Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We are demoing Auvik to see if it makes sense for us to implement. As a managed service provider, we are utilizing it to monitor our clients' networks, perform inventory of devices, and diagnose and troubleshoot network issues.

I wouldn't say that we couldn't do business without Auvik, but it's a way for us to be more profitable because it cuts down on the total hours it takes to service our clients. We gain efficiency in areas that, otherwise, would have been manual tasks. We're no longer spending a lot of time manually digging into each network device when there is an issue. We can easily track down where something is happening.

We've benefited from better efficiency as well as from better clarity into issues, sometimes even before they happen. Before a client is calling or beating down our doors saying things are down, we usually have an alert from Auvik saying there's a problem. When I'm able to pick up the phone and say, "Oh yeah, I'm already aware that you have a network outage," that is very helpful.

We have a more accurate view of everything going on within our clients' networks. Our clients are located across the United States and being able to easily view what's going on in their networks, and have alerting on top of that, is very helpful. That visibility is very important because of the way we are leveraging Auvik, which is for detecting and alerting us about issues before a client contacts us about them. Auvik is how we're being notified when there's an issue, ideally in a proactive manner. We can remediate the issue before any downtime is noticed by a customer. It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution.

It also keeps device inventories up to date. Ensuring an accurate inventory is one of the key components of our service to customers. Our business model is focused on consumption, so we need to have an accurate count of our customers' devices so that we can give them an accurate bill. Knowing that we have 100 percent accuracy on what devices are stuck to their networks is critical. The fact that Auvik does it automatically cuts down on the time we spend managing that aspect. It saves us a couple of hours per month per engineer. The customer is happy, our billing team is happy, and we don't have to spend cycles doing it. It's just a triple-win situation.

Also, because Auvik is in the cloud, we can troubleshoot with it from anywhere. Whereas, when dealing with an on-prem solution, if something's wrong with the internet coming in and I'm remote, I can't troubleshoot it or fix it. It's a different methodology and I feel that it is Auvik's special sauce. Because it's built around the cloud, it allows for a better, holistic view of what's going on and helps identify where the problems are. If you're on a broken network and you're trying to work on that network, it's very difficult.

The inventory and audit features are the most valuable. We are able to get a good map of everything in a network. Some clients don't know what they have or own, and having a tool that can compile all of that is a beneficial aspect of the solution. It cuts down on the number of hours required to search for things, because if you don't know what you don't know, you can miss things. Auvik is truly going to discover everything that is connected to the network. It gives us peace of mind and cuts down on the number of hours it takes to onboard a client.

We usually devote approximately an hour of time to onboarding a client environment. What that entails is gathering some basic information about passwords, SNMP credentials, et cetera. Being able to spend just an hour to get everything captured is pretty effective.

It is incredibly easy to use when it comes to its monitoring and management functions.

And it's incredibly important, given our work as a managed service provider, to have a single pane of glass environment. That is very crucial to being able to identify and diagnose issues with a network and fix them promptly. We don't have to log in to 15 different devices to track down how things are connected.

We've used different tools in the past for mapping network topology and we've also done it manually. The fact that Auvik is able to create a network map that is accurate and to do it automatically with its collector is supremely helpful. 

Since I last used the product about eight months ago, all of the things that I had complaints about have been fixed by Auvik.

One thing I would like to see is more functionality designed for managed services, such as multi-tenancy, to better manage things from an MSP perspective.

I have used Auvik for three different employers. I began using it four to five years ago.

I have never seen an outage with it. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to be on all the time.

It scales very well. You just install collectors on the different segments of your network where you need them, and it pieces everything else together in the background. It's really as scalable as you need it to be.

I have only had to deal with tech support once and they were able to identify what my issue was and referred me to their documentation platform for the resolution. If I had bothered to just read the documentation first, I wouldn't have needed to even have opened a ticket because they already had my issue fully documented. 

It was excellent support because not only did they know the answer, but they had proactively documented it and had it available even before I needed to ask the question. It was a good experience.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks before Auvik. Having switched, we are saving a lot of time, at least 10 hours per client-onboarding.

At my previous employer, we were using SolarWinds. The main and direct reason we made the switch is that SolarWinds had a gigantic breach. We've tested and talked through the security of Auvik's backend and we feel that it meets the various security controls that we needed to have implemented.

SolarWinds was, if I recall correctly, double the cost of Auvik. We gained cost savings and security by switching to Auvik. Also, when we were using SolarWinds, we had to have a dedicated SolarWinds server, whereas with Auvik, we do not need to have a server, we just have to have a collector device. And that device can be a "potato computer." We don't need a lot of resources or compute available to run the collector. We don't have to maintain a server or licensing or any of that other nonsense for the collector.

The initial setup was incredibly easy and easy to follow. They have a guide with very detailed and in-depth instructions for how to proceed. They also have detailed, in-depth instructions for every device on my network and how to get it talking to the Auvik collector. They provide very verbose, detailed instructions for how to make the tool work with a multitude of products.

For example, we had a WatchGuard device that was not communicating properly. I was able to go to the Auvik knowledge base, read through their troubleshooting article, and resolve it with some simple steps that they had documented.

For our implementation, it took maybe three minutes, after the collector code was implemented, until the network started to populate.

We have it deployed for multiple departments and multiple teams with a single location and a site-for-site VPN to another location. We have the collector installed on a VM in a Windows Server environment. It's connected to our switches and pulls through all the data.

With my previous company, we saw time to value within six months. With my current company, we're looking at closer to a year or a year and a half to break even with an investment in Auvik, but that's because of the clients we're working with.

Auvik is probably one of the more expensive options on the market for what it does. But if, as a managed services provider, you are working with clients that have large networks with large numbers of network devices, you can find efficiency to be gained that will make that value up.

It's been a harder sell for my current company because we are a very small MSP, and I don't know if we're going to be able to afford it overall. I know that the value is there, but when you have smaller clients that can't afford an extra few dollars a month, maybe it's not the right tool for them.

I think that Auvik is perfectly suited for a mid-range business model where there are many network devices or many networks that are segmented and connected in different locations. There is a ton of value in that scenario. Or, if you don't have a good inventory tool, the fact that Auvik builds that inventory has been really huge for our team. It cuts down on what tasks need to be done and allows for true transparency and knowing, 100 percent, that we have everything inventoried. We don't ever have to question what we see on Auvik, we know it's accurate every time. And that has helped us increase our billables because, before, we would have network devices that weren't being detected, but we were supporting them and not billing for them. Depending on your model for your managed services, there might be some ways to increase your billings.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing Auvik. That was mostly because Auvik was already in that magic quadrant. We just picked the tool and ran with it because we needed to be fast. We didn't have the luxury of time, we had to make a decision promptly.

Auvik's network visualization is intuitive to somebody whose job it is to work in that environment. It is not intuitive to someone who is a C-level executive. I would not want them to be looking at the tool. It's highly technical data. When you are a technical person you get the information you need. But if you're not technical, it's too much data. Don't use it as what you're going to present to a C-level. Use it to fix the problems and then make a different diagram to hand out to C-levels.

We have not leveraged a lot of the automation functionality within Auvik. We have not been able to use the tool to its fullest extent. We're gaining in that we can easily get the information we need, but we haven't leveraged the automation.

We are a small company of about 15 people. We do open-source kernel development for lab machines. We have about 100 of these machines and they are all connected using smart routers. However, it is hard to monitor the routers' states.

We do open-source driver development as a contractor for other companies that may have licensing issues. We write the open-source network drivers for Linux and other open-source operating systems. That is the reason we need good network monitoring software: so that we know where there are problems in our network drivers. If the network drivers produce very bad network traffic, we need to know the first time. We have a lot of test devices, laptops, running in our lab, and they are currently monitored by Auvik, and we are very satisfied.

Before we got Auvik, we had to write scripts to get every device's state, to see the upload speed and download speeds, and whether there was any abnormal download or upload bandwidth. Because we develop network drivers, these are very important metrics for us, so that we know if there is any bad traffic in our network. Previously, we had to update our scripts every time there was an update to our routers' firmware. And if we had to update our requirements, we needed to rewrite the scripts and redeploy them on all of our routers. That required a lot of manual work. Auvik helped us eliminate that work.

Previously, when we managed the system, we needed to write our own script to run a single command on all the routers. Now, we can do that on the console. We can select everything and run a single command for all the devices with a single click.

A lot of tasks used to be repetitive work, like for new-device support. One of the really great points about Auvik is that it helps to reduce all that toil, including debugging scripts and maintaining them for the latest version.

The most important thing is that you can control everything, every device, all at once. As a unified platform, it handles all kinds of devices and all kinds of brands. If we decided to buy a new brand of router, we wouldn't need to check the manual and write new configuration scripts or record configuration macros ourselves. Auvik handles everything for us.

Before Auvik, we used multiple applications for managing things. Every week, we save hours. Previously, we spent a lot of time watching dashboards to see what went wrong. When a bug would occur, we would need to dump all the logs and look at everything. Now, we can usually diagnose everything within 30 minutes to an hour. It is saving three to four software-engineer-hours per week. That is a lot.

Auvik saves time and effort for our IT team. We can automate more things with the help of Auvik. It makes our team more available, always. It not only helps with availability of the software engineers on the IT team but with the availability of all our IT people. It has eliminated a lot of low-level tasks. And sometimes, it could be reducing work for senior engineers. Some of our issues can be hard to resolve, especially when dealing with the in-lab hardware. It can be hairy. Those weekly hours can be better used for the introduction of new devices or maintaining the high availability of our devices better. We can focus on expanding our labs a lot. It makes us more scalable, overall.

One of the most valuable features is the remote monitoring. It monitors the egress and ingress bandwidth and you can add custom rules to monitor if something is wrong. You can also add your own metrics if needed.

Auvik provides us with a unified management console. It is a website that displays all your routers, network switches, and devices connected to that router. You can easily see everything in that single dashboard.

You can use rule-based or simple, program-based monitoring to see if there is any abnormal traffic. 

It has good support for our devices, including our routers and Ethernet switches that come from the major brands. We are using Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, and Auvik has very good support for them. And it has pretty good support for other major brands like Netgear and TP-Link, as well. One of the reasons we choose Auvik is because the devices we currently use overlap with its list of supported devices.

Overall, the monitoring and management functions of Auvik are easy to use, but at times they seem oversimplified. Sometimes, we need more complicated scripting. Only using the basic logical rules like AND or OR or NOT is not enough. It can make the rules too complicated.

Also, when you load the Auvik website, it shows the topology. From my experience, it is mostly accurate. When we configured our network, there were some mismatches between the automatically-detected network topology and the actual topology. Some of the devices were not detected or were not supported by Auvik. We were able to manually modify things and everything has worked well since then.

Another issue is that to use Auvik you have to have a dedicated machine, either a virtual or Windows machine. Auvik continuously listens to the devices to look for all the devices on the network. This is a problem because it is a single point of failure. If that machine fails, all the functionality of Auvik stops. We can have redundant nodes, but it is still a problem.

Another problem is that it only works on Intel processors. Some of our machines do not use Intel processors. This was a problem initially because we had to get a new machine that runs the Auvik service. I would like to see it support more platforms and operating systems.

We started the 14-day trial plan this summer, and then we decided to purchase a license. So we have been fully using it for four or five months.

So far, the uptime has been really ideal.

Performance-wise, it's also good. For our use cases the monitoring machine is just a server, but it is not that powerful. It uses a lot of networking I/O, but it hasn't caused any network congestion.

It is scalable.

We have not been in touch with their technical support that often, but on occasion. Most of the team is in Toronto or the Eastern Time Zone and we are located in the Pacific Time Zone. But they are pretty responsive and their technical support team is pretty professional and reliable.

Positive

We didn't use any solution other than our own scripts to maintain the network.

As the head of IT, I led the work of deploying Auvik. It is straightforward because you use a new machine to run Auvik. It still needs to be part of the same VLAN as the other devices, but we didn't see any real glitches.

Our deployment is just a single location and we only use it for our lab devices. The lab has multiple layers of switches, Layer 3 switches, and routers, and all the test devices are managed over SNMP and Intel vPro.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping went pretty fast. After it started running, it populated almost immediately, within minutes. But to get it fully propagated and have every device fully scanned took a while. That was expected.

We did our test of Auvik in a physically isolated, small testing network during the trial period. When we actually deployed it in our prod environment, it went pretty smoothly. We followed the playbook and it worked well.

The time that Auvik takes to search all the devices and get everything propagated is average or slightly above average. If there is a device update, for example, and a router reboots, it could take a while for it to be rediscovered by Auvik. I think that is because the frequency with which Auvik checks devices is pretty limited. If it worked otherwise, it would make the whole network congested. So the speed of checking devices is throttled and that means it could take minutes to get the latest state of devices. But once everything is online, you get real-time information.

We haven't had to do any maintenance on Auvik itself.

We did it ourselves and we didn't run into any issues. We had two software engineers involved.

We have only used it for a few months, but in the future we are going to expand our testing-devices fleet. We are going to double our number of testing devices. For most of the tests, the waiting time will be cut in half. Developers will spend less time waiting for tests to finish running everything and spend more time on actual development.

It is on a monthly subscription plan and it's charged by the device. We decided to use it for a year, first, to see how good it is.

PRTG Network Monitor and LogicMonitor were quite a bit more expensive compared to our current solution. Some of the other solutions we looked at are one-time purchases, but they are longer-term investments. For our projects, Auvik is more elastic. Per router, per month, it is a fixed price. We negotiated and got a more competitive price.

We did shop around for other network monitors to see what the best option was before we decided to buy Auvik. We tried PRTG Network Monitor and we tried LogicMonitor, but both are pretty focused on automatic network monitoring using protocols that are common to all devices, like SNMP. 

Auvik attracted us because of two things. One was that it is easy to configure. You don't need to set up your own web server or something like that. There is a trade-off there. If you do everything yourself, you own all the data within your network. However, that scenario is more vulnerable to external threats. But if you give all the network topology to websites like Auvik, there could be some privacy or security concerns. We did an evaluation and it seemed that Auvik would be a reliable partner for us.

The second thing that attracted us was Auvik's pricing, which is pretty competitive.

In terms of deployment, Auvik is a mixed model. You don't need to buy a dedicated machine from Auvik, but you need something that can run the Auvik monitor, whether it is a Docker instance or just a physical machine. We chose to use a physical machine mostly for security. That gives us better physical isolation from the rest of our network and makes it easier to manage and monitor if an attack were to occur.

As a very small company with a limited IT team, we found that Auvik is really helpful when you don't have a large IT team to do a lot of things. A lot of tasks can be done by Auvik and it will really help automate things.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization provided by Auvik is an eight or nine out of 10. There are some glitches, but it is easy to handle.

On the whole, it is a good solution. There are some issues, but I'm really satisfied.

I use Auvik in a couple of ways. It is very good at keeping configuration files organized for us. We can review the changes to configuration files in our networking infrastructure equipment. It is also very good at creating maps and helping me visualize the troubleshooting of any infrastructure problems we have. 

By implementing Auvik Network Management, we were trying to get better visuals on our network and more transparency in our equipment because Auvik could talk to all of it. It was sort of agnostic. It did not require using a certain brand or anything. As long as you can SSH to it or terminal to it somehow, Auvik can read it.

At first, it was definitely just a new toy to play with, but I saw its benefits the first time we were trying to sort through an infrastructure problem with a Wi-Fi network that was older and having issues. We saw several warnings on several of our older switches. We would not have seen this stuff unless we had gone into these switches and read through these logs on our own, but Auvik was holding this data and giving us these warnings so that we could go in and sort out what was wrong.

It gives me all of my infrastructure points very well because I have programmed it to do so. In terms of individual endpoints or workstations for users, the visibility is not as excellent, but it is still good enough. We do not use the tool for that. For our purposes, it is a very clean interface.

Auvik has 100% helped to decrease our mean time to resolution. If I was not using Auvik to troubleshoot infrastructure problems, I would easily be adding another hour of work per problem or using another tool that was doing this. Everything is in one place, so I do not have to jump to different places to see the information. I can very easily filter through warnings and information.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on issue resolution but not on the setup and maintenance of the solution. Any time that we save allows us to do more research into something else that we are doing. There is always a value-add in shrinking troubleshooting time.

The interface is very good. I generally do not have any complaints about it. It takes me where I want to go and is easy to learn.

The dashboard is very easy to use if you set it up correctly at the beginning. We have it all labeled the way we want it to be labeled, and everything is quickly navigable. We can see all of our different locations. We can see any locations that have errors on our map so that we know exactly what to poke at and what to take a look at today. I have no complaints. With big networks, it does become cramped, but there are filters built into the map. I filter out the points I do not want displayed on the map, and then it is very readable.

There are a couple of items here and there that float around disconnected from the network map. That is annoying because they are defined as something that they are not. For example, I have a couple of workstations that it thinks are Wi-Fi access points, and it is a hard and tricky item to clean up. The cleanup or more granular functionality of the network map would be an interesting feature.

If there was a way to do some sort of remote desktop control for endpoints from Auvik, that would be an interesting feature because we have another product that we use for endpoint control to remote into somebody's computer. If Auvik had that, we might move from the other tool into the product that Auvik would offer. We already have that from Auvik to infrastructure devices, which is awesome, but if I could go one step further or one step down right to the workstation that has an issue, that would be a very interesting thing.

I have used it for at least three or four years.

It is better than it ever was. I feel like it was laggier when we first jumped on with Auvik, but over the last year, I have not even thought about any lag or stuttering.

It can be as big as it needs to be for us, but I am only familiar with how it is for us. It met our scale, and ours is medium.

The quality of support is very good. Everybody I have ever talked to in tech support over there or in training is very familiar with Auvik and very comfortable navigating people around it. They have a lot of confidence and capability. I am never disappointed in support.

Positive

For me, Auvik is pretty unique. I have not used many tools that:

• Create a map the way that Auvik does
• Have the configuration review that Auvik has
• Have SSH or terminal access to the tools that Auvik has

Auvik is all in one. I have used SNMP collectors and things but never had another tool like this.

It is deployed in the cloud. Its deployment was easy.

It was not very long to get it fully deployed. The training was longer than the deployment.

We had no consultant. It was Auvik and us.

You can set up Auvik with one person. As long as there is somebody from Auvik with you to do the training, you can set up the collectors yourself, for sure. 

In terms of maintenance, Auvik requires some review for the number of devices it is counting. We had an issue last year where we saw that Auvik was double-counting some of our devices, so we do have to audit the count to make sure that we are not being overcharged.

Auvik is expensive, but given how much we use it and how many hours it is saving over the year, it is justified.

There are no critical devices in our network that are monitored by Auvik at no charge. They are charging for everything. The first page you get to mentions how many devices you are paying for.

Auvik was our first choice because it fitted the use case that we wanted, which was the network control, and not a lot of things. When we started with Auvik, there were not a lot of solutions that offered that, or they were very expensive. Now we are staying with them because it is still good.

Pay attention during the training and definitely play with it after or during the training. Play with your release so that you can ask the questions that are relevant to your network.

We did a demo of SaaS Management with Auvik, and it was very interesting, but the price point was too high for us to justify the capabilities.

I would rate Auvik Network Management a nine out of ten because of the billing thing from last year where we were being double charged. That was disappointing to find out, but we have cleared it up now.

We use it for network management. We use SNMP to get notifications about various issues on our network.

We implemented it because we tried out a free trial. The goal was to get more visibility into our network. I get notifications on everything from printers being low on paper to network cards that are dropping packets. It does a lot of things that otherwise I would not have known about.

It is very easy to use. After you do the initial setup, it is kind of set-it-and-forget-it.

The network map is pretty straightforward. It is like a lot of other discovery applications that I have seen. The network map gives a good visualization of our network as an overview. We can make it larger, and it is easier to see. Our network is pretty well segmented. It shows different switches and things coming out of it. We have got everything segmented very well, so we have not had any issues with it not being able to fit everything in.

I had to have a couple of support sessions to get everything configured correctly. The simple SNMP monitoring was pretty easy for devices using a public tag, but I did have to get some support with the firewalls to get them correctly into the system. I had to make a few configuration changes on the Fortinet firewall to get it to work, but after I got that worked out, the benefits were immediate. Within two days of implementing it, I realized that I had a lot of packet loss on one of our Hyper-V servers, and I was at a loss for what the performance problems were. I immediately found a lot of packet loss on one of the network adapters. I was able to swap that out. That immediately fixed the performance issues we were having with our Hyper-V server.

Auvik has not empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own because this is a one-man shop here. It is just me. I do not use it as much for resolving tickets, but it prevents some tickets from being created because of the notifications I get for various issues. I simply would not know about them otherwise.

As long as everything is cooking along fine, I do not get any alerts. I do not have a lot of false alerts that cause me to waste time. When I do get an alert, it is usually something that is pretty important, and then I can look into it. Oftentimes, it gets resolved before tickets are created by end users.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on the setup and maintenance of the solution and less time on issue resolution. The initial setup took a little bit of time, but it was not anything outrageous. It was not super complicated. For the most part, all the devices were plug-and-play after they were discovered. Firewalls were the only ones that took a little work to get working, but after that, the notifications that I get do save me a lot of time from responding to tickets because oftentimes, I can get things resolved before end users even notice it.

The notifications for events are valuable. If a copier is low on toner, I can get the toner ordered instead of being surprised when it runs out. It saves me from running around and having to check a lot of things. I get notifications based on the alerts that we have configured for it.

There was an issue where I did not have the ability to turn off certain notifications or noise that I did not care about. I worked with the support guys. They showed me how to do it, and I was able to silence notifications on a specific device, which is something that I was having trouble with. I had one device that was getting non-stop notifications about one issue that could not be fixed. It just had to be that way. It was a legacy machine. After working with support, I was able to turn those notifications off specifically for that one device and that specific problem, which I could not find on my own. After they showed me how to do it, I have not had anything to complain about this product.

If anything, the spacing on the network map can be better. In the network map, we have one switch crammed in there. Some improvements in the spacing on the network map would be good.

Their documentation and knowledge base can also be improved.

We have been using Auvik for about a year and a half.

I have seen a couple of emails come through about them doing scheduled maintenance, but other than that, I have not had any issues with any downtime. If they did have any downtime with their cloud application, I did not notice it. I might not have seen any alerts for that short period of time. If they were down, nothing has been to the level that I noticed it.

We only have 150 devices here. We have not had any issues with scalability because we are not that big of a shop.

I have called them two or three times, and each time, they have been able to resolve my issue very quickly. I always try to do things myself using their documentation, but I had a little trouble finding the documentation for my Fortinet FortiGate issues. Another thing that could be improved is their documentation and knowledge base, but in terms of their support personnel and time for them to get a resolution for me and get me up and running, they did a great job.

Positive

I did not use any other product previously. This is the first time I have used this type of product. I do not have anything to compare it to, but I have nothing but good things to say about Auvik.

It is deployed in the cloud. It was super easy to deploy. The Fortinet firewall required some configuration changes on the firewall itself. I did that with the support folks on the line. I was able to do the rest of it on my own without any problems at all. I just had a few issues with the Fortinet firewall.

It was all deployed within one day.

I did it all myself except for the two firewalls. I had to have a support call to get that done.

The pricing is good for what it does. It has been a few months, so I do not remember exactly how much it was. I believe for our network here, it was about 2,000 a year, so the pricing was good.

A lot of printers and things of that nature are not one of the charged devices.

We went directly to Auvik. I got an email about a trial. I installed it and thought how useful it would be to be more proactive than reactive with the types of issues that it spots.

The only advice I have for new users is that if they have Fortinet firewalls, they will have to do some command line configurations to their Fortinet to prepare it to be able to send the alerts to all of it.

I have heard of Auvik's SaaS Management product. They sent me an email about it recently, but I just read the headline of the email and moved on. I do not have a solid understanding of what it does other than maybe keeping track of your software as a service license. I am not familiar with it that much.

I would rate Auvik Network Management a nine out of ten for what we use it for.

We are an MSP and use Auvik Network Management to monitor network sites for our clients, including firewall switches, and other network devices.

We install an Auvik collector on a probe at each client site.

Integrating Auvik Network Management is easy and their support is fantastic, which helps the process.

Auvik provides an intuitive interface. The user-friendly interface makes network troubleshooting quicker.

Auvik's network map, combined with its dashboard, provides us with a more real-time view of our network health. We've even found that sharing this real-time data with our clients has been well-received. Using the network map is extremely easy.

Their network map gives us full network visibility. We don't use any other tools.

Switching to Auvik offered immediate advantages. Not only was it more affordable than our previous solution, but it also proved to be far more reliable. The rollout process was remarkably smooth, standing out as one of the easiest we've ever experienced with any new tool.

Auvik empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own freeing up our senior team member's workloads.

It has helped reduce our mean time to resolution by 85 percent.

Auvik helps us streamline our network management by reducing the time spent on setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting. It provides a quicker and more comprehensive view of the entire network. For instance, we can easily visualize network loops or identify connected devices to specific switches. This significantly reduces the time required to obtain basic network infrastructure information compared to traditional text-based methods. As an MSP supporting multiple clients, Auvik empowers us to share this information and ensure client comprehension quickly.

The integration between Auvik Network Management and Autotask is particularly valuable for us, along with similar integrations with tools like IT Glue. In general, these integrations are helpful.

Our billing structure is device-based, with different service levels offered for each device. Ideally, we'd like Auvik to integrate with Autotask and allow us to set service levels within Auvik e.g., Monitor, Manage, Protect. This would streamline our workflow by automatically syncing these service levels over to Autotask.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two and a half years.

Auvik Network Management is stable.

Auvik Network Management is scalable.

The technical support is fantastic. They are quick to respond. We can chat online or on the phone. The support team knows a lot about the product.

Positive

We previously used LogicMonitor but their pricing went up, and they had promised us an auto-test integration for years that never came. They eventually took it off the road map.

Our Auvik deployment was the smoothest rollout we've ever had for any tool. The deployment took less than one month to complete.

Two people were required for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Auvik is significantly cheaper than what we were using before.

Due to Auvik's licensing structure, I believe there are some devices in our network that we're not currently being charged a license for.

In addition to Auvik, we evaluated Network Glue.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

Auvik requires minimal maintenance. However, the level of effort depends on how we configure network scans. If we choose to set up automatic network scans, there may be occasional maintenance tasks. These might involve removing devices that haven't been detected for a while and verifying that any associated notes are still accurate.

Following the instructions makes using Auvik a simple process.

We use Auvik Network Management to monitor the networks of our clients who subscribe to our network monitoring service. This includes everything from backing up and restoring configurations to maintaining a complete network map.

The interface is incredibly user-friendly for basic tasks. However, more advanced features require some effort to learn and master. Overall, I appreciate the intuitive design that allows me to simply point someone to the interface and say "figure it out," and they can usually do so without much difficulty.

Auvik's configuration backups have been incredibly beneficial. They've saved us on multiple occasions in a pinch. The same goes for remote access - it allows us to troubleshoot issues remotely without having to immediately send someone on-site. We saw these benefits almost right away. We've had some client onboarding experiences that were quite challenging. However, by deploying Auvik, we were able to sort out the devices and identify the issues that same night.

It has empowered our entry-level technicians to resolve more tickets independently. Our company uses a tiered support system, and the help desk is primarily staffed by tier-one technicians whose expertise may not be as strong in networking. However, with Auvik's assistance, they can still identify basic problems, such as a network outage caused by a switch malfunction. In these cases, they can at least diagnose the issue or perform initial troubleshooting before escalating it to the appropriate team.

Auvik has significantly reduced our overall mean time to resolution. In some cases, this improvement is because resolving the issue remotely with Auvik avoids the need to send someone on-site, which could have taken a significant amount of time – up to one or two hours for the drive alone. Thanks to Auvik, we can now resolve these issues in some cases in as little as half the original time, or even a quarter.

Auvik helps us reduce the time spent on setting up maintenance tasks, troubleshooting issues, and resolving them. As the person who performs quarterly network maintenance for our paying clients, Auvik is a game-changer. It allows me to easily export all the necessary information, identify devices that need patching, and get started quickly. This saves me a significant amount of time. Thanks to Auvik, I've been able to reduce the time it takes to complete maintenance tasks from a full month to just two weeks.

Topography mapping is incredibly useful, especially when it's functioning properly. It's important to note that there have been some issues with it in the past. However, when it's working, the map is fantastic for locating even small devices. You can quickly identify the specific switch a device is connected to and troubleshoot issues like port connectivity. Additionally, remote access is incredibly helpful, and I use it frequently.

Recently, the map performance has become incredibly slow, even for small maps. For example, simply changing a device type can take up to five or ten minutes to reflect the change. This seems to be a new issue that has only emerged in the past few weeks.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for three years.

Auvik had been running flawlessly until the past few weeks when we started experiencing incidents where the entire site would crash for a half hour.

Auvik's scalability is great. It allows me to manage multiple sites easily. For example, a client can sign up with 15 sites, and I can simply add their website information and deploy Auvik to all of them in one go.

I frequently contact Auvik's technical support. They are incredibly fast to respond, even if an issue isn't immediately resolved. In those cases, they efficiently escalate the issue to the appropriate team to ensure I get the right answers. For simpler questions, they can quickly direct me to the relevant documentation, often within minutes. Additionally, their communication style is friendly and helpful.

Positive

I am responsible for the Auvik deployments for our clients. These deployments are straightforward. For a typical deployment, excluding any on-site work such as deploying physical collectors for clients without server sites, the process takes less than an hour. This includes entering all credentials, subnets, and other necessary information. The deployment time remains consistent even for larger sites.

Some of our clients have complex network setups, with up to 17 devices. This includes configuring them with all the necessary credentials. I'm currently working on assigning designations to devices that are functioning properly. My meticulousness added about two hours to this task, but overall, it should be completed within half a business day.

I'm generally responsible for deployments. However, if someone else needs to handle them, they can follow the combined documentation – both what I've written and what Auvik provided. It's worth noting that Auvik's documentation is incredibly thorough and helpful.

I evaluated Liongard, but I was not impressed with them.

I'm not entirely sure why our company ultimately chose Auvik, but I've been a strong advocate for keeping it. It offers a wide range of functionalities in a single tool, which is something we lack in other areas. For instance, when we acquired another MSP and integrated it into our system, they were using Liongard. While Liongard serves its purpose, Auvik consolidates all the necessary features into one platform. This provides us with a unified view of our IT infrastructure instead of having to manage separate tools.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

Maintenance for Auvik is minimal.

To ensure a seamless rollout, new users should gather all their documentation and credentials beforehand. Having everything readily available will significantly expedite and smooth the deployment process.

I have 21 different locations in different networks that I have to manage. It gives me the ability to see the devices on the network, to see any troubles, to diagnose and support end-users or get into the network devices that are having issues.

It provides a single integrated platform for everything that I need. I can go and monitor the device, and I can get into the configuration of the device. It's a very powerful tool to have. Having a single integrated platform is very important. I have many tools to use, and to me, the ability to integrate it all into one platform is essential.

Aside from having a unified dashboard, it provides the ability to pick a particular site or a group of sites and see how they are configured and what issue a particular device is having. We are able to drill into that device from this platform, and we don't have to go outside and use different tools to access and get into the device.

It's very intuitive. It's probably the best in terms of getting up and running in short order. I have a team of network professionals who work with me, and we brought them in, and within an hour or two, they had their own dashboard set the way they wanted. So overall, the whole product is intuitive and very easy. It's not difficult.

It has given us a greater amount of visibility that we didn't have before. This visibility is absolutely essential for us. Before that, we would have about four different ways to test. Having it all in one location and one platform is very essential.

The ability to have visibility on a network to see the traffic and the ability to see if devices are misconfigured and if something changes in that configuration, are most valuable.

It's very easy. It's very intuitive. They had me up and running in a matter of hours, so it wasn't a steep learning curve to learn the interface or to learn the controls.

I would like to be able to get a little bit more granularity in turning on and off alerts because I get flooded with alerts. It gives too much information at times.

I've been using it for almost a year.

I haven't had any issues in the year that we've been on it, so it's pretty good.

It's amazing. 

I have not contacted them. 

We used a SolarWinds product. We used some rather rudimentary, built-in network tools. Obviously, there is SNMP, and we would use that through other means, but having it all essentially integrated into Auvik makes a big difference for us in terms of time and ease of use. Switching to Auvik saved us probably 20 hours a week.

It was very straightforward. There was very little in there that did not make sense. I had a great trainer that came in, and we did maybe two or three sessions, and then we were off and running. 

The name of the contractor is Darrell Norton. He works for Sedona Technologies, so we're contracted with them. We met with Darrell and then we went around installing the agents. He assisted with that. We did a lot of that remotely, and then, once the agents were installed, we started building the networks. So, in terms of me getting into the backend and programming, I did none of that.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping started to populate
almost instantaneously. Each site took maybe 20 minutes at the most, and then it started giving us the information. It was amazing. I was pretty impressed. In terms of the full deployment, we were up and running in one or two days. We had 23 different geographic locations. They were not on one campus, so that was pretty impressive. 

I can't compare the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solutions. It was probably the easiest deployment I've seen. With the other solutions, I spent a lot of time. I had to spend an enormous amount of time doing the configurations and programming, whereas, with Auvik, it was almost a plug-and-play.

For the maintenance, including myself, there are three associates. We all spread those duties out. We don't have anybody designated as the network administrator, so it's me and two other people who spend the most time with it. It's a daily function. In the morning, I get in, and I look at it. If I don't see anything wrong, I move on. It has made our jobs a whole lot easier.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. Getting in there and being able to see what that network is up to at any given moment, what the issues are, and being able to address them right from that platform has been a huge time saver.

We have seen a good 15% reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). 

They're very competitive on the pricing front. They may not be the least expensive, but they're certainly not the most expensive. They're right in a sweet spot. For our organization, at least, it was right within the budget.

We were using the SolarWinds product, and I went through demos of probably a dozen or more. We had CrowdStrike and others. I sat through probably a year's worth. I spent a year evaluating different products before we settled on Auvik.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise making sure that they have full control of the network, they understand all the devices, and they have the administrative capability to get into managed devices. We discovered a few that we hadn't known about, which provided a challenge. They also should be aware that there may be privacy concerns for some people because the system does take over and look into things. They may need to put controls on before they deploy it. I know that it goes in and gathers the configuration data, but I'm not sure how much personal data that is. I don't watch that part of it, but that would just be my top-of-mind concern. It's so powerful and it can take so much control. What's it looking at?

I'm very impressed with the product. I don't have any complaints. I wish I had it several years earlier. It would've been a lot easier. We've been through a number of acquisitions. So, taking on new different networks was a chore before. If we had this at the onset, it would've been a piece of cake.

We haven't yet utilized the program to its full potential. The most automation I see is getting the alerts, but we haven't yet designated tasks in that automation. So, there's still some manual work. In other words, we get the alert, and then we have to go deal with it. We don't have an automated dispatch or anything to any particular person.

I am sure Auvik is helpful for keeping device inventories up-to-date, but we use something else. We're still getting our feet wet with the product. The more we use it, I'm sure it would be valuable for that. I can go in and see all the devices that are reporting on the network, so in a sense, it does help us to keep device inventory up to date, but I'm sure there's a better way we can use it.

In terms of comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, as long as I have network connectivity and I have internet, it's great, but if I'm in a situation where I don't have connectivity, it doesn't help me.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We mostly use it for network monitoring. We also use it for configuration backup.

With Auvik's network monitoring, the easiest thing is to see where issues are in the network, such as where the traffic is having problems flowing from one place to another. That is the biggest benefit for me. I can go into each company and see if there's a problem with the network. Auvik will pinpoint it and we can work through fixing it.

And something that is critical is the ability to visualize the network mapping. Most people just put something in and think it works, but without having much knowledge of what goes into actually planning the network and making sure they can't get to things they're not supposed to get to. With Auvik, the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is easily the best I've seen. It's very intuitive. There are pre-built filters and other pieces that allow you to visualize certain, tiny pieces of the network, instead of the entire thing. That means you don't have to move the map around.

The solution has also helped reduce the repetitive, very boring work involved in visualizing the network, where you literally map out everything. Auvik will do it for you. That manual process, for a typical company with a single site, may take 30 minutes. But if it's multi-site with multiple networks, it takes that process from roughly an entire day down to about 30 minutes.

And when it comes to IT team availability, we don't have to have someone dedicated to monitoring the network or documenting networks. We actually have him doing work that we need done, like helping our customers, instead of just documenting.

The ability to put in individualized SNMP checks that might not be in the automated playbook is a valuable feature.

It is also super easy to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. I've not seen something as easy as it is, although that use of ease is not so important to our company. Other companies provide knowledge base articles that make everything easy, but the management and monitoring functions in those products aren't as easy to use. That means you have to lean on the knowledge base. Auvik has a knowledge base, but you don't really need it. It's a lot easier in that way. It has a lot of documentation, a lot of information available, but you just don't need it because it's that easy.

Auvik is also a single, integrated platform, and because we are an MSP, that's a godsend. Other vendors have a single pane for each company, whereas Auvik has it set up so there is a single pane for multiple companies.

We use ConnectWise and it integrates with that perfectly. I don't know what else they could add there to have better integration, because it does everything we need.

Auvik doesn't help keep device inventories up to date in the way that I would like. It just helps keep us in the loop for anything that should or shouldn't be on the network.

The one thing that I need more help with is the networking of virtualization hosts. I need more information on those hosts and which virtual networks are attached to what, the virtual switches that are in there, and how they function. None of that exists currently. That's more of a need than anything else that Auvik is doing. If they wanted to monitor more of the network, specifically Hyper-V and VMware hosting, that would make it better and more robust, but that's not their goal.

I've been using Auvik for a couple of years.

The only time it's down is when AWS goes down, so as a cloud-based solution, as opposed to an on-prem network monitoring solution, Auvik means less worry for me. It's always there.

It scales very well, from a single site all the way up to multi-site. If you need more, you just add another probe and it automatically knows which probe does what, so you don't have to worry about that.

I have far less contact with Auvik's technical support now than in the beginning. I haven't opened a case with them in a year because everything just works.

In my experience, if their support can't fix the problem it's because there's a bug and they need to escalate it. I've never had complaints about their service. If there are any questions, support is there to help, and they will.

Positive

I am usually involved in the initial setup and deployment of Auvik and it is far simpler than anything else out there. Since we're an MSP, Auvik configured the initial, main site for us, and then I set up all of the subsites.

It takes 10 to 15 minutes after the collector is implemented for it to start populating the topology map, but it's not a solid "Here's the entire network" for a couple of hours.

We have two other team members, in addition to me, who do setups, but we just brought them on in the last six months.

A good tool like Auvik should literally pay for itself and it does for us, in time saved.

It showed value within the first week. That's how long it took for us to see it was going to save us money in the long run. As far as making money back on it goes, it took about two or three months. That's how long it took for it to have found everything and for us to configure everything.

They are way too lenient in their pricing. To put that simply, I can have an entire network being monitored and it will cost nothing, as long as I'm not monitoring the firewall or the switches.

There are three or four other solutions that I have used that do network monitoring, and none of them work the same. One was N-Central, which is the MSP version of SolarWinds. I also used SolarWinds, the full suite, for one company.

LogicMonitor is another one that we trialed but it didn't work nearly as well, and was way more expensive. 

We used something from Ninja, their network monitoring service, and it could handle a lot more than Auvik could, but you had to say specifically, "I want to monitor this device or that device," instead of just everything. 

I used all of those solutions before getting to Auvik and finding that it's better.

Auvik does everything through a single probe, whereas all the others require multiple probes and multiple connections to multiple VLANs. Either that or you had to know exactly what was on the network and then you could monitor the single pieces you wanted, instead of everything.

Most of what Auvik does is the high-level monitoring of what's going on, and then it does require the higher-level staff to see, when we have a problem, how we fix it. The lower-level staff couldn't figure that out. So it doesn't really help with delegating things to junior people.

If Auvik wanted to map out VLANs specifically, that could be added, but it wouldn't change my opinion of whether the mapping is good or bad. The mapping is good and the VLAN handling is good. Everything else really just comes down to having someone who understands network engineering to really suss out all of the issues that Auvik sees.

We did not see a reduction in mean time to resolution with Auvik. It is just one extra tool. We didn't have nearly the number of customers that we do now, back when we first started using Auvik, so we can't really point to a reduction. We've been using it for so long that we've brought on customers and put them in Auvik right away. 

However, when clients have networking issues, I'm sure it has reduced the amount of time it takes for us to figure out what the problem is. But for us, it's more the mean time to reconfiguration that has dropped drastically. For example, if we need to add another floor, expand a network, shrink a network, or add another site to it, instead of having to do a walkthrough of the network to see what's there, we hop into Auvik, spend five minutes looking at the map, and we're able to present a valid diagram to the customer of what needs to go where.

The solution is not perfect, but I can't think of anything that would make it better for me or my company. Between its cost and what it covers, I would give it a 10 out of 10.