Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

Our network monitoring solution for our clients' sites is Auvik Network Management. With over 60 sites under our care, Auvik helps us efficiently monitor their network uptime and performance. It utilizes data collection, remote tunneling, and device management functionalities to provide us with a comprehensive view of each network's health.

The interface is reasonable and for the most part, operates as we need.

The network map dashboard offers a near real-time view of our network activity. While targeting specific devices for monitoring can be straightforward once set up, initial configuration may require some effort to fine-tune for optimal results. We are able to see 85 percent visibility into our network.

The benefits of Auvik became apparent within the first three months. It provided us with the network visibility we craved. We could now easily see the entire configuration of an environment, allowing us to quickly assess and understand what we were managing. Onboarding a new client became a breeze. Auvik granted us a complete view of their network, including VLANs. The collector itself was also easy to install.

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

Auvik's GUI is user-friendly and well-designed. While there's room for improvement in some aspects of device targeting, overall I find it to be a positive experience. The device management features, particularly credential management and network discovery, are especially valuable. These functionalities streamline the process of identifying and managing all the devices on our network.

I'd like to see an improvement in how we target individual devices. Currently, we can only target a single device by including it within a large SaaS 32 subnet, which is inefficient. Ideally, we should be able to target specific devices directly. This would allow us to include relevant networks and label them accurately, something that's not possible with the current method.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two years.

We have only encountered one unscheduled outage with Auvik where their website was done.

I would rate the scalability of Auvik Network Management seven out of ten.

The technical support team is responsive and aims to answer inquiries quickly. However, there may be occasions where they encounter issues that require further investigation. In these instances, we have to escalate for a solution.

Neutral

We switched to Auvik because our previous monitoring software, LogicMonitor, was too expensive for our needs.

The initial deployment was straightforward. Five people were involved in the deployment and it took three weeks to complete.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Auvik's pricing model is good.

Our wireless controllers are monitored by Auvik free of charge.

I would rate Auvik Network Management seven out of ten.

Once integrated with our existing system, Auvik requires minimal ongoing maintenance.

Once you've configured the connectors on the site, be mindful during the connector installation process. Make sure your website URLs are accurate. On the technical side, most data transfers from the beta multi-site can be handled automatically. So, if you encounter any errors during installation, they can likely be resolved easily.

We use Auvik to monitor our entire network infrastructure from wireless to our firewalls, servers, and switches.

Before Auvik, we would check each system independently, which was time-consuming, and some things weren't being monitored at all. Auvik allows us to easily monitor our systems without devoting much time and personnel to monitoring. We haven't used it long enough to realize the full benefits of the platform, but we see the potential. 

Auvik's email alerts are convenient because we're always monitoring email, and it's easier to receive the alerts in your inbox. 

We schedule backups in the middle of the night, and a high volume of data passes through our networks during those backups because it backs up everything for a couple of hours. That generates alerts in Auvik's monitoring systems saying that these network ports are at 99 percent utilization because they're being maxed out. 

I'd like to have a way to mute alerts during these hours. There's no way to whitelist this activity within a set period. I want to be able to tell Auvik not to send me alerts about high utilization on these ports between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.

While the web interface is somewhat easy to use, it was hard to find a few things. I would rate the interface seven out of 10. We had to reinstall the monitoring software on some of those machines, and it didn't work, so we had to do everything manually with no UI. 

I would rate the network map five out of 10. It didn't draw everything exactly out correctly. The textual representation of the network map was more useful than the graphical view.

I have been using Auvik for about 15 days.

We've had no issues with instability so far. 

Auvik is pretty scalable because you can have as many devices and monitors installed at locations as you want. We haven't experienced any availability issues. 

Auvik is deployed on-premises, but some things are monitored remotely at different locations. The initial deployment was very easy. We installed the software and entered the credentials. Something did go wrong when we were installing it at an off-site location. The software wasn't connecting to their system, so we had to uninstall and reinstall everything manually. That site was a bit more difficult, but the installation at the main site was straightforward. 

I like that you only have to pay for a minimum of five systems with an account, and you can monitor server software for free. Auvik only charges for certain devices, such as firewalls, switches, etc. That pricing model works out nicely for us. You don't need to pay for everything. You could have five switches and 100 computers, but you don't pay to monitor the computers. There are seven categories of devices that you need to pay for, and the rest are free. 

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. My advice to new Auvik users is to make a network map ahead of time to ensure it discovers all of your devices. It may discover 50 devices when you know you have 60. It could be that some IPs weren't scanned or it is missing some credentials. It helps to have something you can use to check. 

I use Auvik for managing my two most complex networks with multiple locations and diverse routing.

Initially, I implemented Auvik to address routing and switching issues. It helped pinpoint and solve those problems. Over time, its bigger value became evident in its ability to efficiently document and discover every device on the network. Auvik has significantly reduced my mean time to resolution. 

It provides crucial visibility into complex switching setups, allowing me to quickly identify which devices are connected to specific switch ports - a task that was challenging with other tools.

In terms of improvement, Auvik could include more customization options and the ability to efficiently manage additional features like printer monitoring.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

Auvik is fairly stable.

Auvik has been scalable in my experience with simple networks, I haven't encountered any limitations. My use cases haven't tested its full capabilities.

Before Auvik, I briefly used Kaseya's Network Glue, which I considered a less sophisticated option. However, Auvik stood out as the best-in-class solution when I compared alternatives. I had known about Auvik for several years before using it and recognized its value in network mapping and documentation, and later appreciating its real-time monitoring and discovery features.

While Auvik offers an intuitive interface, there is a slight learning curve during setup. Once you are familiar with the process, it becomes easier to navigate and manage network issues. Getting started with Auvik requires a fair amount of setup, especially in new environments. Setting up SNMP credentials for each device is time-consuming, particularly in networks with varied configurations. Auvik has a hybrid deployment model, utilizing an on-premise detector. I was involved in the initial deployment, and it was a gradual process over several weeks, addressing switches, routers, servers, printers, and other devices with SNMP.  Maintenance for Auvik is minimal. The main task involves adding new devices, like printers, and ensuring SNMP settings are configured correctly. It becomes more challenging in co-managed IT situations when changes are made independently by the customer.

It is hard to measure the return on investment for Auvik regarding direct revenue. However, it significantly benefits me by speeding up problem resolution and enhancing efficiency.

The pricing of Auvik seems reasonable, especially for setups with complex networks. In cases where networks are more straightforward, it may not be necessary. However, considering the growing importance of compliance standards like PCI and CMMC, having Auvik everywhere could become essential for comprehensive network discovery and cybersecurity.

Auvik provides a network map and dashboard for a real-time view of my network. However, due to the complexity of my setup, the map becomes cluttered and less useful. While it looks nice, the intelligent scaling makes it impractical for anything beyond simple networks. 

Auvik's network map and dashboard attempt full visibility, but they cram too much into a small space. It becomes impractical and buries useful information in the noise. It is unnecessary for simple setups. 

Auvik doesn't charge for monitoring critical devices like printers, servers, and access points. Its primary value lies in monitoring and managing switches and routers, the devices for which they charge. For other devices, redundant monitoring systems are already in place.

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

Auvik is primarily for monitoring network devices to see which ones have gone down. Another use case is tracking bandwidth utilization on the interfaces.

Auvik has improved visibility across our entire network. We don't want to wait until a user calls to tell us a switch is down. Auvik enables us to be proactive, not reactive. We realized the benefits almost instantaneously. 

The solution speeds up our resolution time. When we're troubleshooting, it's easier to see if a device is down or the utilization is too high. That is helpful. It makes the whole process faster. If I didn't have this solution, I would only see whether the network was up or down. 

I couldn't, for example, see that the bandwidth utilization is 100 percent. Auvik sends notifications when the bandwidth utilization passes 80-85 percent. We get an alert telling us that it's something we should look into. Otherwise, I would need to rely on customers and application owners complaining that sessions are dropping. 

I appreciate Auvik's traffic insights. The network map provides solid visibility in real time.

Some things about the interface were a little hard to set up, and it was difficult to figure out where to find information. The Auvik team did a great job helping us get started. If I had to figure it out by myself, I would have probably gotten frustrated. You need to go on the device first to enable it. If you don't, then traffic insights won't start working. It's pretty intuitive for most stuff, but some things are tricky if you don't have someone tell you how it works. 

I have used Auvik for roughly a year.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10 overall. 

Auvik is easy to scale. It covers thousands of servers. 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. I can't complain. They solved my problem quickly. 

Positive

Setting up Auvik was pretty easy. It was a little tricky to get some of the things set up correctly and working, but it was fairly straightforward overall. Deployment took about a month or two because we have more than a thousand locations.

We did it in-house with Auvik's help. They assigned a team to us, and they did a great job. When we had questions or issues and needed help, they assisted us almost immediately. Four departments were involved. After deployment, Auvik doesn't require much maintenance on our end unless there are significant changes to our environment. 

My boss makes the purchasing decisions, but we're happy with Auvik's overall pricing. We had some issues with the licensing. You need to pay for premium to use NetFlow, and we had a problem with them counting the same device multiple times for licensing purposes. It was a little frustrating because the Auvik database in the background didn't see it as a single device even though it came from the same critical hardware and only had one serial number. However, it was in different groups, so it was counted two or three times. It took a while to work with the accounting team to get that sorted.

We looked at a few different solutions. We went with Auvik because it was the best fit for our requirements, security standards, and budget. The security department didn't approve some of the alternatives.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10 overall. We had a few hiccups here and there that we couldn't fix easily without help. With Auvik's assistance, we got everything fixed. 

We manually use Auvik for network monitoring, configuration backups, and syslogs.

We implemented Auvik because we wanted to have a redundant monitoring solution that has a cloud component.

Auvik utilizes a cloud component that centralizes all data collection and aggregation. Additionally, we employ multiple on-premises collectors to gather data from individual devices. Therefore, our deployment will have a collector at each site, supplemented by a secondary collector at our main site. This configuration ensures redundancy and seamless data transmission to the Auvik cloud.

Auvik's intuitive interface is easy to use. The intuitive interface helps accelerate our troubleshooting of network issues due to how the information is presented.

Auvik's network map and dashboard provide a real-time picture of our network.

The network map and dashboard provide easy access to real-time visibility, with alerts and other information conveniently displayed. Clicking "Advanced" allows further exploration of specific alerts and other relevant details. While the display can become crowded when monitoring numerous items, the filtering capabilities effectively manage information overload.

The network map provides full visibility into everything we are monitoring with it and that is extremely important for us.

Auvik empowers our low-level techs to solve more tickets on their own. This has saved our senior techs time to focus on other tasks. The overall number of tickets has been reduced.

It has helped reduce our mean time to resolution.

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

The traffic insights and the configuration management are the most valuable features. 

The traffic insights are presented effectively, and I appreciate that the analysis runs in the cloud, avoiding the need to overload any specific on-premise hardware. Additionally, the configuration backups appear to be straightforward, facilitating the comparison and refresh of new images on existing devices.

One main feature I would like to see in Auvik is the ability to generate alerts based on specific events appearing in syslog messages.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

Auvik is stable.

The scalability of Auvik is excellent and it scales easily.

The technical support is quite fast and accurate. We only encountered one major issue, but they were able to resolve it promptly. While it took a little longer due to the unusual nature of the problem, it was effectively addressed within a week.

Positive

Previously, we used SolarWinds. However, the configuration and maintenance overhead for Auvik is significantly lower, and Auvik itself is much faster.

The initial deployment was straightforward. We had three people for the deployment but it could be done with one person.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Compared to Auvik's competitors, its pricing is largely in line with SolarWinds. However, the exact cost may be slightly lower or higher depending on how the software is used.

Auvik does not charge for server monitoring, which is a significant cost advantage. If we had to pay for each server individually, the cost would become quite high, depending on the size and complexity of our server environment.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of ten.

Minimal maintenance is required to keep the collector devices up to date.

Before implementing Auvik, organizations should confirm that all devices they intend to monitor are compatible with Auvik's capabilities. This is particularly important for web-based devices, as Auvik may have limitations in monitoring such systems.

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 manage IT infrastructure for 400 companies, and Auvik allows us to monitor it remotely. We have a portal to monitor these companies' servers, devices, routers, and APs constantly so we know when something is down and needs to be repaired in real-time. It's nice. We have it implemented in our Autotask and service desk portal, so it can automatically open and close tickets.

Auvik has improved our company's operation tenfold. It allows us to do real-time network monitoring down to a printer connected to the network. 

We can also automate and streamline fixes for recurring issues. We can determine an ongoing problem and find a real-time fix for it. We monitor and log different events. Once we have enough cases, we create an automated fix for that issue and cross it off our list, so we don't have to worry about it again. It's been overwhelmingly successful in our company.

Previously, we had various managed portals and a list of URLs to check. We went to a client company to see what portals they used. It was an absolute nightmare. Credentials would change constantly, so we couldn't log in. It was horrible.

Auvik has saved us a lot of time. Much of the solution is automated and monitors by itself, letting us know when critical issues occur. We no longer need a dedicated technician to log into every network. It gives us real-time monitoring, so we don't need someone to check every network first thing in the morning to see if any issues require a response. 

When I click on one of the 400 companies we monitor,  Auvik will give me a spanned view of everything on their network, from their DMZ to their servers, switches, firewalls, printers, and PCs. It opens a tree view, so you can go down the list from top to bottom, which makes troubleshooting things much easier. We get a much broader view. In addition to monitoring endpoints for threats and performance, Auvik lets us see the topology of the entire network, which is perfect for our purposes.

The intuitiveness of the network visualization is amazing. Several times, it's picked things up that I've missed. I look back and ask, "Why is Auvik alerting me about this? I know that's not an issue." I'll dig deeper into it; they've noticed something I didn't even see, saving me time and energy.

Without Auvik, our technicians would spend countless hours troubleshooting things unnecessarily. When you get a call from a client with network issues, Auvik can pinpoint precisely where the problem lies. Otherwise, you'll blindly go through every device, trying to figure out what's happening, which could take hours. 

It has freed up a lot of time for our technicians to work on new projects or get certifications. We have 25 technicians, and Auvik has freed up around 24 to 48 hours of additional time for our technicians to do other tasks. Auvik has also enabled us to utilize junior staff better. The GUI interface is easy for a low-level tech to learn. After three or four days of training, they can understand how Auvik works and become accustomed to using it more often. 

I would not want to work at an MSP without a networking monitoring tool. It would be a step back to a point where you struggle to get one ticket done when you could have done eight because you don't have the necessary information. That's what Auvik does for you.

Without the updated real-time information Auvik's device inventories supply, we're not giving the customer the reliability and performance they request. These monitoring tools allow us to be proactive and see things before the customer realizes a problem. That's our reputation. That's what Auvik has given us. Any updated information will save us time. We can't use bad information when we try to fix the issue. 

I like the way everything can be integrated. Auvik uses SNMP and various protocols to ensure we can monitor any device on the network.

Auvik has issues with collecting information from some devices. I don't know if this is an issue on Auvik's end or if the device isn't compatible. We have noticed that some clients have been unable to add their devices to Auvik due to compatibility, but devices are fickle. I think it's a device issue and not an Auvik issue.

I've seen Auvik resolve these issues. They will create the ticket and tell us the issue is resolved. For example, maybe the customer restarted the modem, or the ISP got it running. They'll go ahead and close that ticket. The automation there is so nice that it will keep us updated if something's happening automatically.

I started using Auvik about a year ago. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for stability.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for scalability 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. We've had to reach out to them a few times for custom things or issues with devices not connecting. They've always been very helpful.

Positive

We previously didn't have a managed or automated solution like Auvik. It was a list of URLs and an Excel spreadsheet for each company with all their networking and login information. After we got the pitch and went through the evaluation process, we realized what it could do for us as an IT company couldn't say "No."

Setting up Auvik can be tricky, but I think setting up any of these systems can be difficult initially. It's a piece of cake once you have the baseline down and your systems in there monitoring it. Our deployment was complex because we have 400 different companies, and each has various equipment with varying ages. 

I don't think using Auvik was complex per se. It was just the complexity we were trying to add to it. For a few small companies, we had to work with Auvik to set up custom APIs to get some things to work, but it went smoothly for the most part. 

After implementing the collectors, the network map started to populate within minutes. I think it's attributable to Auvik's ability to work the way it does and the protocols it enables to push this information over the network. We already have the credentials set up in the Auvik portal, so it has the permissions it needs. It can scrape that device for as much information as possible.

We've freed up a lot of extra employee time because of Auvik. It automated many tasks that required a dedicated technician to spend four hours each day checking every company's network. Auvik does that all the time, so it saves our employees a lot of energy and time.

It all depends on the scale of your implementation. It would be pricier for a smaller company ranging out for a few remote locations. It's cheaper if you're using lots of licensing. My advice is to try different solutions and see what works best for you. For us, that was Auvik. I think Auvik's current price is competitive and works for our business environment

We did look at a few other options, including Kaseya and SolarWinds. Auvik was the best option for pricing and features we were looking for in a product. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you plan to use old devices, verify that SNMP is an option. We had a lot of issues with a device that was 25 years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using it for three years.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We deployed it with the help of someone from Auvik.

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

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

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