Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

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

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

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

It's been a very useful tool for us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik for about two years now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did it on our own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're an MSP. We use this solution for all of our clients. For anyone that has a network more extensive than a switch or two, we install Auvik. We do this to make sure that we're getting the right connectivity and that everything is working as it should. I get alerts whenever something goes wrong, and I can jump in and say for example, "That's there. This is why." And I can tell what is happening. If I'm not on site, I can say, "Plug this port in because whoever was there, just plugged it back into the same switch." 

Having a single integrated platform has helped improve our organization. Ease of use and speed are the most important. I always know that I can go back. I've got a solid monitoring solution within Auvik. I know I can access the solution and get the right information that is updated in real-time.

The solution helps us get ahead of issues. If I see something going on, I can start getting ahead of it before my client notices. I can at least get a heads-up right away as something's going on. It's always better to alert my customer that I found a problem rather than have them call me. There's also a perception of being proactive versus reactive.

Depending on the issue, I have seen a reduction in our MTTR.

I have absolutely seen a TTV with Auvik. The solution allows us to hit the ground running. When we get to a client, it takes me 30 minutes to an hour to absorb what that network looks like and I can start rocking and rolling immediately.

The solution's ease of use for our operations is fairly important. It's wonderful for when I'm going into a new client and I don't want to do discovery. The solution plots out a network map for me. The solution tells me where I've got congestion and additional information that would normally require me to do discovery. Auvik is not as in-depth as for example, ExtraHop but this gives me enough of an overview that I can look at a network and say, "Okay, I know where they're at. Now I know where they need to be," and gives me the first stepping stones to get acclimated to the network. 

An example of Auvik's ease of use for our operations for an existing customer is if I receive an event that needs to be worked on, whether I'm onsite or not, I can call my client and say, "Hey, if you're seeing network issues, we just caught a couple of alerts." These alerts may or may not be an issue but it's good to have that in our back pocket to say, "Okay, something else is seeing this. " It's another set of eyes. We're a small firm and we can only be in so many places at one time.

The solution provides a single integrated platform. Although the solution doesn't do everything that I would want network-wise it is good enough. For what we pay, Auvik does the job we need it to do.

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date.

This is the first solution we deploy at every location. We bring out a machine we call a data collector, and we put it in their network, get on DHCP, and it starts to scan immediately. The solution is absolutely fantastic.

Auvik is a fantastic network monitoring solution. When I look just for something that's really focused on network, for the price, Auvik can't be beaten.

The one aspect that I dislike about the solution is that there is no current way to export diagrams. If I want to take this and say, "Okay, here's my network map," I cannot export that network map to Visio and make edits or add notes if I need to on the diagram. Those are the aspects that are really missing for me. Not every product has everything I want. But what Auvik's support has told me, is that it's in the pipeline.

The only area that I dislike about the solution is the lack of exportability. That would be a wonderful feature to have.

The exportability of the information is really where I see the big value, and the other area is when network changes occur. One thing I would like to see is the option of an automated backup shortly after a configuration has changed because Auvik monitors the configs. When it sees a new config or I move five ports from one network to another, Auvik picks up that there was a change. The solution knows that it happened, but it won't back up at that time. The ability to do rollback would be wonderful. If something breaks I will have options, "Okay, here's your latest config. Here's the previous config, do you want to roll back?"  Juniper offers that in their OS automatically and it is beautiful. This would be a wonderful update.

I would like a little bit more of a deep dive because Auvik uses flow data to update what type of traffic I'm seeing which is pretty good but it's not a hundred percent. What I'd really love to see as well, is an offering of a small appliance to do this type of work, to wash packets. 

The exportability of data and network maps can also be improved. One thing that Auvik does well is tell me how long a switch is under maintenance for. For example, if I have a switch, and everything gets pulled up into my portal for the client, I take the serial number, it goes out to Cisco or HP or whomever, and it will tell me how long that switch is under maintenance for. That's invaluable. I know that I have one source of truth I can go and look at and say, "Yeah. Hey, that switch is still good for another two years."

I have been using the solution for around two and a half to three years.

The stability is rock solid. I haven't had any issues.

The solution has done everything that we have needed it to do so far. I can't complain about the scalability. 

Any problems I've had were resolved by the technical support team. Auvik's technical support is email support first, which I'm not happy about, but I understand that that's the way they work. I haven't had an issue that was so critical that I needed the situation resolved immediately.

Positive

Previously, we used Symantec RMM. We used a couple of other items for a while, and finally, once we got onto Auvik and I showed my business partner the power of Auvik, he said, "Yeah, this is what we're going with." Literally within an hour, he said, "You just made up my mind."

The initial setup was not bad. We installed an agent on our data collector, gave it the name of the client, and told it what networks to start looking at.

The implementation was completed in-house.

What is good about Auvik is that it is a monthly spend versus a CapEx. That tends to be a bigger driver, especially for a small environment. Using a product like Auvik and having the same visibility that any tech can walk into and, assuming they've got a decent networking background, can look at it and go, "Oh, yeah. Here's what it is." With this, my client that has 15 switches doesn't need to worry if something happens to the main infrastructure person. 

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

There are certain aspects that I've had little issues with, but nothing that couldn't be resolved by support. I can't be an expert on every product. I've got ten different switching vendors I work with and have to learn the syntax. As long as I've got SNMP and I can get Telnet, who supports most of the major vendors out there, Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade. I am very much in favor of the product and the discovery capabilities therein.

Depending on the vendor, the solution reduces repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. Cisco, Juniper, or Brocade, have CLIs that Auvik can get into and do backups automatically for me, which is a need but is repetitive. Auvik does configuration backups but overall, that's the big area the solution automates for me. 

We're a regional player, we definitely have visibility to our environments.

The visibility that helps our IT team focus on our networks is fairly important. Visibility is the first building block that we have for every single client.

Auvik's automation has not necessarily affected our IT team's availability. The solution does configure backups for me, but if I wasn't using Auvik, I would be using something else to do that. For what I am using automation for, the solution is pretty freaking awesome.

We're a smaller firm, and all of our guys are in senior positions. As we move along, Auvik is going to be watched and managed by lower-caliber staff who can raise the flag and run it up to somebody as needed.

If I need to get a listing to my vendor, say, "Here are the serial numbers that I need to renew maintenance on for next year," I can't just take that and export it out of Auvik. But overall, the solution does make my life easy because I can just copy the serial numbers and give them to my vendor, whomever that may happen to be. 

Auvik as a cloud-based solution covers enough compared to an on-prem network monitoring solution. It does a good enough job, without being on-premise. The solution is fairly lightweight and it's fairly innocuous. Auvik doesn't cause any problems on the network, it sits there and receives. Auvik is a very good passive solution.

I recommend the solution. This is a good product, it's easy to set up, and just give it the once over. I think that it's one of these solutions that can really add value. Depending on the size of your network, it might be small enough and it might be the right size to help you get your hands wrapped around it. I haven't seen the solution in an environment of more than 500 users. That is my scale limit on Auvik, but I know that the solution goes further. The smallest environment in which I have seen the solution used was in a doctor's office that had three switches.

We implement Auvik for our clients as a network monitoring solution. About 20 engineers use it, including me. We also have a business analyst, a systems admin, a capacity planner, two vice presidents, and a couple of data scientists.

Auvik is deployed across several departments. Organization-wide, we have 20,000-plus endpoints, but Auvik is monitoring a tiny subset of that, so about 2,000 more or less. 

Auvik has saved a lot of time. Network monitoring and analysis tasks that would sometimes take a few days to accomplish can be completed in only 15 to 30 minutes. It has reduced our mean time to resolution by about 25 percent. 

Auvik has streamlined the way we put out tickets. The user interface makes it easier to communicate analytics and helps us filter out devices. It gives us robust visibility into our infrastructure in a single pane of glass. I have all the information and link data I need to troubleshoot any issue with the networks. The ticketing information Auvik provides offers some good opportunities for automation. It also allows us to automate data collection through the use of collectors.

Auvik has shifted IT teams to a shared model. so we can have all of the equipment and information mapped out accordingly. The other nice thing is that we can customize Auvik. For example, one department might focus on information extraction for query development, while another group is focused on layer topology and working with firewalls. Auvik lets you drill down based on the different types of appliances or shift toward programming if needed and root cause analysis. Auvik handles the four Ts—topology, telemetry, traces, and time—well.

Our IT team is working really around the clock. It's almost to the point where this automation has made it possible for normal users and businesses to accomplish their day-to-day tasks without any failover. Auvik is also more accessible to our low-level staff, who are looking for more functionality within the user interface as opposed to customizable development. They can get recommendations through the Auvik interface if there's a problem with the configuration or hardware. The junior analysts can review the historical data and live information to draw conclusions.

Auvik is crucial for keeping our device inventories updated. I can try to gather the system uptime for different types of devices and get something like NetFlow data. It works like a packet sniffer with real-time data factored into it. The higher-level staff members use Auvik in conjunction with another tool in the tech stack. They may also want to shift this in terms of data transfer assessment. To compare it with another tool, Splunk has a cloud migration app that helps look at how organizations use cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-ground, and ground-to-ground. With that assessment model, there's a focus on the total cost of ownership. Similarly, within Auvik, that's like an area of opportunity in terms of assessing the architecture being created for how it can be deployed.

I've found the topology mesh graph helpful, and I like the other features that factor into my work with Kubernetes. The solution is intuitive. When someone gets started with it, there are out-of-the-box solutions to accomplish tasks, so a new person doesn't always need to check the documentation. When they log into the tool, they can quickly fix a few areas and get everything running.

The monitoring and management functions are effortless to use. The process is pretty straightforward If I need to connect to an external appliance. Sorting out role-based access control is easy, as well.

Auvik has a single integrated platform with collectors and API functionality, which are crucial. It has application and network performance monitoring tools, with something to bridge the gap between the two. Auvik integrates network, application, and infrastructure monitoring. 

I would like to see Auvik have some more documentation with a typical CM solution like Splunk. I want to see more examples of things like configuring port forwarding for firewalls. In addition to collecting data from different types of appliances, I would like to customize more of the metrics for each appliance.

More encryption and data security features would also be helpful in case I have some confidential data coming through. Password management and encryption for specific datasets would be interesting. Auvik has this ticket functionality that could be used to construct pre-built workflows.

I would like to see Auvik add more features to help clients who work with cloud providers like Microsoft Azure. In Azure, they have templates within Azure Resource Manager. There are templates for 1,000 use cases that people can deploy, and they do some stuff around infrastructure as a code.

Auvik should go in that direction by integrating ARM templates where somebody can look to see SVKs, command interface, virtual machines, data stores, service management, etc., and try to take that on in terms of continuing with a declarative syntax. I find that some areas of infrastructure code could work nicely. They could construct playbooks like GAML files that could work alongside more with an Auvik.

I've been using Auvik for about two years.

Auvik is stable. There are occasional service disruptions, but they are quickly resolved.

Auvik is relatively scalable. Auvik provides a lot of rich analytics that can be translated into insights for SecOps, systems engineering, and capacity planners.

I rate Auvik support a ten out of ten. Their support staff is proactive and always ready to assist.

Positive

I've worked with Stack State, Splunk, Dynatrace, and LogicMonitor. Our department was tasked with looking for innovative ideas. We're a large enterprise, so some departments work with different tech stacks. Other departments might have a tool and try refining it for their analyses. We have Splunk and Dynatrace, but the use cases vary slightly based on their responsibilities. If I move from one department to another, I might be working with different tools.

Setting up Auvik is straightforward, and it took about two months. We started working alongside a larger team and began ramping things up. Our deployment strategy involved ensuring the data was populated throughout and figuring out which dependencies I needed to install at the same time.

I would say setting up Auvik is slightly easier than most other solutions. Splunk took quite a bit of work, but it ultimately paid off. Auvik is also a powerful solution, but it does not require much effort to get it running. After deployment, there isn't maintenance on our side. We get service notifications from Auivk based on a particular type of cluster. 

Folks in the market for a network monitoring solution often think Splunk is relatively expensive, so many are looking for a cheaper alternative. Some network monitoring tools are free but have tiers if you need a customized solution. 

Auvik's pricing model is bundled and flexible. If I need to monitor more endpoints, I have to pay a higher premium. I can estimate how much a typical network has in terms of endpoints and billed devices and break down what else is needed, like a hypervisor or more workstations. Auvik bills based on the aggregate count of billable devices. I can export the billing usage and compare that to the total cost of ownership. 

We also looked at Devo. We felt that Devo didn't offer much of an advantage over what we had already built or what we could do together with Splunk. We thought it didn't make sense to retrain our whole team for a solution that would not add much to our existing setup. We've also looked at a ticketing solution called SysAid.

I rate Auvik a nine out of ten. If you plan to implement Auvik, I recommend getting started on deploying the tools soon, so you can get the full value. You might also want to look into the certification program. 

We use it to monitor the network infrastructure and assets of our clients. We are a managed service provider and it fits neatly into our role. We also use it to keep configuration change records, which is something we didn't have before. It's nice to have that in one platform.

When we are onboarding a new client with network infrastructure for monitoring, Auvik makes it very straightforward and simplified. It can map out and easily visualize the customer's network so that we don't have to manually do it. It definitely has increased automation.

We used PRTG but it lacked the mapping function to visualize the network with an interactive map. It also lacked the configuration backup tool, the hardware life cycle, and good NetFlow insights. Moving to Auvik has saved a good 30 to 50 percent of our time.

Another thing that I love that Auvik does and that PRTG doesn't do is the integration with a lot of our MSP tools like ConnectWise and Teams. PRTG would open tickets via an alert, but it would never close them if the alert cleared. All those tickets from PRTG would go to me and I would have to manually close them. I would get inundated with tickets. Auvik will also open a ticket but, once the alert clears, it will automatically close the ticket, saving me from having to close a lot of tickets. That too has reduced repetitive work for me by 30 to 50 percent.

Our MTTR has almost been automated because of the tickets. About 90 percent of our tickets have been automated. I still have to manually look at the rest and maybe do a little work against them, but it's not crazy. It has unquestionably helped out with resolving issues.

It has also helped tremendously with quarterly business reviews because, with just a click of a button, we can get the hardware life cycle and export all the data to an Excel spreadsheet. That helps our management.

And because most of our clients are remote from us, that visibility that Auvik gives into their environments is in a better overall layout than our previous platform. The UI of PRTG was very '90s-esque, like a poorly designed website. It had the functionality but the UI was lacking tremendously when it comes to ease of use and organization.

The visibility Auvik provides almost makes it so that we don't have to be actively monitoring things. We don't need a NOC or a SOC to get alerts. We're more confident now in the network management solution that we have. Before, we were getting alert upon alert and my phone would be blowing up and then I would get all the tickets. Auvik has put that kind of stress on the back burner.

Overall, it has freed up about 25 to 30 percent of the time I used to have to put into things.

Another advantage is that I didn't want to show a junior tech our previous platform because they wouldn't know what to do with it. Auvik, on the other hand, is more geared toward all levels, rather than just the high-level engineers. It will tell you what might be the cause of a problem rather than just alerting on something that it sees. While we don't have it geared toward our lower-level team yet, it's very easy to use and they should be able to pick it up.

Among the most valuable features are the hardware life cycle and configuration backups, when applicable, since that's not applicable for all vendors, platforms, and networking types. When it does show you the hardware life cycle for, say, a Cisco device and the configuration backup, that's the most useful aspect for me as a network engineer.

Once it's set up properly with the SNMP strings or credentials, it's very straightforward to use. It has a small learning curve, which is nice for a network monitoring tool. Ease of use is very high on our list of requirements, not just for me as a network engineer, but when I want the help desk or the level-ones to be able to look at something. It needs to be easy to use.

It's also very much a single pane of glass, which is especially helpful for our business model as an MSP.

In addition, I greatly appreciate Auvik's ability to visualize network mapping. It's very good for visualizing how the network is formed and the interconnections. Since it's interactive, it's more helpful than a static map or static video diagram. It's a very helpful feature.

I like how you can request features, and one feature that I think they're working on is the ability to export the topology map as a video.

Something else I would like to see would be additional vendors for the hardware life cycle. Right now, they mainly focus on Cisco stuff, which is fine, but not every customer we have uses Cisco. I'm not looking for them to add every networking vendor, and these just might be legacy devices, but Fortinet is a big one that we've used and I don't think Auvik has the hardware life cycle for that. I don't know how it does on Aruba, but we have some legacy HPE as well. I do like the Meraki integration, although it would be nice to see a Juniper Mist and Aruba Central integration.

Another improvement that would be nice, one that should be at the top of their list, is the ability to properly identify vulnerabilities, based on a vendor's security alerts. If it could recognize, "You're on this version of firmware and you're hitting these types of vulnerabilities," that would definitely check off a big security feature for this tool.

We demoed Auvik early in the year and we fully signed up sometime in the summer, so we have been using it for several months.

Overall, it is very stable. 

Every platform or NMS has its own quirks or kinks that have to be worked out, but it's nice that Auvik will update on the backend. I don't have to worry about updating a server platform.

Its scalability is very high. It gets a 10 out of 10.

We have Auvik across multiple organizations. We monitor, administer, and maintain, network monitoring for dozens of clients. It's deployed across all their different environments and in organizations with multiple branch offices. Our clients include the smallest, one-branch organizations up to medium-to-large enterprises. It definitely fits all those use cases.

The technical support that Auvik provides is very good. They're very quick to respond. They have a live chat feature, which is very nice. They're pretty knowledgeable since it's their product. There's no comparison between the support from Auvik and the support we received from our previous vendor.

Positive

We used PRTG before and we're still using it now. We're trying to slowly migrate from it. We put all our eggs in that basket, even though it was a very flimsy basket. We used it for networking servers, mainly.

We didn't use it for endpoint and computer assets. That was handled by ConnectWise Automate. We wouldn't want Auvik to do that.

The deployment was very straightforward because of the user interface. This is where it's more straightforward than Domotz. Sometimes, when you have too many choices, it can be a burden. With Auvik you decide: Do you want the OVA? Do you want to install a .exe? It's very simple. I could probably have someone on our level-one team actually set it up.

It took less than 10 to 15 minutes after the collector was implemented before the network mapping started to populate with basic devices. Then it was a matter of fine-tuning. It was up to me to categorize devices as I saw fit and tune the SNMP so that it got the data that I wanted.

Overall, our implementation of Auvik took a few weeks because of the number of sites and devices and the fine-tuning. Also, an NMS is always being worked on. You're rarely perfectly happy with how it looks. It's constantly being fine-tuned so that alerts generate correctly without over-alerting.

That's one thing I have liked compared to PRTG. Auvik's out-of-the-box alerting is very straightforward and handles the alerts you are likely to see. But that's also where it could do a little bit better, in the customization of alerts. With PRTG, we could alert on almost anything, whereas with Auvik, you're somewhat zoned in.

We have definitely saved a good amount of time on the setup of Auvik, compared to PRTG. PRTG was significantly cheaper, but there was no onboarding help. It was a matter of, "Here you go, do it yourself." Auvik had a customer success team to walk us through and help iron out any kinks, which was greatly appreciated. That was part of what we're paying for. The pricing helps with support. PRTG's support, while it was okay, wasn't as straightforward and easy to get a hold of someone compared to Auvik.

The maintenance involved with Auvik is around fine-tuning for data collection, but it does not involve updating the agent or the backend. It's nice that I don't have to worry about updating the platform itself. I just have to worry about the data getting collected and making sure SNMP strings are updated.

I was the only one involved in the initial deployment, from our side.

I didn't set up PRTG but compared to my brief time with PRTG, Auvik has been night and day and the value has been very quick. For some of our customers, we never had a solution in place to back up configurations. Auvik now provides that. There's definitely peace of mind knowing a config backed up. It is definitely proving its value.

I don't think Auvik's pricing should be based on device, which it is right now. I don't know what their market share is or how they compete with Domotz, but if they want to stay competitive, Auvik should have simpler pricing. Domotz is $21 per month per site, whereas Auvik is per device, so it definitely adds up very quickly.

In addition to the other issues I mentioned, Auvik and our previous platform are night and day in the following way as well. We would almost be scared to put in a subnet for PRTG to scan because we wouldn't know what we got. Now, it's easy to see what we're getting in terms of the devices and prune it from there. 

It's also helpful that it's not onsite because we're trying to move servers and services off-prem. Auvik is definitely a step in the right direction. It's one less piece of infrastructure to worry about. You don't have to open up your environment to collect monitoring information. It just needs outbound traffic, which makes things easier. That's where it shines compared to an on-prem solution. Also, you don't have to maintain or update software or the agent. It does that automatically. I don't have to worry about updating firmware.

With an on-prem solution, everything is hub and spoke and everything has to go back to our data center. Auvik, as a cloud solution, eases up on that usage of our circuits and internet.

While Auvik is geared toward network infrastructure for an MSP, it could probably do a little bit better on the server side. PRTG definitely had that as an advantage over Auvik. It could monitor servers and that type of infrastructure better than Auvik can. 

Auvik also doesn't have some customizable automations for a specific use case that might need an if-then-that statement to run a script or commands. That might be very niche, but one of our clients is using PRTG like that. 

It is nice to see that Auvik has an expanding roadmap. I don't know what PRTG has on its roadmap for new features, but it's nice to see that Auvik is not getting stale.

I did evaluate Domotz and the pricing worked out in favor of Domotz, but we ended up going with Auvik. We're only in Auvik for a year and we'll see how it goes, but unless the pricing becomes too high, I don't see us moving away from it. Domotz was the only other one that was within reach and more geared toward MSPs.

An MSP business can almost flip a coin between Domotz and Auvik. Auvik is priced per device, whereas Domotz is priced per location or site. It works out in Domotz's favor, although I can't speak for its feature sets. Domotz does have a leg up in terms of deployability. It has a hardware appliance, almost like a Raspberry Pi, so it's easy to deploy on anyone's network, whereas you have to run Auvik as a virtual appliance. It can't run on ARM, which is not a deal-breaker, but it is nice to have options when deploying. You're somewhat locked in with Auvik for deployment because you need to run it on a server or in someone's vCenter. It's not that customizable, whereas Domotz can run on ARM as well, I believe.

Auvik has two versions, Essentials and Performance, which is similar to Domotz's model. With Performance you get NetFlow visibility and another feature and that increases the price per device. But the device types they charge for are only those that are part of network infrastructure. Overall, it's probably cheaper via Domotz, but if you have a lot of sites with just one device, it might be cheaper to go with Auvik. Auvik doesn't charge for access points, but they do charge for switches, routers, and firewalls.

Auvik definitely helps keep device inventories up to date. If I have the scan running, it does a really good job of finding devices on the network when the subnets are put in. However, the network infrastructure shouldn't change that much, so I don't typically have it running scans all the time. We're mainly using it for network infrastructure and not as much for endpoint devices. It primarily shines when it comes to network infrastructure, but it did do a pretty good job of doing the initial inventory of the networks.

My advice would be to do a proof of concept if you are in an MSP role or organization, because the costs can quickly add up.

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 use Auvik mainly to monitor switches and firewalls but also use it to monitor VMware. We also utilize the extra monitoring that Auvik provides for desktops.

Auvik gives us better insight into devices and helps us troubleshoot better because we can compare configurations. Auvik also gives us better and faster alerts on devices. If a client has a switch that's down, we tend to be able to find out and react to it before the client has to reach out to us, which is always a great benefit.

When internet connections are down, we can find out quickly, especially after hours or over the weekend, and can make sure that everything is working before the staff come back in to work for the day. We can make sure that everything is back up and running. The number of alerts and the granularity of the alerts mean that we can pinpoint on a particular switch the specific port that is causing the issue.

The other great aspect that has come in handy a few times for us is traffic monitoring. We can see if someone's internet connection is running slowly and see exactly where the traffic is going. We can zero in on what the traffic is, which user is using the traffic, and what switch it's going through. The information that Auvik gives us helps us troubleshoot, which is a lot of what we do. Auvik has helped us make sure that the company continues to run efficiently.

The most valuable feature is that it will back up the configuration and it will keep multiple copies of it. If a change is made to the configuration by someone else in my company, for example, and something goes wrong, I can bring up the previous configuration and the current configuration, and it will show me exactly what's different. It greatly reduces the time it would take to troubleshoot because I can pinpoint exactly what was done. I can then either change whatever it may have been or roll back the change.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions are easy to use. For certain devices, switches, or routers, you have to make sure that SNMP monitoring is enabled on the device. Once it's enabled, Auvik is extremely simple to use. I've worked with other monitoring software in the past, and it has taken weeks to configure all of the alerts and get everything monitoring the way we want it to. With Auvik, once the device is capable of pushing the logs, it's simple. Auvik also has many out-of-the-box notifications that are pre-built and that automatically monitor. Setting up a switch or a router is simple and quick.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform and two different ways to install it. If you have VMware, you can put an appliance right into your VMware for monitoring. If you have a Windows server, you can install the agent, and it crawls the network and finds everything easily. Having a single integrated platform is important for our organization because we don't want to have 10 different programs or applications and have to go through each one to differentiate which one is using what and where. We want to be able to have one central location where we can find everything we need.

Before we switched to Auvik, we used three or four different applications to monitor different functions. Some were designed to monitor VMware, some were for desktops, and some were for switches and firewalls. Using multiple products was a pain, and none of them actually had as many features as Auvik does now. We have saved quite a bit of time by switching to Auvik. We have central alerts, and we have functions pre-built now that we truly understand what it takes to get a new client configured. We just added a client in the past few weeks, and all we had to do was throw the agent on a machine, let it figure everything out, and put in the passwords for the devices into Auvik. That was it, and Auvik took care of everything else. It definitely saves a lot of time, especially in terms of the configuration of the monitoring.

We can visualize the network mapping/topology of our organization with Auvik. It's really nice that it breaks it all out. When we have clients that have 40 or 50 switches across multiple buildings, the map will be very large. In these cases, it's very difficult to zero in on the map; however, we will still be able to pinpoint which devices are connected to which switch. If a particular switch is down or having issues, we'll know exactly which segment of the company is going to be affected by that. We'll know if there are network loops because certain things are interconnected.

The ability to not have to try to manually figure out where everything is and just be able to pull up a map and identify a switch that is connected to it is great. It makes creating a network map for new clients much simpler. If we go into a new client, we can run Auvik for 24 hours, and then it will bring up all the switches and all the devices connected to the switches. It will show where the firewall is as well. It has definitely taken away the time spent creating the network maps, which were never one of my favorite things to create in the first place.

Auvik helps keep device inventories up to date for us, especially with regard to switches, routers, and firewalls. Even if we're the ones who put one of these in, we don't necessarily have to go write down the serial number. We can get it configured, put it in, and then go back into Auvik to make sure that it's being picked up and monitored. We can also check whether we have all the information right there for us so that we can get everything right out of Auvik. If the switch gets replaced and it goes directly to the client, we don't necessarily need to see the switch because we know we can pull out everything we need right from Auvik to update our inventory of the devices for that particular client.

Having a stronger inventory and the flexibility to more easily find particular aspects allows us to delegate certain low-level tasks to junior staff. Because we can pinpoint exactly where particular devices are easily and quickly, we are able to delegate more high-value tasks such as important firmware updates so that patches are done as quickly as possible. It makes it much simpler because we know exactly which clients need the update. We can use Auvik from the portal to remote directly into that device to apply the firmware that we need.

Having Auvik keep our device inventories up-to-date takes away the need to have someone dedicated to recording that information or keeping the information up-to-date. We can just log into Auvik and get it. It's much faster, and we're not wasting time on doing something that, although is very important, takes away from us having the ability to do other much more important tasks.

The time-to-value is worth every penny. The speed at which Auvik alerts us when there are problems with switches or firewalls, or when switches or a segment of a network is down is worth it in and of itself. Then, you have the added benefits of VMware monitoring at no additional cost, configuration backup, and log storage. The cost of Auvik for the amount of time that can be saved and the ability to look good to a client because you're on top of everything is well worth it. The amount of time that Auvik has saved us is certainly worth its cost.

We have definitely seen a reduction in mean time to resolution. Auvik is very quick to alert us and give us the information we need based on the client and the switch. We can log into the Auvik website and get more information so that we can be more on top of things. There have been several times when we've had a switch go down on the client in the middle of the day, and we have been able to reach out to them to let them know that the switch is down and that we're working on it before they even realize that the switch is down. It allows us to get to a problem much faster and also helps us to look better to our clients. Prior to Auvik, if there was a problem we typically found out when the client reached out to us. The client typically would find out within 10 to 15 minutes that there was a problem and then reach out to us. So, it would probably be 15 to 20 minutes before we would know about the issue. Whereas now, we know about an issue within three to five minutes, so we're on top of it. Auvik has cut down our time by 10 to 15 minutes.

The biggest area for improvement is the speed of the website because it's not something we host. Each of our clients hosts an agent that gathers the logs and pushes it up. The website can be slow to click around in or click through.

One other area for improvement is a central location to figure out what devices are not having their configuration backed up or are not monitoring a certain item. Right now, you have to click into each switch, router, or firewall and then just make sure that all of the boxes are checked for backup and monitoring. This, technically, should already be happening as soon as a switch is installed. However, for auditing reasons and to verify that no one missed anything, having one place where you can click and see a list of all the switches, what's missing, and which switches are not doing what in the realm of backup or monitoring would be great.

I've been using it for three years.

The stability is good. Auvik is hosted on AWS, so if AWS is having issues, then Auvik will as well. However, the few times that I have remembered them having issues, they have been resolved quickly. We've seen no ill effects from any of the times they've had issues.

It appears to scale very easily. We have small clients and large clients, and Auvik handles them all very well. It doesn't seem to have any issues with any changes we throw at it.

Auvik's technical support is great. We don't have to reach out to them very often because we don't have that many issues. However, the handful of times that we have reached out for assistance with configuration they've always been easy to work with and helpful.

Technical support staff even reach out to us periodically and ask if there's anything that they can help us with. Auvik's support has been top-notch, and I'd give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used a ManageEngine monitoring solution for monitoring switches. It may have come a long way by now, but the downside at the time was the sheer time it took to get it to monitor what you wanted it to. It did not have a configuration backup or the ability to check configurations and what was different between two particular configurations.

We had a big client we had just taken over who had quite a few switches and devices on the network, and we figured that it would be the perfect time to give Auvik a test run. We really liked the fact that Auvik would monitor, back up configurations, and map everything out.

We wanted the ability to retain logs for more than 15 days, and Auvik implemented the ability to push logs out to Azure or AWS for retention. You can get your own bucket of storage, connect it, and keep logs for as long as you like.

One of the reasons why I like Auvik's cloud-based solution is that it's easier to get alerts. If an on-premises network monitoring solution goes down, it's much harder to get alerts, whereas the cloud solution can tell you that it's down because it can't see it. You may get a false alert that it's down, but it's better to have a false alert and look into it than it is to figure out that it's a true alert. Alerting with a cloud solution can be a little bit better than that with an on-premises solution.

The other aspect that's nice is if hardware crashes on-premises because of a ransomware attack, for example, and I have my logs stored in a cloud solution such as Auvik, I can still get to those logs to figure out what happened or how the attacker got in and do some forensics work. Whereas if the logs were being stored on-premises, I would probably have lost them all.

The initial setup was very straightforward. You have to go into Auvik, create a customer, get the agent to install, pop the agent onto a machine, and give it credentials so that it can scan. You let it run for a little bit, then you add your SNMP credentials into Auvik so that it can log into the devices, and you're done.

You can do more configurations to make sure that the backup feature is turned on or enable traffic insights for each switch. These are just a couple of clicks on the mouse. The initial setup and onboarding of new clients have been simple and quick. We've never had any problems.

We implemented Auvik out of the box. The network mapping started to populate within 10 to 15 minutes after the collector was implemented. How long it may take to truly grab everything depends on the size of the network, but typically, within an hour you will have a pretty solid understanding of the network via the map. If you were on-site with a new client, you could install the agent with their approval and have a meeting about the different aspects of what you're going to do for them. By the time the meeting is finished, you would have a pretty strong understanding of the entire network and what devices are out there.

We deployed it with the help of someone from Auvik.

Given the types of alerts and the different aspects of Auvik, I think it's worth the cost that is associated with it. I don't think the cost is terribly high. The infrastructure is the core or the backbone of a business. If it goes down, then the business stops. You have to decide how much money you're going to lose if your network is down and you can't figure out why for hours or days versus what Auvik would cost you a month.

If you want to evaluate Auvik, give it a couple of days at the minimum. If you have any questions, reach out to their technical support. Ask them how to do things and how things work, or watch some videos on it. Auvik has a lot of functionality, but don't get overwhelmed. Look at each one separately, spend some time on each one, and just give it some time to sink in and see what it can do.

Overall, I would rate Auvik at ten on a scale from one to ten.

I used to work at a managed service provider, and we needed a network topology mapping solution and discovered Auvik. So, we tried it out, and then we used Auvik until that MSP was bought out. I left the MSP world and became a network engineer at Greater Nevada Credit Union, where I'm now.

We pretty much use it for topology mapping. We use it for mapping out the network and then monitoring the availability of the network infrastructure devices. There is also alerting whenever there are problems. So, we basically use it for monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting. We also use it for configuration management and automated backup.

It is a managed solution, so they handle all of the platform upgrades and all that stuff. We have got whichever version they have got.

It alerts us whenever there are problems, such as a site is down, an individual device is offline, or there are performance issues. So, it provides alerting and assists in troubleshooting when there is not a site-wide or a network-wide issue.

When they started it, Auvik was intended to be an MSP-focused tool. So, you set up different networks in Auvik as if they are distinct entities or different companies. I've deployed Auvik such that it treats all of our different locations as different networks, even though everything is basically tied together in one big wide area network. The net effect here is that network discovery is so effective it discovers all of the same subnets over and over again across all different networks that I have configured in Auvik. It normally wouldn't be a problem in an MSP world because those networks are not connected to one another. It is kind of an annoyance for me, but it really just kind of highlights how effective it is. Its discovery mechanism is very effective. I haven't had too many scenarios where Auvik didn't discover a particular subnet. It mostly just boils down to whether or not we've configured the network correctly so that something isn't just like a hidden Easter egg. 

Prior to Auvik, we weren't tracking any kind of KPIs relative to the network, performance, uptime, etc. There wasn't even the ability to do that because there just wasn't a solution in place. Now that we've implemented this platform, it has given us the ability to do so after our IT organization reaches that maturity level. The ability is there, and the data is there, but we're not there yet. So, it has given us the ability to track those kinds of KPIs. Beyond that, given that we are a 100% Cisco network, it very simply tracks contract status, support status, and all that stuff. I can very easily run a report and confirm the software and the firmware version that all of the devices are running to make everything consistent and get all of our switches and routers on the standard software version. We're approaching that templatized network look. It is one of the things that I could have done manually. I could physically log in to every device and figure out what they're on and then go through the upgrade process. Now, it's a little bit more simplified because I can just run one report and see that everything is on different versions. I can then standardize the version across the board.

It automatically updates our network topology. There are certain things that we have to do as dictated by the NCUA. We are a credit union, and the NCUA is the federal regulatory body that oversees our operations. When we get audited every six months or so, the NCUA basically has a long list of things that they check. They'll say, "Are you performing configuration backups of your network devices?" I would say that we do, and they would ask me to show it to them. For that, all I got to do is bring up Auvik and say, "Here's the device. Our entire network is managed by this platform, and here is an example of a configuration backup for a particular switch. Here is every configuration that has changed since the platform was implemented." Directly above that pane in the browser window is the topology. One of the other things that they ask about is if we have network topology diagrams to which I say that we have but not in the traditional sense. Once upon a time, most folks just manually maintained Visio diagrams of how the network was physically and logically connected, but you just can't rely on those because of the network changes. In a network of this size, probably not a single day passes when I don't make a configuration change. The help desk folks also go and deploy a new workstation regularly, and Auvik automatically discovers those new devices and automatically updates the maps. So, it is a living document at that point, which makes it useful because it is always accurate. I don't have to manually go in and add a new device. 

It has decreased our meantime to resolution primarily because I'm notified of problems much quicker. Previously, if there was a problem, a user would call the help desk to look into it. If the help desk wasn't really sure about what's going on, they escalated it to the network guy. I then looked into it and said, "Oh, I see." Now, instead of that, I'm getting a notification from the tool at the same time a user notices a problem, and then I start looking into it. By the time the help desk hits me up, I'm like, "Yeah, this should be good now." So, in that capacity, it has definitely improved the meantime to resolution. It has probably cut our resolution times in half.

It helps us to put out fires before people/end users even know there is a problem. There have been some scenarios where it has alerted on things, and there was no perceived impact by the end-users. If there was a failed power supply in a switch that maybe had redundant power supplies, we would get a notification that one of those power supplies has died. We can then proactively replace that failed device before the spare tire blows out, and the network goes down.

We're a credit union, and we've got an online banking website, ATMs, ITMs, etc. We have another department that handles all of those member or customer-facing technologies. Previously, if there was a network outage somewhere, it used to be that they were basically unaware of it until they started getting reports that members are calling in and saying that the e-branch is down, and they can't log in to the e-branch. That team does not use Auvik, but I have included them in the outage alerting. So, they get an email when a branch goes down, or there are problems. They don't get notifications for high broadcast traffic, but when there are obvious problems, they get a notification. For example, when a site goes down, we know that the ITMs aren't going to be working, and they're going to get notified at some point by members, but Auvik would have already sent them an alert saying that the XYZ branch is down. So, they can already anticipate that there are going to be ITM issues because the whole site is offline.

It provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. These are just compulsory administrative tasks for the stuff you rarely need, but if you ever need it and you didn't have it, you're in a big problem. It does the automated backup, and it does it so reliably that I've never manually managed configuration. If I was doing that manually, it would probably take five minutes per device to do a configuration backup. Across a hundred devices, it would be 500 minutes a month. So, it saves me a fair amount of time. It also saves me needing to employ somebody to do a very repetitive task. This is what technology does. It replaces dumb functions so that humans can go and do things that are not so easily automated. The device configuration part also saves money, but the only reason that it saved money was that it was something that we weren't doing before Auvik. We were not spending money to backup configurations because we were not really backing up configurations. So, it didn't really replace anything. It just implemented something that needed to be done but wasn't being done.

It enabled us to consolidate or replace other tools. We got rid of the managed service provider and saved approximately 100K a year, and it replaced SolarWinds and Uptime. Uptime was another platform similar to Auvik, but it was nowhere near as feature-rich. We're paying around 17K a year for Auvik, and SolarWinds and Uptime combined were probably in the neighborhood of 25K a year. So, it has saved around 8K a year.

It is useful for configuration management and automated backup. It is one of my favorite features because it is low-hanging fruit, and it is easy to accomplish, but on a network where we've got infrastructure devices in hundreds, it is an arduous task to keep on top of. Auvik does it all automatically, so that's probably one of my favorites because it is important, and it just does it automatically. I don't even have to think about it.

It is incredibly easy to use. That was one of the things that helped motivate. We were basically told that we couldn't use SolarWinds anymore, and we had to adopt something new. I already knew Auvik, but considering that I'm the only network engineer here, the simplicity of the platform was important so that the rest of the IT team could use it to find information. It was important to have an interface that was intuitive and the information that was accessible and usable by folks who weren't networking nerds.

Given that you can deploy it so quickly and so easily, its time to value is very quick. I can start getting meaningful information out of it almost immediately.

Sometimes, we get requests for exporting a map of the network. I can export a map, but it exports it as a PDF, which is basically just like a drawing. There is no context. When you're looking at the map, you can hover over things and you can drill in devices and see all kinds of information, but when you export it to a PDF, it is just like a flat image. It is a picture of it, and if you don't know what you're looking at, it doesn't necessarily make any sense. This may be something that has already improved. The exportability piece was one thing that was kind of like a gripe, but it is not all that important. If NCUA wanted to see proof that we have network topology diagrams, I can just show them the tool. Worst case scenario, I can give them read-only access to log into our Auvik tenant, and then they can see for themselves all of that stuff.

Currently, with Auvik's support, I'm troubleshooting some of the information gathered on Cisco devices through SNMP V3. Auvik is not able to pull some of the important information that it uses to draw the map, which is kind of shocking because it is Auvik. So, it is their platform, and it is monitoring Cisco devices, which are obviously very prevalent in the world. Auvik is having a hard time gathering such important information over SNMP V3, which is a networking standard, and on super popular device brand and model. They're actively working with me on that piece. It seems that network device management using SNMP V3 could use a little tuning.

I probably started to use it in 2016 or 2017. 

It is very stable. There were occasions where I got a notification that Auvik failed to pull a device for its configuration information to see if there was a change, and then, it'll magically resolve itself after 15 or 20 minutes. So, there were some instances that made me wonder why that happened, but, generally, it has been very stable. I don't know if I've ever seen an Auvik outage.

It is super simple to scale. To add a site, we deploy all of the equipment. After the equipment is deployed, I deploy a collector at that new site, and we're off and running.

The only folks that use the platform are in the IT department, but we've also got another department in the technology wing of the organization. This department handles all of those member or customer-facing technologies, such as online banking website, ATMs, ITMs, etc. They do not use Auvik, but I have included them in the outage alerting. So, they get an email when a branch goes down or there are problems. The cybersecurity team also uses it a little bit, and we also have our systems engineers, who actually manage the server infrastructure. There are probably about 15 users across those different roles.

It is being used everywhere across the entire network. There is nowhere to really increase its usage. As things change, they may warrant increasing its usage. There are probably some opportunities to increase the use with TrafficInsights and things like that. 

Aside from the ticket that I'm working on right now, I didn't have to reach out to them too much. So, the jury is still out, and we'll see how they do on this. They haven't given up and are still looking into it. So, for now, I would give them a solid eight out of 10.

When I joined this organization, they didn't have much for monitoring the network, but they had already purchased SolarWinds licensing. When the SolarWinds breach happened, we got a kind of edict from the NCUA to discontinue any relationships that we might have with SolarWinds. So, I said, "Okay, not a problem. I know Auvik." We adopted Auvik, and we've been using Auvik since then.

Its initial setup was very easy. The configurations were already in place on our network devices to allow management over SNMP. All it took was to deploy the tool and then give it the necessary information to begin the network discovery. After that, it just started populating information. So, it was very easy.

Auvik doesn't use anything in terms of how it interacts with the network. It doesn't use any proprietary stuff that you really have to learn. It uses the same protocols that everything else uses. So, there wasn't any complicated platform-specific stuff that we needed to get in place to make it work. Deploying the tool is as simple as installing software or spinning up a virtual machine. It took us about a day. It was very quick.

Its setup was much quicker than other solutions because you don't have to set up the front-end. All you got to do is deploy little collectors. You don't have to set up the interface you interact with or set that server up. That's usually the part that is a real pain because you have to spin up your own servers, and you got to install the software and give it enough resources. The interface is clunky and slow, and you've got to tune the virtual machine. That's obviously applicable to any hosted service, but that was definitely a contributing factor to the speed and the ease of deploying it. It was like everything is there, and you just got to start plugging your information into it and let the collectors discover and plug it in for you.

In terms of the implementation strategy, with Auvik or network monitoring tools, we, sort of, have two different approaches. The first approach is that we can deploy it so that one collector or one group of collectors monitors the entire network, and we have one map that shows the entire network. Prior to working at GNCU, I was working at a managed service provider, and GNCU was one of our customers. I had done a lot of project work for GNCU, but they were not a managed customer. So, we didn't deploy our toolset on their network, and therefore, we didn't have any visibility. However, in order to do some of the project work that I was planning for them, I needed that kind of information. I needed topology, and I needed to know subnets and things like that. So, we temporarily deployed Auvik back then into GNCU's network. We just deployed the collector, and let it discover the entire network. We gave it about a day to go and do all that discovery and draw the whole map out. After that, I kind of realized it was clunky because the map was so big. It was detailing the network that spans around 30 different locations. 

Another approach is to break each site down into its own network instead of doing one big network map. This is the approach that we followed when we implemented it at GNCU back in December. In this approach, each site is its own customer, which made the map for each site much smaller. It also made it much easier to navigate and see the things that we wanted to do. So, in the end, this was the approach that we ended up using. It is nice that you have that option instead of having just one way.

In terms of maintenance, it is like a platform. We don't maintain anything there. The only thing that we do is that when we make changes to the network or deploy a new device, we need to go in and make sure that Auvik discovers the new device, and it is able to log in, make a backup of the configurations, and start pulling it over SNMP. The platform itself requires zero maintenance.

In terms of the impact of this level of maintenance on our operations as compared to other solutions I've used in the past, with SolarWinds, when a new version came out, we had set it in a way to kind of automate it to an extent. When an update was available, we would upload it manually, apply it, and make sure that everything was working. It wasn't overly arduous. There were patches, modest updates, and stuff like that. For full version upgrades, a lot of times, it was easier to just deploy a new server, install the new version, and then get it set up. We don't have to do that now. It is almost like a thing that you used to do back in the day before SaaS solutions.

We implemented it ourselves.

We have not done an ROI. I also cannot quantify exactly how much it has saved because I don't remember exactly what we were paying for SolarWinds, but it is similar to what we were paying for SolarWinds. When we were using SolarWinds, after we had got it deployed and configured the way that we wanted, we probably wouldn't have ever gone back to Auvik, despite me knowing it and liking Auvik. That's because we had already made the investment in that platform, but then the breach happened, and we had no choice. So, there wasn't a meaningful saving in switching from SolarWinds to Auvik. 

Prior to me coming on board, GNCU had kind of outsourced the network part to two different organizations. One of those organizations just did the monitoring and management piece. They were charging us about 100K a year for that managed service. By implementing Auvik, we basically duplicated what they were doing, which has a very measurable impact. I didn't have access to their platform, so I needed something that I could use to monitor and manage the network. So, by getting rid of that managed service provider, we saved approximately 100K a year.

Their licensing model is basically per managed device. You pay X amount per managed device, and managed devices are limited to switches, routers, firewalls, and wireless LAN controllers. So, the only things that we pay for are our switches, routers, firewalls, and wireless LAN controllers, but there are orders of magnitude more devices that Auvik manages that we don't pay for. It also manages servers, workstations, and phones. Auvik will gather KPIs from anything that is connected to the network if it can be managed via a standard like SNMP or WMI. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Auvik doesn't nickel-and-dime. SolarWinds nickel-and-dime you to death. Everything has a different license, and you needed that license for every device, no matter what it was, down to even the interface level. It was ridiculous. Auvik does it monthly. So, it is per device and per month with the option to pay annually at some percent savings, which is what we do. We pay annually right now. It is something like 17K dollars a year.

Auvik might have even been a little bit more expensive than SolarWinds, but that was only because we had not added some of the things that Auvik did to the SolarWinds licensing. So, eventually, the SolarWinds product probably would've been a little bit more expensive if it was like an apple to apple comparison in terms of features.

I had checked ThousandEyes. I had also checked Cisco DNA Center, which was more costly, and the network was just not there yet. Some of our devices don't support management via Cisco DNA Center. So, we were not there yet. Someday, I'd like to be able to get there, but for what we needed, Auvik was just the easiest answer.

I would advise others to check it out. It doesn't hurt. They give you a two-week free trial. You can kind of just say that you want to try this, and then, you try it. There is no haggling back and forth with sales. They give you access to the platform for two weeks. For us, I had done the trial just to get it implemented, and then, they extended the trial for us free of charge for another two weeks so that we could get all the approvals in place to adopt the platforms and start paying for it. They make it super easy, so try it out.

The automation of network mapping has enabled junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks, but it is not because of the tool. It is because of the proficiency level of our team. We don't have junior network staff. There is just me. Our help desk folks are our junior staff, and it is just not in their wheelhouse yet. It goes back to that organizational operational maturity. We've got like the help desk that helps the end-users, and then we've got the engineers who deploy and are kind of like that highest escalation point. It kind of goes from zero to 60. They check something out there, and the help desk will get a ticket saying that it must be a network thing. It just comes right over to me. I'll try to use those opportunities as a teaching opportunity to show, "Hey, log in to Auvik, and then you can see here that the device is online. We've got some other monitoring tools that we use as well for workstations in virtual infrastructure to see that it is not a network issue, and here's how you can dig through Auvik to see it." It increases the proficiency level of our staff. The tools kind of assist with that change and with them improving. A network engineer can tell the help desk guy until he is blue in the face about how things work, but when you have something to kind of visualize, you can look at metrics and performance indicators. It, kind of, helps in providing a little bit of context to the topics that I'm talking about, and then, they can, kind of, use those things. So, the proficiency definitely is improving, and the tool helps with that.

We have not used the TrafficInsights feature. We have a cybersecurity team, and they have a tool called Darktrace, which is TrafficInsights on steroids. It has got some AI or machine learning built into the platform, and it does some really gee-whiz stuff. Because of the presence of that tool, I haven't gone into configuring TrafficInsights yet. It is on my list of things to do because it is just convenient to have all of your data that you might want to access available in one window, as opposed to having to log into another device and learn how to use another device or another tool. So, eventually, I'll get around to that TrafficInsights so that the information is available.

If there is anything that Auvik has taught me, which is also one of my general rules of thumb, is that when something is not working as expected, it is not necessarily a problem related to that thing. For example, if it is a problem that I'm having with Auvik, usually it is not indicative of a problem with Auvik. Similarly, it is not necessarily a problem on the network that is impacting users. It tends to point to something not being configured correctly on the network. It kind of highlights our own mistakes.

For an advanced network operations center, Auvik is very easy to use and super easy to deploy. It is intuitive, and its features are very useful to an extent. When it comes to a more advanced network team, there are things that Auvik doesn't do. Doing those things would make it awesome, but they would just make the platform more complex and probably less easy to use. So, for the fundamentals, Auvik does a fantastic job. Once you go beyond the fundamentals, Auvik still does a pretty good job, but there are some things that I would not be surprised that the platform will never do. That's because it is not intended to be Cisco DNA Center. It is intended to be a broad platform that supports everything to a degree. 

For an unsophisticated or a very small network team, I would give it a nine out of 10 because of ease of use. A managed service provider is a good example because the folks who consume the product are not network specialists. They primarily used it for backup, mapping, KPIs, and assisting in troubleshooting. For mid-range organizations, it is a solid nine. For advanced networking teams, it is probably a five because it is not going to give you all the information that you want. It is not going to do all of the things that you might want it to do, but the things that it does, it does very well.

Our primary use cases are network management and configuration backups. The solution is deployed across 1,500 to 2,000 devices, and we have multiple clients as an MSP. The tool is multi-tenant within our environment and deployed across VPNs and numerous sites. Our clients range from small family-owned businesses to enterprises.

We previously used multiple applications to manage our networks, and switching to Auvik saved us a lot of time; we can troubleshoot two to three times faster than before. 

The most significant benefit of using Auvik is being able to pinpoint where an issue is. With the monitoring we had before, it wasn't proactive or reactive when something went down. It would inform us that something isn't working, but Auvik can tell us there's an issue on a specific subnet, and we can trace through and pinpoint a particular switch that went offline, for example.  

The solution helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, which is another area that's two or three times faster now, if not more.

The product positively affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and globally distributed networks, which is essential for us. We previously had separate tools for different locations, so it wasn't cohesive. With Auvik, we can tell at a glance that there are three devices offline at a site, including why they aren't working from a network perspective. It helps us figure out what's happening quicker, which helps us resolve faster and get back online. That insight is invaluable.

The solution's automation significantly affected our IT team's availability, as it frees up a lot of time for tasks we didn't have time for before. The rapidity and ease of resolution give us time to focus on other areas.  

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolve (MTTR) in the area of 50-60%.  

One of the solution's best features is how it helps us visualize our network mapping/topology. It builds the map out automatically as it discovers devices, networks within our network, or different subnets. We can see exactly where devices are in the environment and all their connections. Nobody likes to build out Visio diagrams, but with Auvik, we can take a snapshot of the network map and show it to a client. The network visualization is straightforward, intuitive, and makes sense.  

The automated network topology map is excellent; it shows connected networks, where they're going, and what they're visible on.

The configuration backup is a great feature, as it allows us to compare to previous iterations after changes and roll back if necessary.

Auvik allows us to get into devices through remote tunnels rather than going to the actual sites.

The alerting is another helpful feature, as Auvik gives more timely alerts than other tools. This makes it easier to pinpoint when and what network component goes down.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform for network management, which is essential for us; the fewer platforms we have to jump between, the better.   

Auvik helps keep device inventories up-to-date and find devices we didn't know were there in some cases. This functionality is excellent for helping our teams focus on high-value tasks, though not so much for delegation, as the solution is relatively challenging to learn and understand. 

The solution keeping device inventories up-to-date saves a lot of time because we can find devices we didn't know were there, figure out the network quicker, and identify potential issues.  

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about price, you get what you pay for. We've used cheaper and free products, and we use Auvik now. It depends on how much time and energy you have to put into it versus a tool that's ready to use immediately. Our time is valuable, and we don't have enough to fiddle with a solution all day to get it to work or do what we want it to do.  

I want to see improvements to the interface, as it's data-heavy and challenging to navigate. This makes it harder to delegate and have junior staff look around and figure out the solution. A more straightforward interface would be a welcome improvement, whether by making it cleaner or more intuitive.

We've been using Auvik for about five years. 

The solution is highly stable; I can't think of a time when I tried to access it and it was unavailable. I've seen maintenance alerts and notifications, but we never had an issue.

The product is very flexible and scalable. 

We contacted technical support on a few occasions, and they're familiar enough with the product to answer our questions and solve our issues. 

Positive

We previously used a kind of piecemeal solution; we tried to do SNMP reporting through our RMM tool. We also used a free Linux distro called LibreNMS, Nagios, and SolarWinds.

Libre was too convoluted; it was challenging to set up and obnoxious to deal with. Nagios gave us a lot of false alerts and irrelevant data and required tedious maintenance. Lastly, the company didn't like SolarWinds, so Auvik was our best solution, even though it was more expensive. Auvik does a better job of alerting and presenting relevant data, and I don't know if the other solutions featured automatic backup configuration or remote tunnel access. Most of the competitors didn't have the network topology mapping, or they didn't do a good job of it, but Auvik does that very well, and it's dynamic. Auvik seems like the more complete, refined tool, despite being a bit more expensive or on par with the competition.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it's not as straightforward as some but not as complex as others, such as LibreNMS or SolarWinds. Auvik is somewhere in the middle in terms of setup difficulty. Two or three of us carried out the deployment, as we were the most familiar with the different environments, and the product is lightweight in terms of maintenance. 

The solution was quickly available out of the box; we created the tenant and deployed the collector, which were straightforward tasks. Following the collector deployment, the network mapping began to populate right away. 

To compare Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, we don't have to worry about the backend setup and config issues as much. Other than making sure the Auvik collector is up and running, we don't have to do anything else, which means less maintenance and an easier time for us. 

Comparing the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus previous solutions, Auvik took less time to set up, deploy, and fulfill the job we wanted it to. In terms of difficulty, it's on par with other solutions though better than most, and it provides more data, better information, and better results. Auvik also makes troubleshooting straightforward and helpful; LibreNMS was too granular and complicated to operate for troubleshooting.

We deployed via an in-house team, though Auvik Networks Inc. helped us with a few issues. As we tested the solution and played with it beforehand, we were familiar with it when we decided to go with Auvik and didn't feel like we needed outside help.

The price is a little high, and the product could be more cost-friendly. We work with many small and medium-sized businesses, so the cost can be hard to justify. We try to work around that, but it would be nice if Auvik were more cost-effective. Most enterprise-level businesses we work with have their own internal monitoring solutions, whether Nagios or SolarWinds.

I rate the product eight out of ten. If the interface was cleaned up and it was more cost-effective, I'd give it a ten.

It is moderately challenging to use Auvik's monitoring and management functions. It isn't the most accessible tool to learn; there's a bit of a learning curve, but it was fine once we got the hang of it. There are more intuitive solutions, which is why it takes a while to adapt, but it has excellent capabilities.

The solution didn't particularly help us delegate low-level tasks to junior staff because learning the platform isn't as intuitive as it could be. Therefore, it's harder for our junior techs to figure out what's going on, what's relevant and what isn't, so we haven't had our juniors in there much.

From a technical perspective, we have seen time to value with Auvik, though it can be challenging to demonstrate that to the higher-ups with tech solutions. The network topology is an excellent way of showing that value, and so is the remote management backup. It can be impactful when people don't have such bells and whistles to see.   

My advice to those considering the solution is that it may be more expensive than some, but it does a better job than just about anything else on the market. Auvik is more reliable, does an excellent job, and makes life easier once it's up and running. Be prepared to spend some time finding out what is and isn't relevant to your requirements and configure accordingly, which will make your life easier.