Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using it for about five years.

Its stability is great. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use Auvik to monitor our customers' networks for performance and availability.

Auvik's ease of use is essential for our operations.

We previously used multiple applications to manage our networks. The solution provides a single integrated platform for our organization which is vital for our operations. 

It has streamlined our management of networks, time-wise. Auvik has drastically cut down our time by 50 percent.

Auvik's ability to monitor multiple hardware manufacturers in a single pane of glass makes it very easy for our engineers to respond to alerts.

The ability to help visualize the network mapping or topology allows our engineers to see what is connected to what in order to troubleshoot quicker.

We have found that being able to see the misconfigurations on network devices has lowered our troubleshooting tremendously. This is because we can quickly identify and fix any problems. The solution helps to reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation.

Auvik affects our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally, which is extremely important.

The ability to scan the network and find devices frees up our IT team's availability. 

In any engineering job, we're going to have some downtime. Being able to turn our attention to low-level tasks and resolve some easy tickets is great for our IT department.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up to date.

Rather than delegating low-level tasks to our junior staff, we use the inventory a lot for pooling devices and serial numbers. If a customer wants to know how many switches they have in place, we can pull the inventory from Auvik.

Compared to the other solutions we use, Auvik is easily the most solid.

We like the alerts, the network mapping, and the backup of configurations.

The monitoring and management functions of Auvik are extremely easy to use straight out of the box.

Auvik's overall intuitiveness of our network's visualization is excellent.

It requires very minimal maintenance.

When we deal with larger networks, the current interface is difficult to navigate around the network map because of the volume of devices. The solution can improve by providing a simpler way to display and navigate through all of the devices on larger networks. 

The stability can use improvement.

I have been using the solution for five years.

Auvik has gone down a couple of times. We haven't been able to log in, but that's common in the industry. 

Auvik's scalability is extremely high.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We have used SolarWinds in the past. We also use ConnectWise manual SNMP monitoring to see if firewalls are up or down. We moved from LogicMonitoring to Auvik five years ago. When we moved from LogicMonitor to Auvik, one aspect was immediately apparent: the notifications were a lot better. The notifications through Auvik were timely and relevant, while the notifications through LogicMonitor were often delayed and irrelevant. The interface for LogicMonitor was not as good as Auvik's. Auvik was a breath of fresh air. The notifications were clear and concise, and the monitoring of devices was top-notch. We quickly realized that there was no going back to LogicMonitor.

Once we put the collector out there and populate the username and passwords for our devices, Auvik is easy to set up. The deployment required two engineers.

It takes between 30 minutes to one hour from the time the collector is implemented to the time our network mapping starts to populate.

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

We have seen tremendous value with Auvik.

Auvik's pricing is very competitive compared to other network management solutions. We get our pricing from ConnectWise, and we also use SolarWinds. I know that their prices are higher than Auvik's, or at least what's been proposed to us was higher.

We did not evaluate other options. We were introduced to Auvik by Continuum before they were bought by ConnectWise.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We generally prefer to install the Auvik collector on-premises onto a server and run it in the Linux configuration. We do this more so than using the cloud, likely for performance reasons.

I recommend Auvik. It is a great tool for managed service providers because it works with any hardware vendor and allows them to scale their networking practice greatly.

We use Auvik for monitoring networks across all of our sites for alerts, reporting, configuration backups, and troubleshooting. Auvik does a little bit of everything when it comes to networking.

I'm not the only person that utilizes Auvik, but I'm the only network engineer. The infrastructure team uses it for server monitoring. Security guys can also access it, but I'm the primary caretaker.

I monitor 34 sites with 200 managed devices, and about another hundred are unmanaged. Altogether, I have over 2,600 devices that are not networked. If you subtract the network from that, it's about 2,300 devices that aren't network devices, including printers, servers, and computers. Auvik crawls and finds those kinds of things on the network. That's what I mean by total picture.

I previously used SolarWinds, which I call a Swiss Army knife of network monitoring systems. SolarWinds is great. It does many things, but it's gotten too bloated and slow. It's not as intuitive as Auvik. SolarWinds didn't do mapping on its own, and the mapping provided was kind of clunky to get running because you have to manage the licensing and everything. Even after tweaking SolarWinds, I couldn't get the mapping capabilities Auvik gives me. 

Also, SolarWinds wasn't a one-stop shop. Auvik is the closest I've gotten to a single pane of glass. It's hard to judge whether Auvik has saved time over SolarWinds after two months because I'm still doing some slight tweaks. It took me months to get SolarWinds the way we need it here. Auvik is still a pretty new product for us. Though it's meeting our basic needs, I'm the kind of guy who likes to squeeze every bit of juice out of my fruit.

The out-of-the-box alerts were pretty on-point, so I've only had to create two alerts on my own. The reporting is easy to access, so pulling reports is more straightforward. That saves time. 

Also, I don't need to add devices to Auvik. It automatically crawls, finds them, and puts them in the inventory. I don't have to go back and draw maps. Auvik does that. Mapping in SolarWinds requires their map tool, a separate product you must install on the server itself. Drawing maps on that was painful. Discovery isn't something I need to do anymore. When I added five new devices to a site, it found them all and brought them into inventory. I didn't have to do that.

Auvik automatically keeps the device inventories updated. I'm shutting down SolarWinds this week. On Friday, I did my final inventory comparing SolarWinds and Auvik. I have not been updating SolarWinds, and Auvik has about 20 more devices on the network side alone because I don't have to go back through and update the inventory. It'll pull it in itself. When something is added, I get an alert saying the new device has been added to the network.

Auvik has sped up my resolution time because you can drill down in Auvik and look at the net flow information faster. The alerts also help, but if this is a data-driven event, I need to look at the net flow, which is much quicker. 

The monitoring and alerts are easy to use and set up. Discovery is the first step in monitoring, and that's a piece of cake with Auvik. It'll scan your networks once you get the credentials set up and automatically find newly added equipment as long as the same credentials are already on that gear. Auvik makes my job a lot easier. I don't have to keep going back to a monitoring system to add devices each time we bring something new. That part alone saves me time.

It's all intuitive and straightforward. The out-of-the-box alerts provided everything I needed, but I've made a couple of additional alerts. You can schedule maintenance windows in Auvik, and the solution won't send any alerts during that time. With other products, you have to turn off the alerts on each device if you don't set it up correctly. Ease of use is crucial because I'm the only network engineer at a company of 900, so I have many things to do. 

I have a single pane of glass. It's easier to go into one system where everything is easy to find. It's a one-stop-shop with everything you need instead of going into multiple products to get it done. I don't consider Auvik entirely cloud-based because you have collectors onsite. The portal for viewing your infrastructure is cloud-based. You don't need to get into a VPN or anything like that to get to it. It's two-factor authentication, so it's a little harder for bad actors to get to your data.

The ability to log in and run commands from the cloud is helpful. You can access a full command line on the device, so I don't need to VPN into the infrastructure, which helps when troubleshooting. It's also beneficial that it's not on-prem. If my leading site, where the on-prem solution is located, goes down, no place is being monitored. As long as the internet connection is up and the collector is running, all my sites are being monitored.

The mapping automatically finds all the interfaces but tags some of them incorrectly. For instance, if it can't find how a CPU interface is connected, it will use the MAC address last seen on the router and sometimes attribute cloud-connected devices to the route, but it's not actually there. That's not a true connection.

It isn't going to the cloud. It's going directly back to the router. I've talked to Auvik support about that already. They're looking into it. Overall, mapping could be a little better. Though they do a great job, there's still room for improvement. It's 100% accurate for some sites but only 90% for others. It gives you a complete view of how things are connected for the most part. Auvik still struggles with wireless bridges and things of that nature. However, Auvik isn't the only product missing that, and there is a simple way to make those connections myself.

I did a couple of trials with Auvik, but we've officially been using the solution for about three months now.

I'm through my testing phase, and now that I'm in my third month using Auvik, I can say it's pretty stable. I had one issue with Syslog, but they fixed it. They made a change that caused an unforeseen issue in Syslog. They resolved the problem in the next release.

Auvik's scalability is pretty good. I'm monitoring 30-plus sites. I was running 30 of them off one collector, so the scalability is pretty good.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. 

Positive

SolarWinds does many of the same things, but Auvik has a different approach. If we have some networking event, we can find the problem machine in Auvik and see what it has been talking to a lot faster. 

Auvik is a little more agile. We can find things a little faster with Auvik than in SolarWinds. We don't need to dig as much. The graphical nature of the product makes it easier to navigate.

Deploying Auvik is very straightforward. I implemented it pretty much out of the box. When I had my customer success meetings with Auvik support, I had already done everything they told me to do. I'm experienced in setting up things, so I had it up and running by the time we met to review our technical onboarding.

I can onboard a small site in 10 minutes. Once you input credentials at the top level, it's only a matter of putting in subnets that you want scanned, waiting for them to be scanned, and verifying everything is there. It's about 10 minutes per site once your credentials are squared away.

Once that is ready, it takes Auvik an hour or so per site to stitch everything together. Much of it is on the backend because it makes all those maps and everything like that, which takes time. It has to pull in the data from SNMP and CDP. It looks at all the interfaces and stitches together maps, so it depends on how many collectors you have. It takes longer if you're running a couple of collectors for an entire enterprise because a few collectors are doing a lot of work.

It's much faster if you have a collector at every site. It's probably 15 to 20 minutes per site. I only used one collector when I started because I wanted to see how hard I could push it. It took much less time to set up than SolarWinds. The discovery is pretty simple for what you have to do from my end. As long as you have your credentials at the top level, you add a new site, throw in your subnets, and it finds them for you. 

Auvik doesn't require any maintenance after deployment. I wanted to stress test the collector to see what might break it. I had 30 sites on one collector at one time, but I decided to go back to the suggested implementation.

With a single collector on 30-plus sites, the daily tasks were completed, and we weren't close to using up the CPU or memory on this device—this wasn't a beefy server. It was built to their specs but not overly powerful. Once your collector runs, you don't need to do much with this product because the brains are in the cloud. If your collector goes down, bringing up a new one is a piece of cake.

It's apparent off the bat how much time I'm saving by doing tasks because of the ease of use. Once I got everything discovered, it was evident that I would save time by automatically drawing maps and keeping them updated. I immediately noticed that I would save time, and time is money. I always have several projects and no longer worry about my inventory because Auvik does this for me.

Once the devices are configured, and the collectors are installed, I don't need to add anything to the monitoring system or make sure the backups are there. Auvik grabs it for me.

It's worth the price, depending on how you use the product. Price is a significant component of any purchase; for me, it all goes back to visibility. I have more visibility into everything now than I had before. SolarWinds was on every node, and every interface had to be licensed. With Auvik, the cost could be the same or more depending on the level of visibility you want. The price and value vary according to your network infrastructure and the information you want.

If you want a complete picture of your entire network, then Auvik is a better choice. SolarWinds is a better option if you're only looking at network devices. I think Auvik's price per node is a tad high. That's probably my only knock against Auvik. Your network nodes are billable, including servers, printers, or other devices. You have visibility into those things as well. In other products, each one of those devices is a billable node, so Auvik gives us a little bit more visibility than we had before because now we have more devices in the system.

We looked at Entuity and Datadog. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I deduct a point for the mapping and reporting. I like everything else that Auvik does. The only aspect I don't like 100% is the mapping. Also, they have canned reports instead of a built-in report builder. You have to extract the data in Power BI or some other way. They have great pieces, but I can't customize them and create my own within their system.

When I started working with Auvik, I was working for a managed service provider helping several clients manage their network environments. We tried Auvik and decided to stick with it. It is used for network monitoring and different troubleshooting issues.

Previously, we were logging into a client's firewall to see what was going on for troubleshooting or trying to get some data out of that. When our clients were using Ubiquiti, we logged into their network in a tenant network environment and navigated through different panels and settings to sort things out. Gathering all that data was laborious and time-consuming. 

We saved on labor costs by making our client tech support more efficient. Auvik enables us to narrow down network issues and address them even faster because we aren't sifting through data and logs on multiple solutions or dashboards. Everything's on Auvik. From an MSP perspective, clients get a much better service, quicker response, and lower time to resolution. It saves me at least a couple of hours a day. Our entire team of network administrators is saving us dozens of hours per day.

New devices are automatically added to the network. You input the network credentials, and we get the metrics almost instantly when a new device or endpoint appears without changing the configuration because the settings are already in Auvik. We use another solution for asset inventory, but Auvik keeps track of assets.

It frees up time for your team to work on other tasks. It might even free up an entire technician. The permissions are granular. We have a multitenancy setup where you can assign members of your tech team different permissions. 

You can get junior techs monitoring or troubleshooting without affecting the principles of these privileges. Auvik thought of everything from a security perspective, and the junior techs don't need much training. It only takes a couple of hours to show the junior techs how to navigate. The rest is intuitive.
Because of the granular controls for filtering, notifications, and alerts, you don't necessarily need dedicated technicians to sift through logs. You can respond when you get an alter. 

I like Auvik's SNMP capabilities. Seeing all the metrics and analytics in one dashboard is a game-changer. The topology is excellent. I give the network visualization 10 out of 10 for intuitiveness. The UI and user interface are top-tier. None of the other network monitoring solutions I've tried has more features than Auvik. Nothing compares. 

I deployed NetFlow monitoring for one of our clients, which was great. I wasn't a cybersecurity analyst then, but Auvik helped me get into that field. The data captured and displayed and that real-time monitoring and alerting are critical for any network environment.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions aren't tricky to use. It takes no time to configure the notifications, and the dashboard is nice. The topology is impressive. I remember setting up a TV for some of our client environments to monitor. 

You don't need to interact with it much because you get those alerts and reports sent to your email when there are issues. You can customize the triggers, so you're not bogged down with notification fatigue. It isn't a complicated solution, and Auvik's training is excellent. 

Everything is a single pane of glass, and Auvik is compatible with many different network hardware vendors. We had clients with SonicWall and Fortinet appliances. We primarily use Ubiquiti devices, but it doesn't matter. When a device isn't compatible, Auvik helps us integrate it quickly using various workarounds. We can easily do a bit of programming in Linux or set up specific SNMP triggers. Auvik is the solution regardless of the environment.

Auvik is also a Canadian company, and it means a lot to us to support another Canadian company. They've grown phenomenally over the years. They're not as big as Shopify, but all the Big Tech heavy hitters are all Americans, so it's nice to see Auvik reach for the stars.

I have used Auvik off and on for five years.

I have never had issues with Auvik. It isn't a resource hog. I've never seen it crash. I don't think I've ever used a tech platform or tool that doesn't crash. The stability is phenomenal. They have their maintenance windows, but those are scheduled.

You can scale from a tiny little network to a massive network with VPLS, MPLS, and multiple branch locations. It reads site-to-site VPN tunnels. Scalability is not an issue. 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. Auvik support is phenomenal, and they're Canadians. That was a huge plus because we are Canadians. I'm a French and English speaker. I remember speaking to one of the tech support teams in French, and I was impressed with that. 

They're based out of Waterloo, Ontario. I've been there, and I'm also in Ontario myself. The French community out there isn't big, so I was impressed with that. They're friendly and knowledgeable, and you never feel like a number to them.

Positive

We used SolarWinds for a while, but the UI was not great. It did the job, but SolarWinds' feature set left something to be desired. Switching to Auvik was night and day. It was the Cadillac of solutions, and everything was on one dashboard. You have the topology on the screen and click on a device in the map to connect or send command line scripts and commands to it. We used a few different solutions, but nothing compared to its features. Auvik's UI and the UX sold me on it.

I deployed Auvik for my last company and another company I worked with. I tried to switch everybody over to Auvik. I don't get paid for that. I believe in the product. The setup is straightforward if you have fundamental network knowledge and Linux skills. A level-one tech might take a little time, but you could probably teach a high schooler to do this. It isn't rocket science.

I deployed Auvik out of the box. After configuring the collector, it takes five to 15 minutes for the network map to populate. The last time I configured it out of the box, I set it up and left it because I trusted the solution. The first time I set it up, it took around 10 or 15 minutes tops to see things show up on the topology.

They offer training for it, but it was like, "Here's the KB article. Go at it." We didn't need any support. After deployment, Auvik is pretty lightweight, maintenance-wise. It updates periodically, but we've never had issues. 

The price shouldn't be an issue for a larger organization, but a smaller organization or an MSP might struggle because the billing is per device. You're paying for your firewalls and devices that appear on the network. If you have a smaller organization with an extensive network, your revenue won't be able to support that cost. That's probably the biggest downside for me.

However, you should go with Auvik if you can squeeze it into your budget because the time savings and ease of use are worth it. In the long run, you'll end up paying for the other solutions in labor costs and other expenses. You can use PRTG, but it's a pain to configure and resource-heavy. Auvik never causes issues on the networks because it's lightweight. The upfront costs may be higher, but it will save you time and money in the long run. Your tech team will appreciate it as well because of the user experience, in my opinion.

I've tested Pulseway, ManageEngine, SolarWinds, PRTG, and Domos. Auvik blasts the other ones out of the water. In addition to the topology and the user interfaces, there is nothing like Auvik from a display or user experience perspective. 

Auvik's dashboard is clean and not too busy. It's easy to use, interpret and drill down into a device if necessary. It rapidly detects changes in the network environment and responds quickly with alerts.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. Auvik is a powerful tool, and security is critical for my clients and me. I recommend following all the steps and securing your environment. Auvik has made MFA mandatory, which is essential. It is a powerful tool, so you wouldn't want that to fall into the wrong hands. Access to the company's network map is a hacker's jackpot. Follow the steps and reach out to support if you're unsure. There's also a pretty big community now. I've seen that grow over the years, which has been great. 

The solution helps us get a granular understanding of our environment, all the way down to the endpoints, to Azure, the networking, and all of the networking equipment, whether it's the access points, the firewall, or the switch. We can identify any latency or drops by keeping an eye on the network.

Auvik offers a single integrated platform for our organization simplifying our network monitoring.

Before Auvik we had to log into FortiGate followed by the internet service provider before we could log into Azure. We would then use an RMM for the endpoints, whether it was a Mac device or a Windows device.

Auvik has saved us approximately 20 hours per week of work that was previously completed by our support personnel.

Auvik allowed us to pinpoint root causes quicker, which saved us time investigating different environments. We can now focus on projects and progress further along. Additionally, we've been able to hold the ISP accountable.

Auvik helps us visualize the network mapping/topology for our organization which is required for our security audits regarding HIPPA.

It is pretty intuitive. I give the solution an eight out of ten for intuitiveness but the dashboard requires some getting used to.

The solution has affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks by allowing us to pull up a single window pane and get a quick snapshot of all our locations, including our data center, which is in Azure.

Keeping the network up is critical for us. We have a voiceover IP phone solution that rides on this network, as well as our electronic medical records. Without visibility to help our IT teams focus on our network, we would have a lot of trouble finding needles in haystacks.

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date. I ran a comparative analysis against our RMM and other RMMs, and then against our vulnerability assessment tool, and Auvik is spot on.

Its ability to keep our device inventories up to date has helped save us time. Deploying devices to users takes up a lot of our time. We have around 400 devices in use, and we have to replace broken devices often. Auvik saves us around five hours per week when it comes to documentation and keeping our inventory up to date.

Auvik helps our team focus on high-value tasks and delegate low-level tasks to junior staff by allowing us to focus on resolving network issues reported by end users and get a clear understanding of what's going on. This allows us to focus on our projects at hand.

We are able to identify issues on the server and address them quicker, rather than having to conduct an additional investigation and eliminate possibilities. We can identify issues within 15 minutes, as opposed to the two hours it used to take. On average, we now save 45 to 90 minutes per issue per day.

Auvik is a cloud-based solution, versus on-prem network monitoring solutions that require less maintenance. There is no on-prem server or license to worry about. The cloud solution is more convenient and efficient. We pride ourselves on being a leader in cloud adoption.

The most valuable feature is the notification that alerts us to an offline server, whether the server is rebooting, resetting, or if we have network issues with the internet service provider. We were running into problems trying to hold our ISP accountable because they were telling us it was not an issue on their end. We've done a lot of research and wasted man-hours investigating the Azure environment and the local network, which is set up as a hub and spoke-type configuration. Auvik has really given us granular information that we needed to address issues within the ISP environment.

The monitoring and management function of Auvik is fine once we get the hang of it.

The solution's ease of use for our operations is good once we adapt to the visual side.

Auvik does not require any maintenance.

The dashboard needs to be more intuitive.

I would like more training information on the dashboard and the different functionalities under the various modules.

I have been using the solution for over one month.

The solution's stability is great and we have not had any issues.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The technical support is great. I was out of town and missed a couple of the calls, and Auvik's tech support reached out to reschedule. We haven't had a problem with them whatsoever. The technical support team has been right on target.

Positive

Deploying the agent was easy and there were no issues. I oversaw the deployment with our IT director. I'm the director of IS, and familiar with how Auvik was set up. The probes were placed at each location to get the information we needed for our IT scheme. 

We deployed the solution out of the box.

Auvik started to collect data in real time and map the network without any issues.

Compared to the numerous other agents we have deployed, whether it's 2R, JAM for Ninja, Addigy, or CyberCNS; Auvik is very easy. The most time-consuming piece is setting up the probe.

The implementation was completed in-house with a team of three people consisting of two system admins to set up the probes on the server, and a network admin for the network side.

We evaluated FortiGate, and we considered consolidating one of the RMMs that we're using. However, we required a solution that would allow us to remote into an end user's device to address the issue on the ticket. Auvik is a lot easier to use, and it costs less for us. Auvik also has more bells and whistles than the FortiGate solution.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We are a healthcare company with 16 locations, including our central billing office. We also have a data center in Azure that hosts 400 endpoints and around 300 users.

We've primarily used Auvik for:

• network monitoring,
• mapping out client networks,
• and being able to get remote access to networking equipment.

Being able to get documentation through ConnectWise Manage and IT Glue is one of the biggest ways we're able to reduce our response time. Auvik provides relevant documentation and information from endpoints that we would normally have to manually collect. If we need to open a case with Dell, HP, FortiClient, or FortiGate, Auvik does a fantastic job collecting and providing the information required to our team so they know exactly what we're dealing with.

Auvik helps visualize the network mapping/topology reorganization but we can't always export the information and have that be the best network map when we're presenting to a client. However, with the exported information the solution provides us and a few touch-ups in Visio, we can clean the information up and make it very presentable.

Auvik has improved our IT team's visibility into our remote and distribution networks globally by providing us with a single pane of glass that most of our teams can access. This allows our escalation team and project team to quickly identify and fix network problems, or set alerts so we are notified of any issues. This is a fantastic feature.

Having visibility is very important for our IT teams because being able to see and communicate with everyone quickly and easily is a huge component of transparency and making sure everyone is in the right place.

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date. We found that without Auvik, we were not able to get all of our network equipment into ConnectWise Manage, and it was difficult to keep track of all the relevant data. With Auvik, we were able to get everything set up efficiently and have all the information we need at our fingertips.

Auvik's ability to keep our device inventory updated has saved us time. 
We spent 10 to 20 hours a year updating and validating information before Auvik. Auvik has dramatically cut that down.

Since we've been using Auvik, communicating with our escalation team has been a lot more concise. We can focus on issues easier when it's a client that has Auvik because we can pinpoint exactly what's going on with their network. This dramatically increases our time to troubleshoot and reduces how long it takes to identify an issue and resolve it.

We have a client that has two different locations with at least one location using Auvik. The solution has been fantastic in helping pinpoint their networking equipment and firewalls and validating and providing data to the client on the performance of their network equipment. Auvik has been fantastic at providing our medical institutions with real-time data on their network and monitoring. We work with medical billing companies and it's very important for them to keep their networks up and running. It gives everyone peace of mind knowing that Auvik will notify all of us when there's a problem. Most of our clients are in medium size business areas, with a lot of them being singular locations. We have some clients in the manufacturing space where we use Auvik for monitoring temperatures in the environment.

The network discovery feature allows us to put in a subnet and have the software automatically detect all devices connected to that subnet. Once the SMP is set up correctly, we can then go to our clients and tell them which devices are connected to each other. Being an MSP, it's beneficial to be able to go to our clients and require as little documentation from them as possible, as long as we have access to help them discover their own network. We've had a few clients that we've taken over from departing IT people who didn't leave us with much information. Auvik has helped us become successful with those clients.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions are easy to use.

It is easy to use but it's not intuitive until we familiarize ourselves with the solution. Once we are familiar with the solution it is easy to set up.

The solution provides a single integrated platform for a number of our clients.

We have integrated our RMM which has multiple components with Auvik because from a network monitoring and management perspective, having a single integrated platform is very important. 

Auvik helps our team to focus on high-value tasks and delegating. One of the great advantages of Auvik is its ability to automate the collection of information. This is an immensely important part of our operation, and it makes automating the process very efficient.

I haven't used many on-prem network monitoring solutions, but the fact that Auvik's in the cloud and we can switch between different clients very quickly is a huge win. It may take a little bit longer to connect to a device when we're doing it through the Auvik portal in the cloud, but we don't have to VPN in or do anything else to connect.

The training is not intuitive. The little bit I've done with the training is fantastic but I would like to have a bit more intuitiveness. 

I have been using Auvik for two years.

We've never had any problems with the tool itself, but sometimes we have issues with equipment or lack of documentation. Auvik has never been at fault though. The only time Auvik had a problem was during the AWS outage that impacted 75 percent of our tools.

The Auvik probe is designed for businesses of all sizes. Once it's deployed, it automatically starts pulling in data and scanning our network. Even interns can use it, and it's easy to hand off to other team members.

Auvik's tech support is the best I've ever used. I only opened one case with them, and within five minutes the support person called me and we resolved everything within an hour. He even went above and beyond to resolve the issue. I've been working in tech support for over a decade now and that was one of the best people I've ever worked with. We found out that no one had updated Auvik's API integration with ConnectWise Manage. The support person walked me through the process and shared everything that was reported. The fact that he called and walked me through the steps, especially as I was a new person to Auvik, left a big impression. I compare all of our other vendor support to Auvik's support, with Auvik being the gold standard.

Positive

We previously used LogicMonitor but we didn't leverage it because it was absolutely atrocious, painful to use, and did not compare to Auvik in the slightest.

The initial setup is straightforward and I look forward to deploying the solution each time because of its ease.

I've deployed the solution to at least three or four of our clients. I've been the one to clean up the subnets and get everything mapped out with credentials or find missing credentials. The biggest aspect that slowed anything down was our lack of documentation or having to confirm exactly what we need to do in order to fully deploy.

We've mostly installed Auvik on preexisting servers and the first thing we do is set up a probe. We find the server we're going to use as our deployment server and install it there. It takes five minutes to get everything set up. Auvik then starts scanning to find the information. From there the solution tells us what credentials are missing, and if we have them we start entering the credentials. Within a day we have a full network map. It takes some time for Auvik to fully discover and do everything it requires.

Deploying Auvik is one of my main responsibilities as part of the onboarding team.

We started having information populate within half an hour of doing its initial discovery. The one client we had the most documentation on had most of the environment mapped out within an hour. Some had 10 different subnets we had to go through. It was a lot of discovery, but the solution was also validating credentials on our side. Auvik was fantastic to use and provided too much data at times.

The implementation is completed in-house and only requires one person.

I have seen time-to-value with Auvik. I use the solution frequently when we do onboarding or when we are trying to assess a situation in a client's environment.

We can't put a price tag on the efficiency and reliability of Auvik.

The pricing model makes a lot of sense and it's pretty reasonable considering it's based on the Managed Network devices that we have out there. We've been able to wrap that efficiently into a lot of our contracts when we're selling a full IT solution.

Compared to other solutions Auvik is streamlined so even if we're paying more for Auvik, it reduces the overall amount of time that I have to put in one place, which means I can bill for other items and take on other billable tasks.

We evaluated two other security providers, but they weren't direct competitors. Lionguard is more focused on event security, while the other provider is more focused on guarding property. There are some overlaps, but they provide different tasks.

I give the solution a 10 out of 10.

We're not using a lot of the automation and so, we're not as familiar with it as we could be. We've been dabbling with the alerts, and that's where we're looking to expand. But I'm not familiar with the automation side of Auvik.

Once we know what we're doing Auvik is a very efficient tool. It's very different from a lot of other tools. That's just the nature of it being a network management tool. Auvik is excellent at what it does.

There is very minimal maintenance required and Auvik is not usually the cause of this problem. Maintenance usually occurs when someone is working on a project and does not update Auvik or the project's documentation so that the rest of the team can update it.

When deploying Auvik for the first time we must make sure we have our documentation ready to go when doing a mass deployment to new sites or replacing our current existing one. The lack of documentation from the company using the solution is the only aspect that slows Auvik down.

We use Auvik to monitor configurations, devices, and discovery.

Our staff has a much easier time managing devices, networks, and configurations. We're in the middle of a project involving a full-blown switch replacement. There are about 80 switches, and we can grab configurations quickly and easily. Our staff doesn't have to worry about configuration backups or look in 10 different places for logins to hit a switch or firewall. Auvik discovers rogue devices that happen to be on the network, which saves us time and stress. It makes our lives easier.

Auvik saves us a lot of time. For example, for configuration backups, we used RANCID. It's been around forever, it's free, and it's open-source, but there's no support. It would take a lot of time to stand up to the three to ten different solutions, which would be required to get what Auvik gives us out-of-the-box. The amount of time it would take, the number of sites, the networks, and the cloud or on-premises environment would vary from company to company. If it's a 10-person company, standing up those solutions would be a little bit easier. If it's a 3,000-person company, it could take months to get everything correctly stood up. Auvik is a click-and-go solution. It has easily saved us hundreds of hours.

The solution affects our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally. If there's a network problem, it's normally given to a network engineer or somebody who at least knows what they're doing. With Auvik, each of our staff members has access to it. They can make changes according to their best judgment. It helps a lot of our staff understand basic networking, VLANs, trunks, and how networks are laid out. If somebody says, "Port 12 on Switch 2," they can find it.

The automation has a positive impact on our IT team's availability. It saves us time, and our team is more available to help with other tasks.

Tasks that would take hours now take minutes, especially if somebody doesn't have a lot of knowledge or skill set. Auvik doesn't turn someone into a full-blown network architect or engineer, but for people who wouldn't necessarily know how to crawl around on the command line or do discovery, everything is in front of them and they're able to set it up.

We've been able to delegate low-level tasks to our junior staff. Right now, someone is manually doing around 50 switches, four core switches, and a firewall deployment by leveraging Auvik. He's had very minimal network experience prior to this, but he's learning about the network, port, and VLAN through Auvik.

We have seen a reduction in our meantime to resolution. Between the alerting and the ability to leverage Auvik to find it, fix it, and roll it back, we've cut down our response time by at least half, if not more. We haven't needed to keep track of that metric because we hit the ground running with Auvik. At my last company, the amount of time we spent on issues was insane. There were meetings on an almost daily basis about why people were spending so much time on network-related issues.

For example, we had a major customer that was down for over a week and a half due to a network issue, and they weren't pleased about it. It happened again after we started using Auvik, and I was able to identify the issues with Auvik within five minutes and resolve it within ten. The amount of time it took to resolve the issue went down from a week and a half to 15 minutes.

All of the features are valuable, but the ability to remote into anything, whether it's a terminal or a browser, is really big for us. It makes things a lot easier day-to-day. It keeps track of all the firewall or switch configurations, so if anybody makes changes, we can roll back and have an alert on it. Discovery has been useful.

It's easy to use Auvik's monitoring and management function. We can roll out a site in under 15 minutes, so it's up and working right away.

The solution's ease of use has been very important to our operations.
We have a lot of tool sets, so we don't want to spend a lot of time deploying and tinkering with it. Auvik is a click-and-done solution, so there's minimal effort involved.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform, which is pretty important to our organization. Everything is one pane of glass. We don't want to have 20 different portals for 20 different customers because managing each one individually would be a nightmare scenario. It's a lot of overhead. It's pretty useful in general, but it's also incredibly important because the more time we spend managing those tasks, the less time we have for everything else.

Auvik helps to visualize the network mapping and topology for our organization. It's just there, so we don't really think about it. It makes it very easy. As it discovers, it draws out the map. We can see where things flow and what they're connected to. We can answer all kinds of questions like, "What happens if I unplug this," or "Where is this machine, generally speaking?" We've used it to hunt down everything from rogue devices to a missing laptop. Thanks to the topology view, we were able to see which AP it was connected to.

Customers like to see what their network looks like. They may think they have a tiny network, but they actually have 500 devices that are just sitting on their network in a 20-person company. It helps them understand that we're actually doing something and not just saying that the network has a problem. It's good for visualization and for keeping track of where offices are located so we don't need to commit it fully to memory.

It's very important to us that visibility helps our IT team focus on our networks. We want our staff to be aware of the network, what's on it, and how to manage it. We've used it as a learning tool. It discovers everything. One of our guys wants to get more into networking, and we said, "All right, go into here, go to this switch, get all of the port configurations, and figure out how to apply it to the new stuff," because they're not the same. It's a manual process, so he's learned more about networks and networking in the past week than he has ever been exposed to before.

Auvik helps us keep device inventories up to date. It's helpful to know when the software ends and what the last support dates are.

The higher-level and more experienced guys on our team have been able to delegate simpler tasks to our help desk and people who don't have 10 years of experience with network engineering. It frees up our team, and it helps our less-skilled employees get a hands-on education, which is usually the best way.

Sometimes it's a little bit slow to load, but I can't think of anything else that could be improved.

I have used this solution for two years, in my previous company and now in my current organization. 

We have never needed to use technical support.

We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks. We used Device42 for asset management, discovery, and collection. We also used an RMM and SolarWinds.

There are no other solutions that do what Auvik does. Other solutions can get very convoluted. You could have a monitoring solution, a configuration backup solution, a Syslog server, a SIM, and a Device42 or something similar to track hardware life cycles.

Auvik has packaged everything into one solution. I remember thinking, "No one really does everything the right way." The more you see a solution smash different facets into one product, the more you think, "There's no way they can do everything really well." Auvik does what it says it will do. It meets all expectations. The monitoring is just as good, if not better than a dedicated monitoring solution. Cisco is happy to charge you boatloads of money to do Syslog and configuration backup, but Auvik does it out-of-the-box.

The icing on the cake is all the integrations. You can throw it into Teams or into a ticketing system. We've used other solutions, but for the rest of my career, Auvik will be the default solution that we use.

I deployed Auvik myself. It only took 15 minutes to set up. After giving some credentials and installing a collector, it started up immediately. We had usable information within half an hour and fully discovered networks within a couple of hours. It was insanely easy.

We're a little bit different from most organizations because we include what Auvik does in our monthly fee for our customers. Technically, we're definitely making money. We don't actually break it down and say, "We made $500 on Auvik this month," but as soon as we have a customer, we're making money, and part of that is thanks to Auvik.

Auvik's pricing isn't astronomical. Auvik is extremely fair in how they break down a billable device versus something that isn't, especially compared to PRTG, which charges for a number of sensors. Auvik makes it really easy to understand that you aren't going to get billed for certain things. They're cutting themselves short, in my opinion, but I've never had to worry about pricing from Auvik. It's always been very affordable.

We evaluated five other direct competitors of Auvik. Essentially, we did our due diligence and put it through the paces. We did a demo and a trial.

I would rate Auvik as 10 out of 10. 

I see absolutely no point in an on-prem monitoring solution anymore. If the collector goes offline and something is down at the site, you know that you're looking at a very minimal amount of issues: either the firewall just burst into flames or the ISP is down. Because everything is in the cloud and we're able to see it 24/7/365, I wouldn't deploy an on-premises monitoring solution anywhere.

Auvik is the best piece of software we have used across the board because of the value it offers, especially compared to what it costs and the value it adds to the organization. I've worked for major companies like ESG, Abiomed, and Akamai. I wish I knew about Auvik earlier in my career because it would've made my life a million times easier as a systems administrator, systems engineer, and architect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall, it is very stable. 

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are an MSP. We use Auvik to monitor our customers and to get up/down tickets. We get alerts from the SIEM, so we use it to make sure where those clients are in the SIEM. If we get an alert that something is sending 5 gigs, we can use it to make sure it is on the network or not on the network. We use it for alerts as well. That is mainly about it. We also give network maps to the customers to use.

A lot of our clients want compliance. There is active monitoring of the system, and it is just easier to get a network map. It is easier to see all the clients that are on the network. If somebody needs to know who is using the x subnet, we can search for it and send it off to them. It is pretty easy in that respect for most of our customers.

Auvik Network Management makes it a little bit easier to troubleshoot network issues. If we get an alert saying that there is a high interface usage, or something is very high, I can click right on the switch and look at it. I can see which port is being utilized. I can see the total utilization on the switch. If I need to, I can terminal into it and turn it off or turn it on.

Auvik's network map along with its dashboard gives us a close to real-time picture of our network. It is not in real-time. It is close enough to real-time. If I want to see how much traffic is going from all the clients to the server over the course of a day, I can see that. However, if I want to see a broadcast storm or if we accidentally created a loop or something, it gives me the tools to find it, but it does not explicitly tell me that we created a loop. In terms of visibility, if I click around, I can get about 90% visibility for investigating things.

We have been able to more quickly identify issues in the network. We did not do documentation on clients before. It is now easier for us to get the documentation done because we can see that there is a switch here and there is a switch there, and get it done. For new clients, I can plug it in and put it in the network. I do not have to walk everywhere. These are the nice, immediate, and tangible benefits that we saw.

Auvik Network Management has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution, but it is hard to quantify the time savings. Sometimes, you have to dig in. It at least cuts 30 to 45 minutes off of getting into the server, logging into the switches, pulling all the switches up, etc. I can click from one to one to one.

I like the quick mapping. I can put a customer in, and I can put the Auvik monitor in, and then probably within about half an hour to an hour, I can see most of the map. I have to tweak things here and there with the switches to get it to read correctly for credentials, but it is very quick. I can see the network pretty quickly.

There are a few things I would like to change about the interface, but in general, compared to a lot of other products, it is a little easier to use. It is a little hard sometimes to find MAC addresses and a couple of other things without getting a couple of clicks in, but in general, usability-wise, it is better than the ones we tried.

I would like more customizable alerts. I can put all the firewalls. I can put all the switches. However, especially with our firewalls, I would like to create an SNMP alert when there has been a change on the firewall, such as a rule change or a configuration change. We want to use it as a part of change management, but we cannot because we cannot get alerts. The alerts are basically whatever Auvik has. We cannot create or at least submit a ticket to get a customized alert, so we have to rely on our SIEM instead to do that alert. It took months. We had to get them to create it for us. That would be one thing I would like to see. There should be more customizable alerts or an easier and more accessible way to get customized alerts in some fashion. We really need those alerts. Otherwise, it mostly works for us.

It would also be nice to be able to customize some parts of the interface so that we have the information that is most important to us, and we could display that in some way.

Overall, there should be more customizability. It does what it does, but trying to change anything about it is a little difficult. We would save more time if we could put certain things on the front dashboard and are able to pull it up and go, "I want the switch and the firewall monitored on these ports." If I am trying to do some testing, I should be able to just put them there on Auvik and pin them instead of having to go to each one of them individually.

3+ years

It is definitely stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is pretty scalable. It could get a little dicey, but it is not on the Auvik's side. It depends on the implementation. I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability.

We have ten people who work with Auvik. Our clients are mostly medium-sized organizations. We have about a dozen or so large enterprises, and we have about 300 medium-sized organizations and another 300 small-sized ones. 

I never had to call them. My colleague did call support to talk about the alerts. They did answer pretty quickly, and we were pretty quick to tell them no. They were helpful and quick the one time we called them. We do not really call them.

The documentation that they provide is pretty good. The deployment information is pretty detailed. They have the options for Linux, Windows, and even Unix. I do appreciate that. It is pretty good.

We used Domotz for a while, and we then switched to Auvik. We ran into similar problems, but the dashboard of Domotz was not as accessible as Auvik.

We also used Observium. It is an open-source one. Observium did everything we wanted to do, but it was way too in-depth. It is an actual open-source developer one, so it is not easily accessible to the average person. We used Observium for a brief period.

Many customers are getting contacted by ManageEngine. I've take a tour of their platform and it seems to be very similar, but can be more robust - for a price. 

The time to value of Auvik is not very long. The platform is pretty quick. There are good instructions online. It was almost immediately.

I am pretty sure it is all on-prem. At least I have not deployed one that was in the cloud.

The deployment is pretty straightforward. It is super easy. The instructions online are usually pretty good. I do not have any problems with it. It is pretty easy and straightforward.

For small customers, it takes a couple of hours. For large customers, with ten switches and a couple of firewalls, it can take four or five hours. Auvik itself usually takes 20 minutes. If we have access to the server, we can just boot up Windows or Linux, and it is done.

In terms of maintenance, we do get alerts when the collectors go offline. Sometimes, they just fall out, and sometimes, the network does some weird things. There is a small amount of maintenance but nothing crazy.

We have definitely seen an ROI in terms of time to resolution and time to work on things. It has definitely shown value in that sense. It has saved us about half an hour on a ticket.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on the setup and maintenance of the solution and issue resolution.

Relative to others, it is affordable. It is not terrible. The Performance licensing is a little expensive for what you get, but the standard licensing is fine.

Observium was free. It is open source, so you cannot beat that. It is open source, so it is free. 

Domotz is probably a little more expensive. I never got into that because that was a little bit before me. I used it a little bit but did not get into the pricing structure too much. It seems pretty comparable.

Technically, there are critical devices that are monitored by Auvik at no charge. We have to pay for servers. We have to pay for network devices and firewalls. We do have some PCs that we want to make sure do not go down. This free monitoring is nice. It does not add too much value. We want to see the workstations and where they are at. It would be weird to be charged for that.

It definitely does what it is supposed to do and what it is advertised to do. If people want to use it, it would be fine. For MSPs, it works great because the pricing structure is pretty good, but singular individual or giant enterprises would probably go with an in-house solution, such as Observium, for some of the alerting. In general, for MSPs, it is great. The pricing structure is great, and it is definitely usable.

Auvik has not empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own because we do not give it to our entry-level technicians. In our case, it is specifically for our network team. Our entry-level technicians do not handle any of the network. It is something we want to do with them, but as of now, our entry-level technicians do not use it.

Overall, I would rate Auvik Network Management an eight out of ten. Customizable alerts would be good. It would also be nice to be able to customize some parts of the interface. There should be more customizability. 

I have used Auvik on our local network and our remote network over VPN, and I used it to look for physical devices automatically on our networks.

The main benefit I'm seeking from Auvik is automation. I want to automate the process of pulling resources from our network. I am trying not to do things manually. I would also like to pull information from cloud systems, but I can't do that now. 

It doesn't take long to set Auvik up, and it accurately maps all my network devices. It's rare for a product to simply work the first time. The trial was super easy. I turned it on and let it go. It told me where I had to add login information, and then it just worked, so I think it's pretty good.

I haven't used Auvik in production, but I've been testing it by disabling devices to see how the network map updates. It updates very quickly, so I know immediately when something goes down. Based on my limited testing, I can say that it's ready to go if I put it into production. 

Auvik is effective at scanning the network. It pulls information from devices automatically using the devices' login credentials, creates a network diagram, and displays the network logs. Interestingly, Auvik can manage hardware life cycles. You can see which devices are reaching the end of their lives.  It does a built-in audit, but the solution's strength is automated discovery. Auvik does this really well.

Auvik is easy to use. It's probably one of the best. The network map is something that has been undervalued in these solutions. They're often a secondary thing that network admins are left to build out on their own, and they don't work properly. With Auvik, the network map updates quickly on its own automatically, so it's quite helpful. When there's a problem or disconnection, you know, somewhere, it shows up right away. 

The network map updates in real-time, and I quickly started to trust that it's showing the correct information. It's constantly updating. It's easy to use and set up. You don't need to maintain it. It maintains itself. If the hardware in the system is disconnected or disabled, it continues to update the map.

Auvik only covers the physical network devices. It doesn't include remote apps working in the cloud, but I'm hopeful that they'll have that at some point. It maps virtual machines and physical devices but not low-level cloud systems. 

I've done a couple of trials with Auvik. I did a trial about a year and a half ago. I just did a trial for a few days last week.

I haven't had any issues with Auvik's stability or seen anything weird about performance. Network scanning could be hard on a network, but this has been consistent and reliable so far. 

We monitor some large systems, but for our trial, I only gave it access to about 50 devices. We monitor about 2,000 in total. 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. During my last trial, I asked them for help, and they remotely connected to my Auvik instance to provide help immediately. I didn't need help this time. 

Positive

I've used many network monitoring solutions over the last 30 years. Auvik's biggest advantage over the others is the easy setup. As soon as you install it, Auvik asks for some basic credentials and starts scanning. it just works. That's pretty rare. The interface is clean and easy to use. 

The only disadvantage is that it doesn't capture cloud activity. To be fair, that's outside their wheelhouse. That isn't a capability they advertise. It's more like something I would like to see, but it's not really what they do. So it's kind of unfair to request that.

Auvik's time-to-value was extremely good. Other solutions require a lot of manual work and config file setup. I spent considerable time determining the connections between devices, and often the connections aren't configured correctly on other systems. Auvik sees the interconnections between devices quickly and correctly.

Deploying Auvik was straightforward, and we completed the setup in under 20 minutes. Our network has a few parts. There are local and remote components. There are also some remote connections, so we had to pivot the remote subnets. Within an hour, we had the local and remote networks, including network devices, firewalls, etc. 

I am not familiar with the details about Auvik's pricing. I know that there are billable devices and some that aren't billable, which are displayed on the dashboard. You need to see all the devices to get the full picture of what the network is doing. It's all part of the network. If something is missing, it won't work properly. 

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. When deploying, you should have all your network credentials ready. That's all it needs. Make sure whoever is installing Auvik has access to all the systems you want to monitor.