Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We're an MSP and we deploy Auvik for every single customer that DP Solutions has. We use it for network monitoring and infrastructure provisioning alerts. We also use it for troubleshooting, and for backups and configuration.

We used UniFi or Ubiquiti for our switching and access points, but that didn't get us into firewalls, so we had to have a separate pane of glass for the firewalls. Having one piece of software to manage it all is the reason we love Auvik. 

We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks, including the Ubiquiti portal and whatever firewall portal the customer had. That included Cisco, FortiGate, SonicWall, Palo Alto, Juniper, and Barracuda. We have used a lot of firewalls, but having one piece of software that has all that combined is really nice.

Auvik has saved us hours, per issue. We've caught multiple network loops due to user error, and that problem is usually incredibly hard to troubleshoot and pinpoint exactly what the issue is. Auvik pinpoints it and tells you exactly what happened: when, and which switch port—all the kind of stuff that no other piece of software can do, at least in a single pane of glass. Without that single pane of glass for us for troubleshooting and monitoring and alerting, it would take us hours to troubleshoot, not minutes. 

It can find the network loops and configuration errors without us even having to lift a finger. The minute we sign into Auvik, we see the alerts. At times, like in a network loop situation, the reduction in MTTR could be over 100 percent. At other times, it could be 50 percent. It depends on the issue.

In addition, the fact that it automatically backs up configurations is outstanding. That way, if there's any kind of change or something has to be reset, I can just copy that configuration, put it back in, and call it a day.

When it comes to visibility into distributed networks, we have clients all over the Lower 48, especially on the East Coast. The amount of time it saves us from having to actually go out to a site to do something is phenomenal. That visibility is critical. Without that, it would be really hard to really stay afloat and make money. Every time a tech has to go out, we're talking about money, labor, and time that we could be using for something else.

At this point, we have close to a couple of hundred clients, and we dedicate a technician one day a month to each client to do documentation and keep inventories up to date. It is probably saving us 200 hours of labor every month. That amounts to tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, Auvik definitely helps keep device inventories up to date. I'm able to tell how long ago the device was offline. Being an MSP, we don't always know everything that happens at a customer's company. They might switch phone providers and not tell us, but we'll get the information because we can see they switched on date XYZ because instead of going online, now it's not. Now, we have more information and it gives us much better insights into the customer and network.

The ability to change the severity of alerts is also helpful. If it's a level-one, then we can have some junior people look at it and determine that it's not important or that it should be escalated if they know it's a bigger issue. It keeps the critical alerts to the upper-level staff, which means they're not dealing with a service advisor or a service director and looking at every single ticket to delegate it. That is saving us plenty of time.

I love the alerting. With a single pane of glass, it's able to tell me that there's a firewall error, or that something is offline, there is a switch configuration error, or a configuration change has taken place on a certain device. I don't think I can pinpoint a single favorite feature of Auvik. I use almost everything.

Using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik is really easy, but I'm a little bit biased because I am Auvik Certified. (The certification process includes super in-depth training. Before the training, I was able to use Auvik, but I wasn't using it full-strength. Once I did the training, there was not a whole lot I didn't know about the software). The ease of use is incredibly important. If it wasn't something that is easily accessible or has the tools that we need, we wouldn't be using it.

It's also fantastic for helping to visualize the network mapping topology. It saves me countless hours of time every time a customer asks for a network topology map. Normally, I would have to wing it and roughly create one. But with Auvik, I'm able to just hit "filter by network elements only" and it prints it out. I can take a screenshot for the customer and send it back to them within minutes. 

And that network visualization functionality is right there when you sign in. It's front and center, which is great. It especially helps when we have junior network engineers work on it because, when they sign into that Auvik device, it gives them a good start into the network and its complexity. It gives them a brief description of what they're getting themselves into.

The automation side needs improvement. I'm a regular in the Auvik forum, and there have been a couple of automation requests to remedy some things that a normal single pane of glass would have. 

A really important one was about a SonicWall firewall that needs to be rebooted every single month. You can do that in the SonicWall GUI, but you can't do it in Auvik. Hundreds of people have endorsed the idea of having an automated command line interface command run on any device that supports it. When the device goes in it would run the command and the device would reboot (just as an example, because that's a really simple task). 

Having a scheduled task like that would save lots of people from having to go into a different pane of glass, such as the SonicWall GUI. Or, in a worst-case scenario, if I have to schedule a reboot at midnight, I have to be up at midnight to schedule that reboot instead of just letting Auvik run the command. That kind of automation would be really beneficial.

I've been using Auvik for 10 months, since January of this year.

The software is incredibly reliable. We really have never had any issues with Auvik. We have issues with Windows more than we do with Auvik. Perhaps that is pretty standard because Windows is not really that reliable.

The scalability is very good. The addition of the multi-site feature was a great touch. We can have one customer with multiple sites, which really reduces the load and the horsepower needed for an Auvik device. It reduces the bandwidth needed to monitor multiple sites when you can split it up between multiple devices.

We manage close to 200 customers. Some customers have one site and some have 30. Each Auvik instance might have multiple VLANs and multiple networks on top of that. And the number of actual users that are affected by Auvik within our clients' environments is between 20,000 and 30,000.

We had a previous network monitoring tool, which I believe was Arctic Wolf. It had some of the security features that Auvik has, but it had none of the technical troubleshooting capabilities. It was mostly a backup and security appliance.

The blessing of how simple Auvik is to deploy is that, once I'm done setting it up, all I have to do is put the device back in the box, ship it to the customer, and tell them, "Call me with this number, plug the device into this port, turn it on, and we're done." That allows me to deploy 20 in a week, as opposed to five. The setup is completely straightforward. It's one of the easiest.

The amount of time it takes after a collector is implemented until the network mapping starts to populate depends on the device. For smaller things like standalone PCs, it can take 30 minutes. But when we have devices with a little more horsepower behind them, it could be within 15 minutes.

I am the only one involved in the deployments. That's how easy it is. You can have one person assigned to it, and it's just plug-and-play. And the maintenance side is incredibly lightweight. The only thing we have to do is manage the Windows part of it, which we were already going to do.

I love the pricing. It makes a lot of sense. It allows you to use your own metal, which is great because it enables us to go higher-end for some clients and lower-end for others. Sometimes we have it just run as a service on a Windows Server. You really can't beat that kind of flexibility. Even having the flexibility to switch clients between the Performance (expert) and the Essentials (simple) version of Auvik, on the fly, is really unheard of.

If someone is comparing network monitoring solutions' pricing, Auvik makes itself worth it very quickly, as soon as you get anything happening that involves labor hours. It completely pulls Auvik out of any kind of argument.

We pretty much had our eyes on Auvik.

One of the best parts about it is that it's a cloud-based solution. A device runs on-prem and only sends out the information it needs to the cloud. That saves so much bandwidth by having it local. Clients that might not have the fastest ISP circuit can still enjoy the benefits of having something that I can remotely manage.

My advice is that you absolutely have to get Auvik Certified. That unlocks so many things that aren't necessarily intuitive, things that are a little bit more hidden behind the curtain. When you get that certification, it's like you have all the keys. You can go behind all the doors and you know how to navigate the system really well. I wish that Auvik would push their certification more. It's incredibly hard to find that training. When you set up the account for the first time, or even when you're a new user, they don't really even talk about the training and they never talk about getting certified. The fact that they have a certification training course is news to everybody.

We utilize Auvik for monitoring our clients' environments. 

It plays a highly critical part in our operations. A part of the product that we sell to our clients involves a service level agreement that we will respond to within X amount of time, and we'll monitor their environment for them. Because of that, this plays an absolutely critical function.

The collectors that they use are constantly connecting to Auvik to make sure that you're aware that it's active, it's running. You would think all of the other monitoring solutions out there do the same thing, and many do claim that, but most can't deliver that, whereas Auvik can. There have been many times when some of our other tools that are also monitoring things should be reporting that there's an outage at a location or a server is down or something like that, but that's just not the case. With those other tools, it doesn't even blip on their radar that the system is completely hard down and it's a big issue, whereas, with Auvik, the moment a collector disconnects, and it has been disconnected for the amount of time that we defined, it immediately alerts us and says, "We can't communicate with this machine." It's really handy. You can sell the feature all day long, but if that feature doesn't work, it's not a real feature. Auvik works. It's very reliable, at least from our experiences so far.

I enjoy it when it comes to visualizing the network mapping/topology for the organization. It doesn't just provide a network map. It gives us a global view, an actual Earth view, and it allows us to see where the devices are physically located, which is very handy. Especially if we need to dispatch something or if we need to compare a power outage to maybe a storm that's passing by, it gives us the map and visual of where a device is located. When you drill down into it, you can click on the actual nodes that are on the map and go down as granular as you want. You can see the actual network topology of the environment. It does a pretty good job of figuring out how it's all laid out. You've got a collector from Auvik that's sitting there, and it explores and discovers the devices. So far, I haven't seen an instance where it couldn't figure out the exact network topology. There's always this rare case where something gets kind of wonky in regard to how your server is set up. You might have multiple connections coming in or whatever, but so far, it has been able to define all that. That's something that a lot of people don't realize is normally a manual task. You have to break out Visio and start dragging and dropping a lot of icons, name it yourself, define the IPs, etc. Auvik does it automatically, which is just cool.

Our client environments are not a single vendor product. There are multiple vendors coming in from different directions. We deal in data systems, which is the industrial automation type of stuff that deals with wastewater treatment plants, water treatment plants, etc. Due to the nature of our business, being able to have an accurate inventory of what's at what site, what's the IP address, or what are the specs on a server is super important.

It provides an integrated platform for a few brands. It doesn't provide a fully integrated platform for all the brands and manufacturers out there. It's probably a little bit more skewed toward Cisco products, which we don't use a lot. It would be nice if they had full integration into Dell's tools, as well as VMware for Hypervisor and things like that. Having a single integrated platform would save us a lot of time across the board. Currently, we have to use Auvik for monitoring. It's probably the most reliable one that we have so far. We've used quite a few in the past, including Ninja, some Microsoft options, and several others. Everyone promises it, but far and few can truly deliver a single pane of glass experience. The Auvik tool gives us a single pane of glass for all of the monitoring needs, and then, if we need to drill into on a system-by-system basis and remotely manage the system and remote into a machine, we have to use other tools for that.

My favorite feature so far is the alerts section. We've got our main company at the top, and then all of our customers are underneath that. We can either filter by a single customer or one of their sites specifically, or look at it from the top down and see the whole picture. It's an easy way for me to be able to have a high-level overview. I can see the status of all of our sites simultaneously without having to really dig in and get super granular unless I want to. It gives that ability too, which is cool.

The functionality on a PC is definitely better than in a mobile environment. If you are logging in to Auvik on your phone or on a tablet, it's a little janky at times, but on a PC, it's fantastic.

If I could make a wish list of things that I would like to see from Auvik, I would definitely love to see more vendor integration with specific manufacturers. They've got that integration with Cisco, but it would be awesome to also have that with other major brands, such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. It should have integration with more vendors, and in general, being able to quickly and easily access vendor-specific tools from the portal would be amazing. A real-life case scenario would be that we know that Dell servers have iDRAC cards on them, which allows for remote control and a remote KVM keyboard, video, and mouse functionality. It would be nice to be able to have the direct link baked in and be able to quickly just say, "I need to remotely manage this machine," and then you can just click, and you're in. In regards to VMware, VMware is one of the top three hypervisors for virtualization. It would be awesome to be able to quickly and easily identify that this is the VMware cluster, this is the ESXi server, and this is a vCenter. We should be able to quickly and easily log into consoles and remotely manage things as needed from there. This kind of functionality for the Cisco products is baked into Auvik right now, but it doesn't exist for other manufacturers. It's one of those things that will happen as time goes by. They need to make sure that it's embedded and done properly and that they're working with the manufacturers directly, instead of trying to duct tape a solution.

The other improvement would be more on the software side of things in terms of understanding that patch management happens and vulnerabilities are security patched all the time. There should be more direct integration with Microsoft updates. Pretty much everyone uses Windows, and being able to easily identify that there's a patch pending, and maybe even be able to push it, would be awesome.

My direct experience with Auvik has been since August.

In terms of full stability, which also includes their response to security issues, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

The sky's the limit. There don't seem to be any actual limits on the number of collectors that you're able to deploy. We started out at 40, and we're at 63 right now. It scales easily and effortlessly. So, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

It's decent. It's a little difficult to get a hold of them sometimes, but, overall, it's not bad. Comparing it to the big three computer manufacturers, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, they fall in Dell's mid-tier level support. It's pretty decent.

Positive

We use multiple tools. We went for Auvik because of its dependability. We have to have a reliable report as to what's up and what's down. Ninja is great on a surface level, but it doesn't update live. It has a periodic updating process. You don't really know when it's going to update next. You would expect it to be live, but it's not. Having accurate, live information was the reason why we started with Auvik.

This isn't just a one-application show for us. We've got Auvik. We've got Ninja, and we've got several other tools that we use for monitoring to cover redundancy and any spillover situation. By far, Auvik is the cleanest. It's the most up-to-date. It's the most accurate. Ninja, for example, is a decent competitor against Auvik's platform. Ninja reports things, but the information is very clustered up and very hard to read and discern. Once you get used to it, you're okay, but on your first experience with Ninja, it's horrible. Auvik is very clean. It has that modern look and feel to it. Anybody who uses modern apps and web apps is going to be able to quickly and easily figure out his or her way through it.

The most important thing when comparing Auvik versus other competitors is that we have found Auvik to be the most reliable. It will report when things are out. It will report everything based on how we have it set up and defined. This reliability is very important. Ninja is great, and as a team, when we were using only Ninja, and we weren't utilizing Auvik at all, Ninja would report things, but it wouldn't always report that live, up-to-date view of what's going on. You might have alerts saying, "Oh, it's out." You're like, "No. No, we cleared that alert. Why is it still showing that?" There's no real easy way to discern how to clear the alerts if it just doesn't detect it automatically, whereas Auvik is always up to date. It's always communicating, and if it ever drops that communication, it immediately notifies you, which is awesome.

The alerts that are provided to us correspond and correlate directly to the SLAs that we are selling and promising to our clients. So, in the event of a full outage or whatever, it gives us the ability to quickly and easily identify that there is an outage at this site, and it's this device that is currently causing the problem, or we haven't had any communication for X amount of time to this IP address. We are then able to say, "Okay, this is a high priority because it's affecting outage, and it's affecting the service for our client," whereas, something like when disk-based utilization is 80% has a high priority, but it's not a major issue. Auvik allows us to quickly and easily prioritize types of incidents, for example, outage versus 80% storage. It allows us to clarify whether something is an incident or not.

I was not involved with the setup, but I was involved in the sourcing and options. That was me working with the company, before I actually worked with the company directly, and looking at all the different options that were out there. Auvik seems to be the one that made the most sense. In regards to the setup process, I can see that the general setup itself as an administrator is not difficult. It takes 15 to 30 minutes on average. You can add in some videos to watch if you want to figure out how to do something or whatever, and you're probably going to be up and running within about two hours.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It does that itself. It updates its own collectors. You have to just install the collector. Once that's installed, it'll update itself. Outside of that, it's a web or cloud tool. It's software as a service. So, they handle all the maintenance and things like that on the backend from there.

Being a cloud solution, the always-on communication between Auvik and its collectors gives you that real-time status, and it's amazing. With an on-prem solution, if something goes wrong with your equipment, that's going to cause issues. If you're doing it even in your own private spot or even public cloud or whatever, you're having to control that kind of infrastructure, environment, and things like that. It's one of those things that annoys people when they see that there's going to be an outage for a tool because of updates, maintenance, and things like that, but Auvik has been always on the spot making sure that we're aware, "Hey, heads up on this date at this time, maintenance on these machines is going to be happening. These are the things that will either function or non-function. These are things that are going to be changing and so on, so forth." I've also seen several instances where they responded to a security threat, and they did that really quickly. Our outage time on that from Auvik was measured in minutes. If we were doing that and hosting it ourselves, even though we have a decently-sized team, we don't have the time to do all that kind of work. Monitoring and maintaining all that is amazing with the whole cloud option.

It's hard to measure what it's providing. However, considering the cost that we are paying in regards to what we're getting out of it, it has easily paid for itself within the first few months just based on our current deployment environment. We have to have accurate information. We have to know when something is up and down, and if it's not, we break SLA, our service level agreement, with our clients. If we do that, we have to pay money to our clients because we broke contracts. One broken contract is going to cost us five grand, and this prevents us from losing that, so it's awesome.

There is a reduction in our mean time to resolution. When we were using just Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware that there was an issue until Ninja just had an update. Now, we're aware within the timeframe that we assigned, which is 15 minutes, that communication has been lost. We give it a couple of minutes to make sure that it's not just an internet blip or whatever, and then we're able to quickly attack it. With Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware until a customer calls us to say something is broken. It's time lost in regards to the fact that we should have been aware of it before the customer even had a chance to pick up the phone and do that.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about price, I would say that it's the cost of doing business. It's just the fact that it's going to cost something. The amount of money that you're spending on these tools is a fraction of what you would be paying for an individual to be doing the same thing live as a person. I believe that our bill is somewhere around the $600 range per month. We're monitoring about 63 machines. Most of them are servers. So, $10 to monitor it for an entire month is amazing. You couldn't get somebody in India for that cheap.

We definitely evaluated other options. We use Ninja in-house, so it was one of the first things that we originally evaluated. We also evaluated ConnectWise and a few others. It was not very difficult to pull up a list of the competitors and look at them all. We originally had decided on Ninja because it was something that most people knew about, but then we're like, "Yeah, it's great when it works, but it doesn't always work." That's when we started looking at the other options, and we landed on Auvik.

It's a newer company on the horizon. They're still developing features. You can tell that. So, if a feature that you are wanting isn't available, give it time. It'll probably come.

It takes a little bit of time to get used to. When I first started, back in August of this year, I was getting my feet wet with Auvik as a tool. I had heard of it, but I never really personally used it and experienced it. I've been in my IT field for well over 16 years, so it's not like I'm not capable of understanding how to use something. One of the things that come into play is understanding that the default view that you see is like a zoomed-out version. Being able to traverse that, being able to go back and forward, and understanding where you're at in the tree takes a little bit of time to get used to and follow.

On top of that, there's the reporting functionality below it, where it's reporting alerts and things like that. At first glance, you're like, "Oh, everything's fine. There are no alerts," but then you realize that you are only looking at the last 15 minutes or the last three hours or whatever. You need to understand that there's that little date field midway on the right side and of purple color that you choose to select the date range that you're looking at. It will automatically redraw and redo things based on the selected range, and you can drill down into whatever system you're connected to, which is really cool.

We haven't experienced much automation so far. Right now, we're using it just as a reporting tool, but it's something that we're looking at doing. Outside of that, it's just reporting and doing the network discovery and watching for outages and any types of alerts. The process of doing that is kind of pseudo automation just in the fact that that's what Auvik sells as their core option or whatever. As a reporting tool, it's great, but so far, we haven't really dug into many of the integrations or functionalities past that.

It hasn't helped our team focus on high-value tasks while delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because, in our environment, we're all equal peers. We all have our own specialties, per se, such as networking versus storage or VMware versus Hyper-V, but, in general, we're all of the equal stances.

As a solution for monitoring and things like that, it's awesome, and I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We use Auvik to monitor net flow within our primary core switch and firewall. We look at the health and traffic flow alerts from our wireless access points or switches.

We don't use any of the automation features. Our company uses Auvik strictly for managing alerts. Auvik acts as a dashboard to give us oversight and a sense of the overall network health. We don't do a lot of troubleshooting within Auvik. It's more of a documentation and dashboard tool that lets me see all the problems and drill down.

We only have one location where we're using Auvik, but we're expanding to a second location under construction and being rebuilt. We'll eventually have two more locations. We want to monitor multiple sites and how they interact because we use SD-WAN between the sites.

We previously had multiple solutions, and implementing Auvik has saved me a lot of time because I'm solely responsible for the infrastructure. I probably save an hour or two daily on my morning run-throughs, so it has saved the company the equivalent of a part-time employee each month. 

In addition to saving time, we get better traffic insights. We can look at the entire inventory from a networking standpoint. It lets us see all our pieces and what's online, like a network topography. If somebody submits a ticket about internet issues in one of the areas, I can check that area to see how many other things are affected. It makes troubleshooting smoother. You can more effectively triage a problem because you have more information in front of you.

Auvik keeps our device inventories updated. We pair it with our asset management platform to double-check if things are discovered that haven't been asset-tagged. We want to see if the things that are live on the network match what we have in our asset management platform.

Auvik also helps me delegate. I can see alerts on the endpoints that are not necessarily licensed, but it gives us traffic insights. I can message the person at the help desk, "Hey, I noticed we're having Wi-Fi issues in this area. Can you check the staff computers on Ninja and see if anybody is having any issues?" They can go in remotely and communicate with the staff to see if they have noticeable issues. Is it an advisory thing we're seeing or something deeper that must be solved on the network side? Maybe it's on the endpoint side?

Keeping our devices updated helps me take the pulse of each device. We use a remote management platform like an MDM, but then we also use ScalePad as a cost and inventory platform. Auvik tells us if all these things are up and running. There are three of us on the team, and each tracks inventory differently. Whenever we do annual inventory, we pull MAC addresses and devices to see what's in use and the usage rate. It helps a lot at the end of the year. Inventory takes an hour instead of a week.

Auvik helps us get ahead of the curve, so we can see many potential issues before they become problems. We'll get alerts for particular items before getting a ticket. In those cases, we can say, "I noticed you've been having some issues with Wi-Fi and sporadic connectivity. Is your computer okay? Are you having issues?" 

It depends on the person, but most people don't like to complain and don't want to go into the trouble of sending in a ticket or anything like that. When you can get ahead of that and reach out to them, it's a great value.

I like Auvik's mapping. Your home dashboard has a map view where you can see potential issues on the endpoints. If an AP or switch has a problem, you can drill down into those to see how it's affecting the endpoints.

The monitoring and management features are straightforward. Getting everything configured is a little tricky, but it's easy once everything is set up. The management is highly intuitive. It has tons of little tools you can use for your hardware. You can monitor network traffic, device health, and lifecycle management within an easy-to-use dashboard.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform that covers everything. We are considering adding our primary servers to get utilization stats and different telemetry from our primary hosts for our on-site VMs. Having all the features on a single platform is crucial. We use many services and platforms, and it's convenient to log into one dashboard and see everything from a bird's eye view.

It's super easy to use. Everything is easily mapped out. If you've navigated any website, it should all be intuitive. It's easy to lift a pane and see all the general areas. As you click into each site, you can drill down into each area you want to see.

People who don't dive as deep into the infrastructure as I do can go onto the site to see the dashboard and get a sense of the network's overall health. I don't need to push out reports and share alerts constantly. I'm the only one getting those, and the other team members can see from a bird's eye view whenever they're looking into things or trying to troubleshoot.

I would like a Power BI-style dashboard that you could show to a non-technical person with metrics like the number of devices accessing wireless, the amount of internet, total issues resolved each month, etc. 

Those kinds of features would be nice, but that's more of a feature for executives. Many platforms are adding these features because they understand in-house IT staff need to deliver those reports to management.

We used Auvik with our MSP for a time. It was an account through somebody else. This month, we started using it as the primary account. In total, we've been using it for a year and a half.

We haven't had any issues. I've been able to load the website from any location without any lag or delays.

One reason we chose Auvik was its ability to scale for multiple locations. It's effortless to scale by adding different locations. We have it at our headquarters and plan to add our Central Austin location, then go from there. Within the organization, it's easy to build out and add.

We used Meraki's built-in monitoring platform because we have a full Meraki stack. We used the topography and alert systems there, but it lacked many features because you're only seeing the network side. You don't see any of the devices. You could see some insights, but Auvik provides much more clarity.

I like Auvik's secure cloud-based solution and the ability to check the dashboard no matter where I am. If I'm remote and looking at multiple sites, I don't have to worry about VPN connections. I don't need to worry about opening the ports. It's huge for us to see everything from multiple sites.

Setting up Auvik was straightforward, but sometimes you forget the passwords when setting up SNMP or Syslog. We had to go back and look for passwords, but that wasn't Auvik's problem. 

It was simple to deploy Auvik right out of the box. All we needed to do was get our SNMP credentials and input the subnets I wanted to scan. I deployed it by myself, and it took less than one day. I probably spent about four hours on it.

After deployment, Auvik hasn't required any maintenance. The only thing that I've had to do is change the password for an SNMP credential if I got it wrong, but that's about it.

We saw immediate value from Auvik. I think it's brand and device agnostic, which is incredible. The time to value was almost instant because we could see everything. We didn't have to go onto a Netgear portal, a Meraki portal, Azure AD, Intune, RMM, etc. We can see everything on one dashboard. The time to value was the time it took to implement: less than a day.

Auvik is much simpler to set up and maintain than my previous solution. It's night and day. Dealing with multiple platforms and solutions was unwieldy. Time is money. Having everything combined is a value-add and saves a lot of money. We no longer need to outsource this and have somebody monitor it. Bringing all the monitoring in-house saves us $2,000 a month, easily on top of all the other support hours we've saved.

Auvik's pricing is spot-on. It's one of the better values I've seen. 

I tried Netskope and SolarWinds, but they were both somewhat clunky. At times, things can get over-engineered. It's like a lousy buffet where all the food is mixed in. That's what I feel with some platforms.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you're thinking about implementing Auvik, I recommend watching videos online before deployment. Watch the videos for ideas and attend demos so you can ask questions ahead of time. 

We deployed so easily because all the questions were answered before we started. We did our research and watched videos when we were checking out Auvik. Auvik was at the top of our list, but we looked at other solutions and didn't find anything that came close. 

We have several different physical sites and we run our own network. Auvik has some exciting capabilities for aggregating Syslog from switches and having remote console administration across geographic locations. The solution puts a common off-wall in front of switch management but also makes it easy for us to go in and make changes.

We use the solution across multiple locations and departments.

We use Auvik where we have the most pain points because it's a charge per device brought online model. We use Auvik in a smaller proportion of our infrastructure, around 30% of our architecture.

Auvik provides a simple way to view the current configuration and to view the network monitoring status checks. Auvik allows me to work in a bigger team with a large number of different circumstances happening at once, and share a common source of truth and management platform. It is more of a teamwork tool and a work-from-different-location tool than anything else.

We get more benefits out of Auvik than other solutions depending on specific job roles in the team. The main value of Auvik is the reduction in communication gaps that makes it faster to respond to issues. Our incident response no longer relies on someone logging into a SolarWinds platform or getting a Syslog agent on our system to collect our logs. We no longer rely on someone having to configure a pipeline alert or the SMTP email relay working in order to get an email that wasn't checked. Auvik doesn't do anything that I can't get from a variety of other tools or modified solutions but it does it all in one website that works well.

In terms of instant response, we get alerted about issues faster and with fewer spam alerts. Previously, we didn't configure our alerts as well as we could have. When there is an issue, Auvik identifies it for us and that saves us time. We have proof of network performance, in any case. The ability to quickly run tests and show logging allows us to see if an issue is because of something on our network or from external causes beyond our control.

We purchase other companies or partner with them at different times and work with them in various ways which require us to onboard or allow people to access certain areas on our network and Auvik makes it easier to manage. The solution allows us to have a visual network representation and streamlined demo space of some network features, and we can let people play in a sandbox.

The solution reduces the amount of time we spend on onsite visits, eliminating the travel time and setup time for inspecting the network. Auvik allows us to manage the network remotely in a matter of seconds without the need to leave the building which correlates to more time for other tasks.

Auvik's UI design helps visualize the network mapping and topology of our organization because it provides a nice modern experience, in terms of usability and can be used with any modern browser. Unlike some other solutions with outdated interfaces, Auvik utilizes an appealing dashboard to show us our network and lets us drill down deep.

Our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally has been good to date using the solution, but we are not a large company and we have a limited number of sites.

The solution's ability to access our networks remotely has correlated with time for our IT teams to focus on other tasks. Our engineers can save over three hours of their day compared to having to deal with an issue on-site.

The remote console administration stands out as a valued feature. I haven't found another relatively easy and versatile product that is all-encompassing. 

Using Auvik's monitoring and management functions is easy because it is a web-based app. The charge models are based on the number of core network devices we have. We have virtual machines and various items that our charges are based on such as adding a switch or a firewall. We are not charged simply because we have a virtual machine running. We get more visibility into what we're running compared to other solutions. 

The solution's ease of use is the reason we bought it.

The solution can provide a single integrated platform depending on what we want the platform to do. Auvik provides more of an integrated teamwork network management platform than anything I've previously seen. The solution does nearly everything and it does it in a convenient, easy, and accessible way compared to my past experiences with other solutions. Auvik's user experience is very nice.

The solution's intuitiveness of the network visualization is strong and we don't need to spend much time to find it useful.

Auvik's ability to keep our device inventory up to date is a convenient feature.

Auvik can improve by increasing the tech file management capability.

In the past we had a Git server where we made changes to configurations, allowing us to push the changes, and depending on the system, we had the ability to convert the information down to a text file but if there was a problem, we could quickly revert it back. I would like the ability to version control Auvik configurations and potentially automate them by having a type of Gitflow system.

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

The solution is fairly stable but at times can drop off, or we have collector issues, or there's various service-related downtime. Auvik has a status page where we can check for uptime issues.

I don't worry about the scalability of the solution because it is quite a broad, scalable, and modern platform. 

I previously used open-source solutions that were built at home. I don't know of another solution that is a strong competitive, multivendor, that plays in this space, which is why we ended up using Auvik.

Until July 2021, our organization had a SolarWinds contract, but when the global hack happened, we had to reevaluate what we were using for monitoring and management.

The initial setup was not complex. All we needed to install were collectors and we were able to start network mapping the same day. The deployment was handled by a small team. We have different offices and sites but it does not require a significant amount of time to implement Auvik and get it running on the equipment we need. We need someone that has the ability to use computers for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have found Auvik improves our ability to complete tasks more quickly and improve responses internally. We're not planning on canceling the solution. We find that Auvik is improving our ability to manage remote sites, and we like using the tool.

Auvik charges based on the number of network devices being used. The pricing is fair as long as we are getting use out of the solution.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We still use multiple applications, but Auvik has taken over a lot more of them and has also taken over areas that we just did not have applications to manage before. There is a nice network flow and analytics information. What we found the most interesting is, if we onboard or offboard a team member, our ability to manage switch configs, check in on issues quickly, and do some Syslog searches, can all be done in one place, behind one login, one permission set making it a lot easier to manage tasks on a daily basis.

I'm not sure how much of Auvik's automation capability we've really leveraged or how much the solution specifically has. We have some existing systems in place and we use Auvik more as a network monitoring and remote management tool. I don't believe the solution has fully supplanted some of our existing practices. We use Auvik as an additive layer that's super helpful in terms of incident response, client engagement, and making our lives easier.

Auvik provides discovery capabilities based on Mac addresses that can help keep device inventories up to date. We don't use the solution for device discovery and I am not sure how accurate it is. I find the solution very helpful in terms of getting visibility into what the network is doing and what's on it.

We selected Auvik based on a number of factors that made sense at the time including, their charge model which is based on network devices and COVID affecting our locations. We didn't go through a full vendor review process the same way that we usually would and looked for a number of competitors. We saw that Auvik was affordable and fulfilled a business need.

To anyone that is comparing network monitor solutions, but is concerned about pricing, I would advise the amount of time we saved with the solution was worth the money spent. 

I am a big open-source proponent. I've contributed to open-source solutions and used a lot of them. Most of the time open-source solutions are some of the best solutions that we can have. In some cases, there is a clear deficiency versus a commercial solution. Sometimes it's worth paying for a service, a product X because it saves the company money or it meets a compliance or insurance requirement. 

Business reasons can overrule other reasons. One business reason could be that we need a network monitoring, management, and remote administration capability platform so our engineers spend less time traveling between data centers to complete tasks and debug logging systems. Engineers are fairly expensive employees at the end of the day, between health insurance, salary, and vacation time. The business would be more profitable if those engineers were more efficient at their job. 

Auvik can benefit the organization through the reduction of staff required by minimizing the time it takes to complete each task or allowing those engineers to spend time on more useful tasks. Auvik is a helpful product that assists a company that is trying to remotely manage sites across different areas with a team. The solution adds an orchestration layer to that. Auvik adds an application on a modern platform for the management of the devices that we're controlling and makes it less taxing and easier for us to benefit from that.

Auvik's cloud-based solution is convenient compared to on-prem network monitoring solutions.

We sometimes perform trivial maintenance on Auvik for user management in the portal.

I recommend the solution to others. Auvik is a useful platform. 

Our network infrastructure is monitored by Auvik Network Management. This includes firewalls and network traffic. By using Auvik, we gain data and analytics that fuel our diagnostics, alarm systems, and overall network environment insights.

We decided to implement Auvik after struggling to find a network monitoring solution that ticked all the boxes. We needed a cost-effective option with a user-friendly interface, backed by a responsive company committed to ongoing product updates. Unfortunately, the market seemed to offer outdated, once-great products or solutions prohibitively expensive for small businesses and MSPs like us. Thankfully, our experience with Auvik has been good. Both our dedicated sales representative and the onboarding technical support team have been phenomenal.

Despite the usual setup time – an hour or two for getting things connected and entering credentials – the platform started pulling data from our devices almost immediately. It was practically instantaneous, aside from the standard management deployment time. Interestingly, the network map took a bit longer to figure itself out compared to the platform itself. The platform started showing me interface details, traffic information, and even automatically identified our WAN connections. We did have to set credentials later, and thankfully, we had backups of our devices ready beforehand, since it seemed like the platform wanted that information before the network map fully visualized everything. Overall, the deployment process was remarkably quick and easy.

Last Sunday, I encountered an issue that the dashboard interface helped resolve quickly. I could easily locate the specific device on the map and clicking on it brought up all relevant information. This allowed us to directly investigate the problematic port, view its traffic status up or down, without the need for a more cumbersome process. Traditionally, we would have had to VPN into the network, log in to the switch using its credentials, and then identify the specific port involved. The dashboard streamlines this process, saving time frequently. While it may not be a massive improvement, it offers a noticeable efficiency gain in our mean time to resolution.

Our company is still in the early stages of adopting Auvik, a monitoring platform that can be used for all of our customers. This means that we will eventually have one platform for all our alerts and for our technicians to access. This will simplify things internally for our company by reducing the number of platforms our technicians need to be familiar with to support our clients. It will also reduce the amount of documentation we need to maintain. With Auvik, our technicians will spend less time on maintenance and troubleshooting because they will only need to learn and use one platform. Currently, our technicians haven't started using Auvik yet, but the plan is to move away from all the various monitoring solutions we've been using for different customers and consolidate everything onto this one platform. Once our technicians are using Auvik, it will make our jobs significantly easier and faster.

Auvik stands out for its ability to combine network and per-port traffic inspection with log aggregation and data flow analysis in a single platform. This comprehensive approach is rare in network monitoring solutions. Even more impressive is that Auvik offers these high-end enterprise features at a cost-effective price. Traditionally, such capabilities are only found in expensive products. The combination of powerful features and affordability made Auvik a very attractive choice for us.

The Auvik interface has a modern look and feel in terms of its color scheme and layout. However, some elements are arranged in a way that I find counterintuitive. As a company with a web and application development team, we have a strong focus on user interface and user experience. For some features in Auvik, the placement of buttons and functionalities doesn't feel optimal. We've had to consult our representative several times on how to find specific options. For example, editing a device requires navigating through the sidebar to a specific category and tab, then selecting the device, line item, and checking a box before finally reaching the edit button. Additionally, the placement of buttons seems inconsistent across different sections, making the overall workflow less intuitive and requiring more training to become proficient.

My ideal real-time network monitoring would involve seeing all my data at once, including connection speeds and throughput. While Auvik's automated network map is visually appealing and generally accurate compared to competitors, it lacks some key features. For example, unlike a competitor's recent feature that shows traffic between trunk connections, Auvik only displays a single color for connection links, indicating wired or wireless status. This doesn't provide vital information like link speed or potential problems. Additionally, connections with momentary issues simply disappear from the map, which is frustrating. Auvik could integrate valuable alerts and insights from other parts of the platform directly onto the map. This would highlight potential issues with specific devices and their connections. While I acknowledge ongoing development efforts, there's still a significant gap in desired features. Another limitation is the lack of manual map editing. For instance, our server has multiple Ethernet connections entering a single switch, but the map erroneously shows them spread throughout the building. With no way to manually adjust this, the map's accuracy suffers. While Auvik's map is aesthetically pleasing, I wouldn't rely on it for complete accuracy.

I've had some trouble using Auvik's device proxy, which allows technicians to connect to network devices through Auvik's platform. The Mac software I need isn't fully functional yet, so I might be doing something wrong, but other products like Domotz work flawlessly. One of the main reasons we chose Auvik was to eliminate the need for VPNs, on-site PCs, or network tunnels for technicians to access devices. This would reduce our equipment costs. While the pricing is fair overall, the jump between plans is significant. For instance, their higher plan offers features like NetFlow statistics and analytics for firewalls, which require more data and rightfully cost more. However, the entire client site is included in that plan, and there's no option to pay extra for specific devices. I'd be happy to pay more for those features on select devices, but the current pricing structure prevents me from getting them. This seems like a missed opportunity for both Auvik and us. Not all my devices need the extensive logging and data collection offered in the higher plan. Network switches and access points, for example, have their own controllers that handle SysLogging, so I wouldn't need Auvik for that. However, I would like to pay extra for those features on our firewalls and routers. In the current situation, neither side benefits. If we pay for the higher plan, our costs increases, which will eventually impact our customers' prices. However, convincing customers to pay for this one additional feature within the entire monitoring platform is difficult.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one year.

Throughout this process, I've primarily relied on my representative for assistance. While I haven't directly contacted their technical support line, my representative has involved them on my behalf. This may be a slight deviation from the usual procedure, but it has still allowed me to reach the appropriate people.

The technical support team has been very responsive in identifying and resolving any technical issues I've encountered. They were able to quickly understand the situation with minimal questions. Additionally, I appreciate the granular control I have over their access to client data. I can grant them temporary or read-only access, which allows for collaborative troubleshooting without compromising security or hindering our learning experience.

Overall, I've been very impressed with the technical support team's knowledge. We understand they aren't responsible for diagnosing internal network issues; their focus is on supporting their platform and ensuring our connection to network devices. So far, their responsiveness has been excellent.

Prior to implementing Auvik, we experimented with a number of network management solutions. These included PRTG, Domotz, LibreNMS, and the built-in NinjaOne option. We also evaluated SolarWinds. We've explored a wide range of options. Our goal is to find a standardized solution, and we believe Auvik fits the bill. PRTG was expensive so we could only use the free version that only allowed for 1,000 sensors, proving too restrictive for our needs. LibreNMS required a high level of technical expertise for deployment and maintenance, which wasn't feasible for all our technicians. SolarWinds simply didn't meet all our requirements. While NinjaOne is still in active development. We may revisit it in the future. Overall, Auvik strikes the perfect balance between functionality, ease of use, and scalability.

The deployment of Auvik requires installing an agent and some information. The deployment took around one hour. 

Although Auvik is a cloud-based solution, it requires software installation on a computer or server within our network. This initial process can be cumbersome. In our experience, the provided API key wasn't functional, and creating separate API keys isn't an option. Instead, we need to create full user accounts, which feels unnecessarily complex.

Once the connector is installed, the user interface presents challenges. Management credentials and network scanning configurations are located in separate areas. While the deployment section attempts to consolidate these settings, it becomes irrelevant after the initial setup. Ideally, the interface should streamline the initial configuration process, instead of requiring users to navigate through various menus.

Another concern is the requirement for generic credentials. Instead of specifying credentials for each device, we must provide generic ones that are simply tested for functionality. This raises security concerns. These generic credentials are tested against various devices in our environment, even those for which they are not intended. While we trust our security measures, a compromised device could potentially allow the Auvik connector to expose these credentials to unauthorized devices. Ideally, the system should allow for specifying credentials on a per-device basis, eliminating the need for generic credentials and the associated security risks.

The implementation was completed in-house.

I came to a surprising realization about Auvik's pricing. It turns out they only charge for routers and switches! This means all our access points, security cameras, camera servers, and other infrastructure are monitored for free. While the client understandably wanted the server on-site, most other devices are a bonus. This is a huge advantage – with a typical network, we might have one firewall, three switches, and 60-70 access points. With Auvik, we only pay for the four core devices, bringing the cost down significantly. In my opinion, Auvik could advertise this benefit more clearly. Many other platforms charge for every device, so Auvik's free monitoring for a large portion of the network is a game-changer. It not only helped us make the decision but also benefits non-profits we support. The fact that they're confident enough in their platform to offer this makes Auvik a truly valuable and supportive solution.

In the end, we were deciding between Domotz and Auvik. Auvik's initial pricing structure was a concern. Their tiered system required a minimum number of devices per tier to get a reasonable price. While their desire to be profitable is understandable, this presented a hurdle for us. However, Auvik impressed us with their willingness to work with us. They emphasized that they wouldn't lose a customer solely on price, as long as open communication existed. This flexibility in finding a solution was a major factor in our decision. Another reason we chose Auvik was the user interface and user experience. We found Auvik's interface to be superior to Domotz's. Additionally, Auvik's pricing based on individual devices, rather than NetFlow, was a significant advantage. This meant we wouldn't be penalized for devices with minimal traffic or high port counts. From a business standpoint, this eliminated the need to constantly monitor billing for small variations in device usage. With Auvik, we pay a fixed cost per device and receive all the necessary features, regardless of its size or complexity. Consistent and predictable billing was another key consideration in our choice.

Auvik Network Management gets a solid eight out of ten from me. While the network maps and user interface could be improved, the software delivers exactly what we need out of the box. It connected to our devices seamlessly and provided valuable analytics data and information logging. The setup process was straightforward, and the learning curve wasn't steep.

We're currently in the early stages of implementing Auvik, which means our existing software is still operational. To ensure a smooth transition, we typically allow a three-to-four-month overlap period for new software before fully integrating it into production. While I've been the primary user so far and can provide initial insights, our help desk technicians haven't yet been granted access to Auvik.

There is a minimal amount of maintenance required, primarily for alerts. The default settings include alerts for all devices, but not all of them are relevant to our needs. We simply need to adjust these defaults. Aside from that, the system is truly "set it and forget it." It will notify us of any problems, and as an IT company, we have internal procedures to log in and investigate any alerts. However, there is no ongoing maintenance required after the initial installation.

Setting up Auvik is smoothest when your network devices are already configured for SNMP. If you're unsure about your equipment's SNMP settings or lack a configuration altogether, take some time to familiarize yourself with your devices before proceeding. Having your device credentials readily available will also expedite the process. As long as both SNMP logging and credentials are prepared, Auvik deployment becomes a breeze. However, investing a few minutes to learn the Auvik interface beforehand will pay off in the long run. A grasp of the interface will make Auvik exceptionally user-friendly and position it as a powerful and functional solution for your needs.

I use Auvik to create a network topology map for my business, which also serves as a monitoring tool for any downtime or issues within our company's network infrastructure. As a production company, we require continuous operation, so a tool like Auvik provides valuable visual insight even when I'm not physically present.

We previously had a basic alerting system in place, but it was not sufficient when we experienced networking issues within one of our two buildings. Often, it was unclear which cables were connected to which devices and where the connections led. Auvik, unlike other tools I've used, excels at visualizing these connections, making it easier for me to identify the source of the problem.

Auvik's interface is one of the most intuitive interfaces I've used.

The ease of use makes troubleshooting network issues easier and faster.

Auvik's network map and dashboard offer a real-time overview of our network. I rely on it daily, starting my workday by checking it for any potential issues and then adjusting my priorities accordingly.

I found the dashboard very easy to understand and easy to manipulate and customize.

The network map dashboard typically provides me with full network visibility. I haven't encountered any instances where something wasn't displayed within the network from Auvik's perspective. Even for devices where I haven't explicitly provided credentials, Auvik still manages to identify and display them, ensuring comprehensive network visibility.

I am the only technician that uses Auvik in my organization and it has empowered me to come up with better solutions to solving our tickets.

Auvik has helped decrease our mean time to resolution.

Auvik's value became immediately apparent when we needed to investigate an issue causing a server cluster to intermittently shut down. Auvik accurately detected and reported the problem, pinpointing the exact location and nature of the fault, including the specific port experiencing instability. This information was invaluable in resolving the issue quickly. We have encountered other scenarios where Auvik's responsiveness surpasses even our power distribution units. For example, in an instance of power loss within a specific room, Auvik alerted us significantly faster than the PDU itself. This enhanced speed significantly improves our ability to react to critical situations.

Auvik allows me to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution. 

The cloud monitoring portion of Auvik that provides visibility into each piece of my infrastructure is the most valuable feature.

The use of a mobile app would be very beneficial because sometimes I cannot access a computer. Additionally, I believe that more monitoring could be done on certain devices, especially since we have credentials for them. Ideally, there should be more comprehensive monitoring for endpoints, such as switches, firewalls, workstations, and even servers. Support for other hypervisors would also be valuable.

I have been using Auvik for just over one year.

The Auvik website experiences occasional stability issues, which may coincide with their frequent maintenance windows. Although they perform maintenance at least once a week, my monitoring has not identified any significant delays in reporting.

Auvik is highly scalable. While the price does increase as it scales up, it is remarkably easy to deploy, even to new sites. I have done this myself. I have also restructured the network topology twice since I started using Auvik, simply to improve organization, and it remains very easy to scale or adapt the configuration.

Previously, I used PRTG. The main differences between PRTG and Auvik are the user interface being much easier to navigate, and Auvik being much more intuitive in indicating what it can and cannot scan, as well as what it is currently scanning. With PRTG, we had to manually select and choose what we wanted to be monitored, which required a significant amount of setup time. In contrast, I found Auvik to be much easier to set up and get running quickly.

The previous solution lacked many features that Auvik provides. For instance, it didn't offer bandwidth or power consumption monitoring. We needed to go into specific devices and enable reporting for each one individually, like for power devices such as rack-mounted APCs or PDUs. Usually, configuring these devices requires manual intervention. Auvik automatically discovers and monitors them, allowing me to access reports directly through its interface. This information, combined with other reports like server power-down events, helps me map the order of events during a system crash. I can analyze which devices failed first and work my way back using the network map and alerts. No other tool offers such ease of use and diagnostic capabilities as Auvik's built-in features once a device is connected.

Furthermore, Auvik provides extensive functionality for firewalls and network switches. The configuration backup feature, which was a key factor in our decision to purchase the software, is unparalleled. It securely stores configurations in the cloud, enabling quick redeployment and comparison between backup points to identify changes. Additionally, it allows for easy reversion to previous configurations if necessary.

We encountered a scenario where an older switch in our server room lost power. Auvik notified me of this event, and the switch automatically reverted to an older firmware version. Recovering the lost firmware required redeploying a configuration file, which was readily available through Auvik. Restoring the configuration was a simple click away. This incident highlighted how Auvik goes beyond mere monitoring by actively facilitating troubleshooting.

The initial setup was incredibly simple. I was brought into an onboarding meeting with just two or three others, and within a couple of weeks, I had a firm grasp of the platform. I also took advantage of the excellent training offered. 

The integrator would answer any questions I had, but for the most part, I was directed to their knowledge base. This prompted me to take the courses they offered, including a certification for the tool. Completing these courses on my own proved to be much more efficient than waiting to schedule meetings with the integrator. Consequently, I was able to learn the tool independently.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The pricing is very good. It's extremely competitive and I've shopped around on Auvik to see if there were cheaper solutions like Traverse, and there's no comparing the pricing. No one can beat their pricing right now.

Auvik monitors my core switches free of charge. I only pay for my firewalls.

I evaluated SolarWinds and another solution, but neither met my needs because they required extensive setup. Auvik, on the other hand, simplifies the process significantly. As a single person in my department responsible for the entire infrastructure, networking, cybersecurity, and other tasks, I rely on efficient tools. Auvik allowed me to seamlessly integrate into my new workplace and gain immediate visibility into the entire environment. Implementing the other tools would have been a much more time-consuming process. Auvik offered a smoother, faster, and easier implementation within my company.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of ten.

Maintenance on Auvik is only performed when we are aware of downtime. The only reason I have ever needed to perform maintenance on Auvik is to unmanage devices that are looping alerts. While troubleshooting, I may occasionally need to make changes to Auvik, but there are very few day-to-day tasks required. Once configured, Auvik requires minimal maintenance.

For anyone evaluating Auvik, my advice is this: understand that while this tool won't fix problems on its own, it will help you diagnose and solve issues more efficiently and logically. It provides a visual representation of your network that you wouldn't normally see unless you were physically present in the server room. But with Auvik, you have this vital visibility from anywhere you have a computer. That's a major benefit in itself. Additionally, Auvik is very quick to set up and easy to deploy. You can be up and running in as little as a week, which is a significant advantage over other network monitoring solutions.

We use it for insight into an entire network, all the devices on it, and for monitoring their health. We also have it hooked into our ticketing system for automated ticket generation from any of the devices that we need to manage.

The benefit is the ability to monitor and react to issues on devices that we manage. I've existed in this organization for eight years and it has scaled up tremendously. That wouldn't have been possible without a tool like this. That has been the most powerful part, the ability to scale up an organization from managing a couple of hundred endpoints to tens of thousands of endpoints.

It also definitely clears out a lot of repetitive tasks, reducing them by between 20 and 30 percent. It helps us attend to issues much faster, scaling up the availability of our entire team by a lot. They're not spending time doing things that are manual and unnecessary anymore. Our team is 10 percent more available. And with Auvik, there has clearly been a reduction in our MTTR, in the 20 to 30 percent range.

Another advantage is the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. That's pretty important, although it depends on who we're talking about on the team. It primarily impacts the more senior network engineers. It's definitely helpful for them. So the importance of the visibility it provides, overall, is somewhere in the middle range.

It's helpful for delegating low-level tasks to junior staff. They don't have to have the education that would typically be necessary for understanding individual products. It does some of the heavy lifting for them and presents things in an easy-to-understand way for someone who is not necessarily as technically inclined as they would otherwise have to be. There are a lot of tasks that we wouldn't give to our junior techs if we didn't have a tool like Auvik.

And the fact that it keeps our device inventories up to date saves us time. That's a use case I didn't mention, but it's a huge piece of what we use Auvik for.

I like the user interface and the fact that it generates a map automatically of any network that you are trying to manage. That's pretty valuable, as is the ability to hook it into all the devices and keep an eye on their health.

It's a really useful tool for visualizing network topology mapping. When I first started using it, it definitely wasn't as powerful as it is now. There were some issues with it performance-wise and with how it mapped things, but now it's become very useful, with a very accurate visualization of what's occurring on a system or network.

It also has a single web console and it integrates with other tools. That's very important because it's pretty cumbersome when you have a bunch of consoles that you need to go to. Being able to narrow it down to as few consoles as possible is definitely paramount.

It's very intuitive. It does a good job of showing you individual nodes on the network and their relative positions to one another, with pertinent details on each node, all in one location. And it provides easy accessibility to drill down into each node and get more specifics on them.

There is some difficulty using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. If I were to rate it out of 10, I would say it's a seven or eight, on the "difficulty" scale, to set it up properly and in a way that's useful. It's not outside of a normal difficulty range for a tool like this, but there is definitely an amount of overhead required there.

The user interface could be tweaked in a few different ways to make it a little bit more intuitive when it comes to navigating through the menus. 

Also, getting remotely connected to managed devices could be a little bit smoother. Sometimes, it's a little bit cumbersome trying to do that. If they could streamline the facilitating of remote connections to network devices, that would be an improvement.

I've been using Auvik for about six years.

I've only had a few hiccups here and there. The stability is an eight or a nine out of 10. It has been pretty reliable.

It has really done great in scaling up according to our needs.

In the company that I'm with now, we have it deployed in up to a couple of thousand networks and to a lot of different devices. I don't know what the specific device count is because we've come to a point where we've handed that off to a specific automation team that is there to manage Auvik and a couple of our other tools. There is a lot in our Auvik system right now.

I've had contact with their technical support multiple times. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks, or no applications at all, which was something of a mess. It's definitely helpful to unify a lot of different tools in one spot. Switching to Auvik has saved us 15 percent of our time.

Because Auvik is ubiquitous, it's useful for a lot of different network devices. Before we had a tool like Auvik, I'm not even sure that a tool like this existed in the managed services industry. We would use either the vendor-supplied tools for managing specific vendor network devices or something muddled together out of Microsoft's software, like Excel or Access, to try to manage everything.

Overall, the setup is pretty straightforward. It's just time-consuming to get it set up to a point where it's maximally functional. It's not complex, though.

We're continuously rolling it out to clients as we pull new clients in and build out new networks. Once the Auvik code is implemented, the amount of time it takes before network mapping starts to populate depends completely on the network side. It has varied over the last six years that I've been using it, but it doesn't take longer than I would have expected.

I've seen value in the product, absolutely. I don't think that we could operate as a business on the level that we do without something like Auvik. It's done what we needed to do and it hasn't caused us any reason to start looking for any other solution to replace it.

When comparing network monitoring solutions, if there is concern about pricing you really need to assess where you're at in your company and decide how much value a platform like this would bring to you. Sometimes, it's not always apparent how much time you're actually spending on the types of tasks and functions that Auvik can provide. 

Check the knowledge base articles because they're very helpful, and don't be afraid to use the forums as well because the people are very responsive there.

We are a multinational company in almost 55 countries. One of the reasons why we selected Auvik was we wanted to have insights into our networks. Ultimately, we can control them at a central level. Auvik was the best fit because it has:

1. A cloud-based solution using a SaaS model. 
2. Visibility into end users using tools. 
3. Terminal auto-connect, where we can connect devices from Auvik. 
4. Some sort of an audit. 
5. Backup consultations in the tool, which it maintains. 

It has really eased our life in terms of network operations.

It is improving our network operations in 55 countries, including the US, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. 

Auvik automatically updates network topology. Since it automatically updates the topology, we proactively know what is happening in a country or our branch offices. It also alerts us if there is a topology change, e.g., if it discovers anything new in that country. So, it has reduced the number of failures in our operations. We went from being reactive to proactive. So, we are no longer reacting to what is happening and others are doing. This has saved us about two to three hours a day. We used to spend two to three hours every morning checking the firewall and router logs for malicious behavior.

The automation of network mapping enables our junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. The type of views that we have Auvik automatically discovering has helped our operations, as issues get resolved at Level 1 or 2 with the help of the topology. They don't go to Level 3 until they are serious. 

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution. Around three years back, there always used to be a heavy load on Level 3. Nowadays, in a month, there are maximum two tickets that reach Level 3. They all get sorted out in Level 1 and 2.

The most valuable feature is the auditing part. Whenever we are doing any changes, it captures those changes. Date-wise, if we want to refer back to them, we just need to view the date when we did those changes and it will give us a comparison of what has been changed from the last concept. 

The Auvik terminal's service is a value-add to our operations.

It is very user-friendly. It is easy to use, understand, and deploy. My guys have not taken any training from Auvik, but we have learned the systems quite quickly. Because it is user-friendly, you don't need professional training for it.

Auvik's network discovery capabilities are awesome. It not only discovers the network, but it also gives you a map by designing how your network will look like in your environment.

Auvik has very good alerting modules. If a connection or device goes down, it alerts us right away. A good part of that alert is it has some sort of intelligence mechanism. For example, if the router or network device has some sort of malicious activity or critical issue, then it alerts us upfront. It will say, "Hey, you have some issues that you might need to check." It alerts us to critical elements before something bad happens. 

They need to improve the reporting system. They still don't have a proper reporting system in Auvik. They have built a dashboard in Power BI using APIs, but they should build some sort of report within Auvik itself. If Auvik fixes the reporting or comes up with a good reporting module, it will change the game.

I have already talked with the CEO of Auvik about this. He agreed that he will be working on getting some reporting systems in Auvik. As of now, they only have reporting via Power BI, and it is an additional cost to get the Power BI licenses. Another drawback, the Power BI reporting is not that accurate and you really have to struggle to get the reports.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

It is a SaaS-based tool. Auvik takes care of their hosting environment. So far, I found this solution to be more stable compared to other tools that we have used on-premises.

The scalability is good. An important thing about Auvik is that this tool is available from anywhere. For example, we are in a pandemic situation today and forced to work from home. Auvik gives us the capability to do our network operations from anywhere. This is one of the important features that I like about Auvik. For the on-premise solution, you have to make sure you are in the company network and have the VPN connected with the resources.

In my department, we have 46 people using it.

We are expanding Auvik into other countries. For now, we have expanded it into Europe and Asia as well as starting to expand it into the US. So, we will have a long journey using Auvik.

Their technical support is good. They need some improvement. They are not quick. Whenever we raised an issue with Auvik, which was two or three times, the technical support was a bit slow in responding to our issues.

We used to manage the firewall and routers manually, connecting to the countries' VPN. Today, we don't need to have them connected. We can just manage it from a single Auvik console. This has really changed our network operations. 

The initial setup is an easy, straightforward process. You just need to download the Auvik collector, and it is just three steps: next, next, and next. Then, it is complete. From the employee perspective, it saves you at least four to five hours. Other tools take people  a working day to deploy one site. Whereas, Auvik takes just a few minutes. The reason for that is they have their automated discovery capabilities, where you just put in your SNMP credentials.

I deployed myself in five minutes.

Three years ago, we used to work out of the office for hours doing maintenance, like patching and upgrading tools. My guys are no longer doing night duty for operations like that. We don't do any maintenance on Auvik because it is done by Auvik.

Compared to other products, Auvik's pricing is more feasible since you get all its features. You pay for licenses on a per network device basis. It monitors hypervisors, but does not bill for that. There are no additional costs, which is something that I like.

We did evaluate a couple of tools, both on-premises and cloud, then we decided to go with Auvik.

Auvik works smoothly compared to other tools. It also discovers the entire network in a respective area, then Auvik maps it automatically and gives you a good topology. This was a key factor in our decision.

Auvik is for any networking department. If you have a very complex network or a lot of devices that need to be monitored, Auvik would be the best fit. Auvik is not for a simple environment. If you have 10 devices or 10 branch/site offices, then Auvik is not a good fit because it will become expensive.

We are still in the testing phase of the TrafficInsights feature, which gives you full visibility into what is happening on your network. Also, the TrafficInsights feature will help you to say where protocols or services are consumed heavily. In the long run, it helps you to optimize your bandwidth based on your country consumption. It gives you a lot of details and integrated traffic insight, which we unfortunately need to hold back on because of data protection laws. 

It doesn't configure out-of-the-box automatically. That is a manual job.

For an enterprise environment, I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.