboard people easily when it comes to learning how to use Auvik to do monitoring for our customers.

It also provides one pane of glass. You can do the things you want to do in one place. Your NOC team can access and look at the alerts, check all the backup configurations, see the status of the devices, et cetera. It's one place to look at everything.

We would like them to make the alerting more customizable. We had a conversation about this yesterday. We want to be able to access more fields.

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

It's stable.

It is also scalable. We plan to increase our usage of the product.

We use it across multiple locations and we are at about 600 endpoints.

Their technical support is great overall.

But recently, we got a little bit frustrated. Two weeks ago, we were able to access the support chat via a small button on the bottom right side of the screen. Now, that button has gone away. I'm not sure if it is a limitation of my browser and I tried to find out about it on the internet. But it has become pretty difficult to access support right now, as long as there is no chat button available. Before, it was great. We need the support button to come back.

Positive

We tried other vendors, including SolarWinds, but you had to host those solutions in your data center and maintain them. Auvik is cloud-based, and it's a new way to think about monitoring. It gives us simplicity and enables a multi-tenant philosophy.

The cloud is a trend. That is what the world looks like now. Everything is cloud-based, making it easy to access, wherever you are. With on-prem solutions, you have to maintain your stuff, such as VPNs with your customers to collect information. Cloud-based stuff is great.

The initial setup to install a collector takes about 10 minutes. Within 10 to 20 minutes after that, you can have your topology built. Of course, you have to configure the devices to the SNMP, so it can grab the information. The whole process to get a rock-solid topology will take two hours or so. You have to engage the customer to do additional configuration on the devices. But if they have that configuration done ahead of time, it won't take more than one hour.

Most of the time, it's just me doing deployments.

As for maintenance, because it's cloud-based, Auvik maintains it on a regular basis. I notice every weekend that they have something to do, but it doesn't disturb us. We are not maintaining the solution.

For the first deployments, we had someone from Auvik who supported us. We learned in real time with someone who was an expert in the product. After that, we just replicated what he did and added more things as we went forward.

Our ROI is in saving a lot of time in terms of onboarding. When we want to engage a new customer, we can do that in about 10 minutes. With the legacy stuff, we would have to spin up a VPN and maintain it. Now, we just put in the Auvik collector and we are good to go. It starts scanning and collecting information.

The pricing of Auvik is good. If it could be less, that would be even better, but as long as they offer free devices, that is great.

We looked at LogicMonitor at the same time. But we had a salesperson from Auvik who demonstrated more features. In the end, we saw that the solutions are pretty similar, but we picked Auvik.

While I didn't check the price of LogicMonitor, Auvik is cloud-based and you have to pay a monthly subscription. But what you gain is that it will monitor servers and APs, et cetera, for free. It's a subscription and not a one-time fee like SolarWinds and other legacy platforms. For instance, we have some customers with 20 switches, two controllers in high-availability mode, and 200 APs. We get monitoring of those 200 APs without paying for it. We just pay for the switches and controllers.

I would recommend Auvik.

We're using Auvik right now for switch backups and general network monitoring.

The switch backups are great. If a switch goes down or gets fried, we can just plug in a new switch and be good to go. 

Its interface is pretty intuitive.

The network map, on the main dashboard when you log on, offers general topography. While I have in my head where everything is, it's nice to have a visual reminder.

The solution is easy to use. It gives you full net visibility. You can dig pretty deep in, and it'll show everything - from server to switches to access points. 

We realized the value of the solution pretty fast. We already had it and we brought it back. We knew what we needed.

It does help with some use cases and would allow for entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own. We are a two-person team, so we don't have too many concerns in that respect.

Overall, it's pretty straightforward.

We spend less time on setup and maintenance. If we have a switch we need replaced, we can just copy the configuration, and that saves a lot of time. 

There are spots in the interface that could use a little more work as it is congested with a lot of information in one spot.

We had the solution a year or two ago, then ended our subscription, then about three or four months ago, resubscribed. We had a change of staff at the time and didn't see the value, and then ended up regaining it once we saw that it offered features we needed. 

I have never had any issues with the Auvik even being slow. It's always been very responsive for me.

The solution should scale well. If we added another store, it would be pretty straightforward. 

I've never reached out to technical support.

We didn't have a direct competitor to Auvik. We do have Cisco, which has some similar functionalities.

I did the initial setup with the team. I went and installed it on a few switches and enabled DHCP and SSH, et cetera. The implementation was pretty straightforward. The setup took around 30 minutes to an hour. 

We do not have to handle any maintenance. We get the alerts and deal with those directly.

Auvik assisted us and we had an initial setup call during deployment. They ran us through the setup of one switch and showed us a few features.

I wasn't involved with purchasing; I can't speak to licensing costs. 

I'm a customer. 

I'd rate the solution a solid nine out of ten. I'd advise users to be prepared to go into all network devices and make sure they are talking to Auvik and reporting back. Just make sure you're spending a few hours getting it all setup.

We're a managed services provider using Auvik for network management of firewalls and switches. We use several tools alongside Auvik, which we primarily utilize for network mapping and managing communication between switches and firewalls. Our clients are set up on tenants within the solution.

Auvik enables us to make comprehensive network diagrams of the various companies that we manage. It gives us complete visibility into the network infrastructure, but we use an RMM for some of our other items. It doesn't replace the RMM or stuff like antivirus.

Our tier 1 support techs generally do not use Auvik because they're handling basic tasks. Auvik's interface is intuitive, but you need to know what you're seeing. Tier 2 and tier 3 engineers have the understanding needed to delve into the information Auvik provides. 

Auvik has lowered our mean time to resolution. When there are network issues, we can hop on Auvik and quickly see what's happening. It enables us to resolve problems much faster than before. Previously, we were hunting through all the switches, trying to understand the problem on a switch-by-switch basis, but Auvik lets us see precisely what's happening on the entire network.

For example, we were ripping apart an entire server rack yesterday. In the past, we had to manually map each individual port on a switch to where it connected on the other side. Now, we can go into Auvik to grab that information right instead of going to each switch individually or physically mapping this port over to this port on this switch. That can get hard, especially when you're dealing with switches that may or may not be on the same switch rack. Auvik definitely helps out with stuff like that.

We started realizing Auvik's benefits within the first month or so. Some of our more experienced network guys could start taking advantage of Auvik as soon as the network maps started populating. 

I like the information Auvik provides you about switches that helps you troubleshoot connectivity issues between clients and switches. It's much easier to locate where the problem is on the network. We were using N-central for our RMM. Unfortunately, that doesn't map out the switches. It tells us what is up or down but doesn't do a good job of network troubleshooting like Auvik does. 

Auvik's intuitive interface enables us to troubleshoot networks much faster than before. In the past, we were going into a connectivity issue blindly. With Auvik, we can pinpoint exactly where things might be breaking down on the network.

When you remove an item from the network, Auvik puts it off to the side so it stays on the map for a long time. I'd like the ability to completely delete unnecessary items. For example, when you replace a switch, the old one still displays on the map as a disconnected item. It would be nice if you could go in there and remove it from the map. 

Network setups take time regardless of the tool you use. It will always take time to build. I wish you could order Auvik to rescan the network on demand when I make changes. Sometimes, I want the network to scan immediately instead of waiting for it to detect the changes.

I have used Auvik for around six months.

I haven't had issues with stability, but there's a little lag when you make a network change. Sometimes it can take a little while. 

Auvik is highly scalable.

I rate Auvik's support eight out of 10. We've contacted support a couple of times. Once, it would not install the collector properly. It took a little back and forth, but they resolved the issue pretty quickly. 

Positive

We were using Microsoft Visio to create our network maps by hand. When something changed, we had to remember to update the map. Auvik updates the map in real-time when something changes, so you can see it update within minutes. We used that and N-able N-central RMM, which we continue to use, but we've limited our N-central license and started to use Auvik for some of the functions related to switches and firewalls because Auvik gives us a clearer understanding of the network. 

Auvik is a cloud-based solution. It's fairly easy to set up. I handled most of the deployment, but two other people were involved. The setup involves adding all the passwords, SMPs, etc. for the network. 

It takes a little time to fine-tune it. It probably takes around two hours for the average network. It's a little less for the smaller sights, but we had a couple of massive ones that took a while to do. I'm also meticulous, so I want to ensure all the workstations pull correctly and show the right names. After deployment, Auvik doesn't require much maintenance.  Sometimes, we have to update the credentials when we add something new. 

We can identify issues a lot faster and make the cluster work a lot quicker. Previously, a technician could spend hours trying to find the issue. Now, it takes minutes. 

Auvik's pricing is fair overall, but some advanced stuff is a little expensive. I like that the licensing model is based on switches instead of endpoints. We don't use some of the more advanced features because they're a little beyond our price range.  We're using the tool internally, but the expense is passed on to the customer, and the advanced features aren't something that most customers are willing to pay for. 

We had researched Auvik before, and so we already had a prior understanding of what Avid does. It was a matter of convincing the people who pay the bills that this is something they should invest in. There weren't many other solutions that did the same thing, and they were expensive. Auvik has a better price point than some solutions like SolarWinds. Also, SolarWinds is too basic for what we're trying to do. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I'm happy with it and how it works. New users should get training from Auvik and play with it. The best way to learn the solution is to use it and try things. Also, I recommend not turning on all the alerts immediately because you'll get overwhelmed.