Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

I work for an MSP and manage networks for a couple of clients. We use Auvik to monitor their network devices and make configuration changes as needed. When a network device goes offline, we get an alert and we can respond to it accordingly.

Auvik improves our visibility and enables us to monitor more proactively. We can identify if devices or links are approaching their configured capacity. For example, we can set alerts if bandwidth utilization is over 90 percent or if CPU is extremely high, allowing us to take action before the users notice a drop in performance.

We started seeing benefits the moment Auvik was deployed on a customer's network. You immediately start seeing devices, including some devices you didn't know were there. Auvik helps our NOC see issues and resolve them. They know what's connected to what. It helps them and reduces the number of cases escalated to senior network resources. Due to this, we can focus on bigger projects because the NOC technicians can see the issues in many cases.

Auvik has reduced our resolution time because it has the maps and the configuration backups. Some issues that would typically take hours to resolve could be resolved in 15 minutes or less. We can revert to the old configuration, and everything starts working again. It saves a lot of time. 

I like Auvik's configuration backups. When a configuration change occurs, it automatically updates the configuration in Auvik. If something stops working, we can roll back to the previous configuration. That's very helpful.

Auvik's interface is pretty easy to use. You should be good to go after playing around with it for a few hours. You can find what you need easily. It isn't rocket science. Auvik's ease of use makes troubleshooting faster because we can easily see what we need to see. All the alerts are in one place. I don't find it difficult to achieve real-time visibility with Auvik because I am familiar with the solution. Also, I took an Auvik course about five or six months ago, so I know how it works.

The network map offers a real-time picture of your network if you include the correct credentials. It's pretty smart and can draw a decent map of the network. However, it doesn't work as well for more complex clients. The network map is a little messy. 

Having this visibility is critical for a network specialist. When we're troubleshooting, the first thing we need to know is how it's all connected. If you don't know how it's connected, you won't be able to solve the problem. 

We have a firewall with devices behind it. When that firewall goes offline, we get alerts for it and the 10 devices behind it. There should be a way to set up a dependency so that when the firewall goes down, Auvik bundles it up and sends it at the same time. That would reduce the noise in our email. We don't want to get 11 alerts because one firewall went down. We just want one alert saying that all the devices under the firewall are also offline.

I'd like to see device response times and packet losses. Auvik monitors these metrics for internet links, but I would also like to see this for devices within the network. 

We have used Auvik for 14 to 16 months.

We have some devices that Auvik has gotten configurations from previously, but it stops working for some reason. Auvik stops receiving SysLog messages from devices. We still haven't fixed this issue because we haven't had time to drill down and figure out why it's happening.

Auvik should have about 1,500 devices, and you will see performance impacts after around 15,000. The performance will be very slow, and it takes time to load.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. Their support team is pretty responsive and quick to help. You can click on a chat button inside Auvik to open a ticket. That's pretty convenient.

Positive

I've used a couple of solutions, including SolarWinds and PRTG. SolarWinds has some nice features. You can push configurations to all devices in your network simultaneously. I don't think I've seen that in Auvik.

The setup went smoothly. Once you install the collector, it discovers everything in the network. Deploying Auvik can take up to a month. We installed Auvik on a data server accessible everywhere on the network. You need a server that can reach all the subnets. We gave it some time to discover the network and manually added any devices that it didn't find.  After deployment, we need to do some maintenance on the server where Auvik is installed, but there's nothing specific to Auvik. 

Some of our clients who weren't interested in Auvik changed their minds after talking to other clients and seeing the benefits they've received. It saves a lot of time, giving us more time to focus on critical issues and not worry about the product. It's very solid once it's set up.

I rate Auvik seven out of 10. I recommend simplifying your network as much as possible. The map can be messy when a network is unnecessarily complex. Auvik struggles to bring the connections up correctly. 

We use it to onboard new clients to get a baseline idea of what their network looks like and a picture of what we potentially need to upgrade or replace or get rid of entirely. And for existing clients, we use it for network troubleshooting to figure out if there are any loops in the network or, if we're seeing high packet spikes on specific interfaces, to track down the lags in the network.

We use it for small business networks, mainly SonicWall firewalls and HPE networking gear.

Auvik has helped us diagnose a lot of really painful network issues. We left it because it was a little too pricey for us at the time, but over time we realized the amount of labor involved in diagnosing even the smallest of network loops or broadcast storms is impossible without a tool like Auvik. It has taken some of our network problem-solving tickets from 10 to 15 hours down to two or three hours. We eat the cost of Auvik and, frankly, it's worth every penny in that regard.

We are also now delegating tickets for the network, moving more tickets to our tier-two engineers from our tier-three engineers.

Something Auvik does really well is provide a single integrated platform. That's very important for us as a managed service provider. We really need single-pane-of-glass for all of our programs. Auvik makes it super simple to have sub-tenants and you can then view high-level details from the "parent" tenant, which is our MSP interface, while also diving deep into the client-side and having full access there for assigning client-level permissions. For our co-managed clients, we can get their engineers in alongside our engineers to both view and manage the data.

Another great part of the platform is that it helps keep device inventories up to date. That's where we get an initial map of the network during client onboarding. We can then use that over time and say, "Okay, this switch is hitting the warranty." Auvik can detect the serial number and check the warranty status. We can prompt ourselves to call the client and say, "Hey, we should replace this before you run out of service." To an extent, this feature has created more work for us, but it's work that we need to do. It's notifying us that these things are expiring when, previously, we just didn't know. It's saving us the time of manually checking, but we weren't necessarily doing that consistently before Auvik.

The visualization of network mapping and topology is good, but it's not as customizable as I would like. I'd like to be able to adjust the images that are used for different vendors, for example. There are some improvements that could definitely be made, but it's definitely better than a lot of other programs in the market.

Also, the general feature set could use some work. For network mapping and network alerting, it's great for what it does. But it could provide more monitoring, such as jitter monitoring, which it doesn't have, and round-trip time for packets. I would like to see more network detail on the actual traffic that's flowing through the network. Maybe they could also provide some additional flow support.

It has some room for improvement, but especially since we first used it in 2015, it's come a long way. I'm really excited to see where they go next with it.

We started using Auvik in 2015 for about a year. We then left it and just started using it again about six months ago.

There haven't been any outages that have affected us. I've seen some status alerts from them saying, "Hey, we're conducting maintenance," or, "Hey, we had an emergency outage," but they have never been at a time when they affected us.

The scalability is fine. It's just a matter of adding new clients. It takes some time for each client, but that's true with every solution. It scales well because, especially once you get the setup down for one client, it's pretty easy for future clients.

Their support is quick to respond. I haven't had to reach out to them for a while now, but when I was reaching out to them during and shortly after onboarding, they were prompt, with same-day or next-business-day response times.

Positive

Between Auvik in 2015 and now, we were just using the built-in network device mapping of ConnectWise Automate and we just found that wasn't enough. It wasn't efficient and it just missed too much.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just followed the documentation. I had also done it in 2015. Although I didn't remember doing it back then, doing it again was really quick. I got one of our other network engineers involved to help at one point and he picked it up really fast. It's super easy to set up for high-level engineers, but I wouldn't necessarily trust a level-one tech with setting it up to the standard necessary to get it set for future use.

There is definitely some technical knowledge necessary. I couldn't task our tier-one techs, necessarily, with setting it up super quickly, but the documentation is good enough that, as long as you can follow documents, you can get through it. Speed is an issue there. A higher-level network engineer can speed through it really quickly.

The overall intuitiveness of Auvik's network visualization is fairly good, but that's where the configuration side comes in. If you don't configure it well from the beginning, it can be a mess to understand. So you need to have that higher level of knowledge to take care of that. But as long as you set it up right from the beginning, a tier-one tech can go in and look at that network map and see how things in the network are all connected together.

Once the Auvik collector was implemented, it said it would take about 10 minutes to populate the network mapping. I waited about 12 minutes and it wasn't done. I came back about 20 minutes later and it was done, so it took about 30 minutes, at most.

There is much less work in setting up Auvik versus previous solutions we have used. Maintenance consists of periodic checking to make sure all the credentials are still right. It uses usernames and passwords, so if you change your password and you don't update it in Auvik, things will stop working. So we check on that. Also, when you install new devices, they need additional setup in Auvik. It's not a tremendous amount of work, but there is some.

Auvik pays for itself. Network monitoring tools are all expensive. They take in a lot of data and they do a lot of processing. If you're hosting it yourself, it's going to be an expensive license. If they're hosting it for you, it's going to be expensive hosting. At the end of the day, unless you're paying employees minimum wage, which you shouldn't be doing, the network monitoring tool is going to save more hours of employee labor than the cost of the software.

We saw value from Auvik within five business days. We were really pushed when we set it up, and we pushed Auvik saying, "Hey, we need this now. We've got a client issue that we need to solve." They got our instance to us quickly, we got in there and got it set up in two or three days and we got that issue solved within five business days of contacting Auvik to get the solution. It was insanely quick.

The pricing is kind of steep, but it's worth the price. There's no beating around the bush. It's an expensive solution, but it's really the best solution there is for us.

We did some superficial looking at SolarWinds products and PRTG, and Kaseya has some products, but Auvik, at least in the MSP industry, is our standard. We did the demo and we were sold instantly.

It's fairly easy to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. I wouldn't say ease of use is one of our highest priorities. As an MSP, we need to cater to the lowest common denominator in our staff. We need to be able to tell our tier-one techs to at least get into this software to review the data—maybe not configure it—but at least review and understand it. Other tools, like PRTG or Nmap, just give you that data, but you need to be a network engineer to even read through it properly and understand it. Auvik really brings that down so that a junior can review things. Configuration, not as much, but that's not a limitation of Auvik, that's a limitation of network devices in general.

As a cloud-based solution, Auvik works well. The probe sends us a lot of data, but it's all tech-space data. There is constant traffic from your network to the Auvik servers, but it's not gigabytes of traffic data. We haven't had any issues with it. I definitely think that there's value in having an on-prem network solution, both for the sake of security and for being able to have a bit more access to the network than just a probe and then the cloud server architecture, but it works well for what we do.

We used it for network monitoring and network health. We had it deployed at all of our sites. We are an MSP, and we've got about 30 different managed clients. All of them had an Auvik collector at each site to monitor the network for changes or infrastructure health. We have an RMM solution for remote monitoring and management of our workstations and servers, but that tool doesn't monitor network infrastructure. 

Its monitoring and management functions are very easy to use. With some of the other solutions, their built-in database of OID markers isn't great, and you need to manage all of your own MIBs. With a lot of competitors, if a device isn't in its catalog, we need to go and add it to the catalog ourselves, which is a big challenge, whereas Auvik has a phenomenal database behind it, and it is generic, which is another benefit of Auvik. It's not vendor dependent. So, whether you're using Cisco switches, Ubiquiti switches, NetGear switches, TP-Link devices, Hyper-V or VMware, FortiGate firewalls, or Barracuda firewalls, Auvik typically supports them. It has very broad support.

Its integrations are exceptional. The multitenancy in it is also phenomenal. It's very easy to jump from one client to another while also keeping those clients separate. So, if you have someone who is only managing a couple of sites, that's all they can see. They can't see everything else, but someone with a little bit more access can see all of the sites. Being an MSP, we have a lot of different sites that we're accessing. When we have a co-managed environment, a tech for client A can go in and see all the information relating to client A, but they won't be able to see anything for client B.

The time that it has saved is almost impossible to measure. For example, we had a client, and their firewall had failed. We picked up a new firewall. We were going to go set it up, but the last backup that we had on the client's server was from a year and a half prior. It was well out of date, and it was missing a lot of the recent changes. With Auvik, we were able to go in and download the latest backup and restore it instantly. It has saved all those hours that we would have spent troubleshooting or finding missing rules, as well as the management time of having a tech periodically go in and do all of those backups. Because the whole system is automated, it's very hard to measure how much time we saved, but it is a lot of time.

It is the best in class for visualizing the network mapping/topology of the organizations we were monitoring. It is extremely intuitive. One of the big things is everything is all color-coded. So, whether a connection is layer one or layer three, it is very easily highlighted with a blue line versus a gray line. If it is wired versus wireless, there is a solid line versus a dotted line. All of the device types have their own category associated with them. So, if you're looking for a firewall, you just look for the red dot, and you can pick that up pretty easily. If you're looking for a switch, you look for the orange dot. Finding devices on it is very intuitive.

They also had a great feature of being able to collapse and group some of the devices. If you had ten security cameras connected to one switch, rather than having ten little black dots on it, it was able to group them into one item saying security cameras, and you can click on it and expand. It's something that I didn't think about that much when I was using the product because it seemed normal and intuitive. Moving away to a different product that doesn't have the same mapping level or the same features has made the switch a little bit more difficult. You can still get there at the end of the day where you can find the devices, but it is just not as easy.

It was absolutely helpful in reducing repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. That goes back to things like backups. The fact that it would automatically go through and do the backups, and we didn't need to spend the time to go through and check that was phenomenal. The remote internet connection checks were very useful. ISPs can be very difficult to work with when you're trying to discuss service or packet loss or interruptions. Rather than telling the ISP " We're experiencing this issue," the reports coming out of Auvik gave us a great ability to go to the ISP and say, "Hey, here's some more data. We're dropping packets at such and such rate." Auvik gives you historical benchmarks and reports, and because we already have got the history of it, to troubleshoot, the ISP doesn't have to start gathering reports from that point.

If you have a client that has two locations and a data center, Auvik can group all of those collectors into one client, and you can have a larger view of all three locations and how they interact with each other in one overarching network map, whereas Domotz splits it into three separate locations. Domotz is great in the sense that you get one flat rate per site, but what it won't do is that it won't integrate those sites together. They would be three separate agents that need monitoring within Domotz.

The remote access feature was very useful. If a client's server was offline, we didn't need to VPN in or go to the site to turn on the servers. Auvik gave us the ability to turn on the server remotely without having to go anywhere. It saved us time on that side of things. Over the four years that we were working with it, on average, it has saved us about 150 hours.

Auvik has a phenomenal granular access model where you can even make your own custom role. If you have a co-op student and you want them to only have read access, that's easy to set up. If there is a more experienced person, but they're only allowed certain sites, it is very easy to restrict their access.

Auvik's SSO integration is one of the best I've ever seen. When we were first adopting SSO, Auvik was the first vendor we integrated it with because Auvik was able to get SSO set up where it's one per user or per tech. It's not a big bang migration, and you can have a trial with a couple of techs first, and if it works, roll it out to more.

We had integrated Auvik into ITGlue. When we're onboarding a new client, rather than having to manually add each device into ITGlue, after Auvik has scanned the network and picked up all the devices, we can import all the devices from there. From an accuracy standpoint, being able to import devices saved us from the manual entry and saved us from user errors, such as mistyping a map address or something else.

It definitely reduced the mean time to resolution. The spanning-tree notifications from it were helpful. We've had a couple of instances where a client found a cable that they thought was just loose, and they were being helpful by plugging it in somewhere, which created a loop on the switch. We got to know about it from Auvik. We knew which port it was plugged into and what the solution was to fix it instantly. It reduced our mean time to resolution to about a quarter of the time. We were able to fix things that would've taken an hour to resolve in 10-15 minutes.

Auvik is phenomenal for network monitoring as well as for other functionalities such as remote access or backups. A really cool feature that it has is that it takes a backup of all of the configurations automatically. Auvik periodically, most probably on a daily basis, logs into all the switches and firewalls that you have on-site to see if there is a change, and when there is a change, it does a new backup of the device. It logs changes for you. If you start experiencing some issues, you can go back to those logs to say, "Oh, there is a change made last week, Thursday," and with Auvik, you can just roll back to that snapshot nicely and quickly.

Its UI is really intuitive. It's really easy to get a hold of it. It's very easy for non-technical people to understand. One of our problems with some of the competitors is that they've got a fairly grayscale UI. It sounds very pedantic, but the color scheme of Auvik made identifying which devices were which and how they were connected to each other easy. It was a very useful feature that is underrated. 

Another feature that worked really well for us was the remote access tool. If we needed to log into one of the network devices, we didn't have to jump on a server, workstation, or local device, or connect through a VPN. Auvik was able to give us direct UI access to any device on the network.

It is amazing in keeping device inventories up-to-date. It mostly keeps them up to date as things change. There were a couple of hiccups where a device would get replaced and the mapping would break, and we'd have to go in and fix the mapping. It was with devices that Auvik couldn't fully discover or devices that would change frequently, such as cell phones or other devices on the network that are dynamic and change all the time. The integration would just show up with an IP address and a MAC address. There was no other information in them, which wasn't very helpful. They were the devices that Auvik wasn't able to discover fully. If they had full SNMP or SSH credentials and Auvik knew what the device was and it was matched correctly in Auvik, then Auvik could push it through.

It is not at all cheap. We migrated to Domotz because of its pricing.

We used it for about four years, and we just migrated away from it.

It was probably one of the best ever. I went to school with three other guys. When we graduated, three of them went to work for Auvik support. Full props to the support team. They are phenomenal. I would rate them an eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement. I do wish that they had more open-source pfSense support. There were a couple of things that I was hoping would come out as features but they didn't.

Positive

We didn't have a solution in place. Auvik was our initial solution, but now, we have migrated away from it to Domotz because of pricing. What really triggered it for us was that our firewall of choice is pfSense, which is open source. Auvik, by default, would categorize pfSense as a Linux server, which is essentially what it is. We would then manually categorize it as a firewall. Firewalls are on the list of billable devices for Auvik. However, we weren't being billed for them because Auvik was originally categorizing them as Linux servers. When we were onboarding the product, we mentioned this to our account manager, and we told him that none of our firewalls are being categorized as billable devices. The account manager at the time said that it was a bank error in our favor, and because they were not able to categorize it properly, they were not going to bill us for those devices.

We then costed out our offering with it and had that set with all of our clients. Recently, Auvik was able to fix that bank error, which essentially doubled all of our prices. This makes for a very hard conversation to go to clients and say that we need to double our prices to them because our vendor has doubled our prices. That was a challenge. 

I'm okay if you're going to double our prices, but the support for pfSense, for which they weren't billing us before, is fairly limited. With most of the firewalls, if you have site-to-site VPNs, they show up on the network map as a site-to-site VPN or remote access VPN. Auvik will monitor the usage on those to say, "You have 10 remote access connections, and everything is okay, or you're up to 50 people connecting remotely, and you're starting to get degraded service." All of these additional firewall monitoring features weren't available on pfSense, which was fine because they weren't billing us for it. Now that they wanted to start billing us for these devices, I had asked them if we were going to get support for all of these additional features. They said no because they are not looking to expand their pfSense development. That was frustrating. So, it basically came down to whether we double our costs and pass that onto all of our clients, or whether we look for an alternative, such as Domotz, that doesn't have as many features and is not as pretty in a sense, but it halves our cost. So, we ended up halving our costs instead of doubling them.

As part of onboarding, we got talking with some of the Domotz dev team, and all of the features that were missing have been added as feature requests. We're working with their engineering team to implement some of the features that are not quite there yet.

It was significantly easier than onboarding Domotz. Virtually, every alert or trigger that we could have wanted was built in by default. We didn't have to set up custom alerts, custom triggers, or their base alerting standards. In fact, if anything, it was too much. We had to turn off some of the alerts that were misfiring or not a hundred percent accurate, but there was nothing that we wanted that we couldn't get out of the box.

Its setup was easier. Everything was a lot easier. Even onboarding of new devices was easier. Auvik would identify them a lot easier. Our current solution is a lot more finicky and has more manual elements to it. It's definitely something that Auvik was better at.

Its time-to-value is instant. Before we even onboarded the product, we could see the value in it just from the demo.

Auvik is definitely one of the more expensive platforms. It is not cheap at all. If cost is an issue, Auvik isn't on the table at all, but they do have a fantastic solution for the cost. If budget isn't a concern, they are probably the market leader.

We migrated away from it to a competitor called Domotz because of pricing. Auvik bills per what they call a billable device, which is a firewall, a switch, and a controller. All of those count as billable devices. Domotz, as an alternative, bills per site. It's a flat fee for the whole site. So, whether you've got 3 switches or 10 switches, it's the same cost.

Auvik's premium product has a couple of other features with regard to NetFlow and some of the traffic analysis on that side. They've also got Syslog now in their premium product. However, we found their premium product to be fairly expensive. The whole product is very expensive, even for their standard offering. So, to bump up to premium, it's a lot more expensive. We trialed it for a bit. It was very useful but not worth the extra cost.

In terms of comparing Auvik’s cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, it is a tricky balance because while the Auvik database and the backend are all cloud-based, you still have an on-premise collector doing some of the management for you. The management of it is cloud-based, but there is an on-premise component to it. There are some alternatives, such as PRTG or Zabbix. They're all on-premise alternatives, but they are very much a pain to manage, particularly when you have multiple sites and multiple clients. Having the backend cloud-based is very useful. However, that's a feature that they share with Domotz. Domotz is cloud-based in the same way.

Overall, I'd give Auvik a seven out of ten. Tech-wise, it's a ten, but its pricing is a very big barrier to adoption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

We had no consultant. It was Auvik and us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I work for an IT-managed service provider specializing in the medical field. We offer IT support to various healthcare organizations, including hospitals, urgent care centers, doctor's offices, and specialty clinics, with client sizes ranging from 50 to 500 computers. Auvik Network Management is a critical tool for us. It helps us discover network devices, stay on top of alerts, ensure proper backups, and locate specific devices when needed, allowing us to proactively manage our clients' IT infrastructure.

While the network map provides a valuable real-time view of our complex network with diverse clients, it's not easily interpretable for laypeople. However, for network specialists like myself, the map offers a clear picture of the network layout, device activity, and overall network health.

Auvik provides complete network visibility, which can be overwhelming for new users due to the detailed information presented. To address this, we typically install an office collector at potential client sites to gain a comprehensive understanding of their network before onboarding them. This approach has proven effective in giving us a clear picture of their IT infrastructure.

In the past, I lacked proper network management tools, and manually discovering devices was a time-consuming process that could lead to missed issues. Auvik's automatic discovery and management suite have significantly improved my productivity and effectiveness as a network administrator, even if it hasn't changed the entire company.

While we didn't realize the full potential of Auvik initially due to a rushed onboarding process, taking the time to set it up properly has revealed its true value. Now that we're utilizing its alerting, backup, and monitoring features, we're experiencing significant benefits, and I expect this value to keep increasing as we delve deeper into its capabilities.

Auvik significantly reduces our average time to resolve network incidents by allowing remote connection to devices without needing a VPN or on-site personnel. This can mean the difference between a ten-minute fix and a two-hour wait for someone to travel to the client's location. In applicable situations, Auvik has sped up our mean time to resolution.

The most valuable aspect of Auvik Network Management is its remote management capabilities. It allows us to access devices like firewalls and switches for our geographically dispersed clients without needing to be on-site or set up VPN connections, saving us significant time. Additionally, the automatic backups provide peace of mind by centralizing all our network device backups in one location, eliminating the need for manual backups.

Auvik's UI, while informative, can be a hurdle for new users due to its complexity. It offers a steep learning curve that necessitates extensive training for beginners. As someone who's been using it for nine months, I find it valuable, but it overwhelms my less experienced colleagues. While not a major issue, improving the UI's user-friendliness for beginners would be a welcome change.

The network map's user-friendliness is a seven out of ten. While it offers comprehensive information, it can be overwhelming at first glance due to the sheer amount of detail. However, the filtering system is excellent, allowing us to focus on the specific aspects we need once we get accustomed to it. Overall, the map excels at displaying network information, but initial filtering is necessary for a smooth experience.

While I find Auvik to be a valuable tool, it's not beginner-friendly enough for my tier-one technicians to use independently. Ideally, I would have liked a solution that could bridge the gap and lighten my load, but Auvik currently requires training and isn't easy to pick up for new users. Due to our busy schedules, we haven't been able to invest the time in training them yet, but I believe Auvik has the potential to be more user-friendly in the future.

While the support team was excellent, the onboarding process for Auvik felt overwhelming from the start. The sessions weren't very productive, leaving us to do much of the setup ourselves, which has delayed realizing the full value of the product.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for nine months.

Auvik's network management software has been stable for us, scoring a nine out of ten. The only occasional hiccups we've encountered stemmed from specific hardware integrations, not Auvik itself. We haven't needed to contact support until recently for these hardware-related issues. Overall, Auvik's stability has been good.

While the initial setup requires scheduling and on-site installation, Auvik scales very well as a platform. We are confident that as our company grows, Auvik will be able to keep pace with our increasing needs.

Auvik's technical support has been great. Despite rarely needing them, their responsiveness has been exceptional. Unlike many IT support experiences where tickets lead to long waits, Auvik consistently replies within an hour. Even when solutions weren't immediately found, their support team either asked insightful questions or promptly provided relevant documentation. My only minor complaint is the lack of phone support, which could be an issue in emergencies.

Positive

While installing Auvik itself wasn't complex, deploying it across 15 customers, some with multiple sites bringing the total to 30 to 40 physical locations, became a logistical challenge due to the time required for on-site installations. This highlights the advantage of cloud-based solutions in such scenarios. In short, the difficulty stemmed from the number of locations, not the installation process itself.

Nine months into the Auvik deployment, we're still working on logistics to ensure it reaches all our customers. While major customers are covered. Around 80 percent total, we haven't achieved full implementation across the board, meaning not all customers are utilizing all the management licenses and features.

Our 15-person IT team has collaboratively deployed the system. We've assigned engineers based on their area of expertise to ensure comprehensive coverage, though technically any one of us could handle the entire deployment, albeit over a much longer timeframe.

While Auvik offered onboarding and deployment sessions initially, they weren't helpful for our specific needs. We already had the information provided, and deployment wasn't adequately addressed. Now we're refocusing our collaboration with the onboarding team on best practices, particularly alert configurations. The default settings trigger excessive alerts for minor issues, overwhelming us. We're working with them to find the right balance and hold monthly meetings to refine our alerting system. This second round of collaboration with Auvik is proving more productive than the first.

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

The only maintenance required is to ensure the on-premise component has internet connection. Other than that, Auvik does not require any maintenance.

My most important advice is to prioritize a significant upfront investment in time for setup and onboarding. In hindsight, we would have benefitted from fully implementing and onboarding everything at the beginning, rather than a piecemeal approach. So, even though it will be time-consuming, take the plunge and fully implement the system across all your sites from the outset. This will allow you to reap the full benefits and boost your productivity from day one.

We are a managed service provider. We use it for our customers, and we use it internally for our own network as well.

By implementing this solution, like most people who have to manage networks, the first thing we wanted was to monitor and see what is on our network. 

The network map along with its dashboard gives full network visibility.

Auvik Network Management is helpful for our engineers. We are structured a bit differently. We do not, as such, have entry-level engineers on our team. Our engineers already have pretty good knowledge of these things, but it does help them quite a bit. They do use it.

It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution, but it is hard to compare the numbers. From the time I have been here, we have had Auvik. I do know that we use it quite often when there are issues. It is most likely the first place we check to make sure that the device is offline or to check for any alerts that might have been generated.

Auvik Network Management has helped us quite a bit with the issue resolution. It helps us trace certain things. It tries to map out as best what devices are connected to certain interfaces. In the past, we have used that quite a bit to troubleshoot when certain things were down.

Its user interface is easy when it comes to where things live. Navigating to certain places and things like that is easy. The other part of the user interface is their map, which has not been the greatest. When I had to search for a device using the map, I found that difficult. They have implemented something to address that. It came out a month or two ago, where when I search for a device, it will automatically bring up that device. I can click on it, and then it will zoom into the device, whereas before, I had to go look for it.

Being able to terminal into the devices without going anywhere else is valuable. All of it can be done within Auvik.

The backups of the configuration seem to work for the most part. I have not had any issues with them. I have used a couple of other solutions, such as WhatsUp Gold which had a lot of issues with making backups, and so far, from what I see, Auvik just works.

Auvik's network map along with its dashboard gives a real-time picture of our network. However, if a device is unreachable, there is no indicator for that, at least from what I have seen. If it is offline, there is an indicator for that, but if it is unreachable, there is no indicator.

The network map is hard to use to gain real-time visibility into our network. We have some bigger sites, and we have all of it in one Auvik site instead of having multiple. If I am trying to look for devices in a particular building, I have to do a couple of different things. I wish there were views that I could save and say, "This view is for this first floor." They do have views, but there is no easy way for me to go and find those views. When you have too many of them, that becomes an issue because they start getting cut off by the pages.

Alerting can also be better. There are limited options. We cannot create alerts that are not there in the system. There are no custom alerts. That might be something that I would like to see more.

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

So far, we have not had a whole lot of issues with stability. I know that there were a couple of times when Auvik seemed very sluggish and slow, and we did not get any notifications about it. Later on, when we reached out to support, they said that they were experiencing some issues. Over the year and a half that I have used it, that has probably happened twice.

I find it pretty scalable. Because we are an MSP, we are having to add multiple customers. We do not have a whole lot right now; we only have three, but so far, there are no issues there. I do not see any issues there for adding more customers.

I have interacted with their support. Their support is not that great. Usually, I use the chatbot on Auvik's portal. Most of the time, it is very difficult to get a full answer to what I am looking for. They usually have to take it back and research or discuss it with their team. They will send an email for the follow-up, but sometimes, it takes a really long time to get a follow-up email about the resolution. Usually, by that point, I would have already figured out the issue, or the resolution is no longer needed. It could be because we decided not to do that. I cannot remember exactly what type of resolutions those are, but I know that sometimes, it just takes a long time or it does not point me to the right resolution.

In terms of speed, they are pretty quick in answering, but the resolution can take time. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I am not aware of any other product being used in my current company.

I have used alternatives to Auvik in other companies. I have used WhatsUp Gold. I have used Zabbix. I have briefly used SolarWinds.

To me, Auvik has been better in almost everything. Zabbix is a very powerful tool, but at the time I used it, it required a lot of setup. Getting it to work required a lot of setup work. Auvik also requires some setup work, but it is a little bit easier. You just have to get the credentials in. Everything is scanned. The collector does the rest once you have everything in there.

One thing that I do not like about WhatsUp Gold is that you have to install it on a Windows machine. It uses a SQL database to store all of its information, so you have to do upgrades or migrations. I had to do that. It is just more work, whereas, with Auvik, if you need to move something or migrate, you just spin up a new collector and shut down the other one. There is really no impact. WhatsUp Gold also had issues running backups of configuration, whereas, with Auvik, I have not had any issues on that front. The only thing that WhatsUp Gold does better is to allow you to do an SNMP walk on your devices, so you can see the OIDs and all the information that is being pulled, whereas, with Auvik, you do not have any of that on the portal itself.

When I joined the company, Auvik was already in place. 

Its deployment is easy. It is more about making sure that all the devices on your network have everything configured. Auvik just takes in whatever you provide. You need to set up new SSH credentials on every device so that Auvik can read it. So far, I have not had too many issues with the setup.

It takes some time to see its benefits after the deployment. I came into Auvik pretty new. At the initial stage, you have all your devices there. They are all being monitored, but once you start getting all the credentials, traffic insights, and Syslogs and you get all the information configured, you start seeing the full benefit of Auvik.

It does not impact the setup of devices at all. I cannot do anything unless the device is connected to Auvik. We need to use the terminal session on that, but not every device is supported in that way. It is pretty limited, but it helps out a little bit on that. In terms of Auvik setup, if we are putting devices in, as soon as the device is scanned, it automatically gets put into Auvik. Maintenance-wise, there is very little required on the maintenance side. The only thing that we need to do in terms of device maintenance is to put the current firmware. If we are going to be implementing a patch, most likely, we are doing that on the device itself. We can terminal in from Auvik itself without having to VPN into the client network.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the environment. It depends on how many devices are on the site and how much access we have. It generally requires two people.

The time taken for deployment also depends on the size of the site. It can take ten hours if we are just straight working and trying to get it set up.

There is no maintenance as such. The maintenance is mostly in terms of cleaning up devices. There can be devices that need to be removed from Auvik because those devices have been removed from the network.

I do not have a whole lot of information on the pricing, but our pricing seems to be okay. Internally, we have not had any issues with it, so we have not had the need to discuss pricing.

My advice to new users would be that in order to have a smooth setup, they need to put in the time to set up their devices. They have to make sure all the devices have proper login credentials, SNMP credentials, and NetFlow setup if you are using NetFlow. After you have all of these set up, it is very simple. From what I have seen from other deployments, when those things are not set up, people seem to think that it does not work. It all depends on the devices.

We used Auvik's SaaS Management product for a month. To me, it seems like a whole separate module. We only used it for a short period for demoing it internally, but I did not see any benefit from having them together. It almost seems like a separate product. Overall, as a product, we definitely liked it. It provided a lot of information. We were testing it internally for our own company before trying to sell it to our customers, but it came back to pricing in terms of whether it was worth it to have this information on our users based on the price. For us, there was not a use case for it. Also, none of our customers have reached out with any interest in having SaaS management. The Auvik rep that I had talked to had mentioned that this came out because a lot of people were asking about it, but none of our customers asked about it. It just did not seem like a product we could push. I would recommend Auvik's SaaS Management product if someone is looking for this type of information.

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

The primary use case is network monitoring.

One of the things that I like the most is being able to see what is connected to each switch port. If there are 300 switch ports, I can find out which port any given computer is connected to on the network, assuming it is physical. We then can label certain ports as uplinks, servers, or storage. It is easy to find where a lot of traffic is coming from because we can get to that individual switch level, which is a lot easier to do in Auvik than it is to do native in the equipment.

Remote accessibility of the network devices is the most valuable feature. I often have to log into switches and routers to make changes, and I can do so from any computer as long as I have an Internet connection. I don't need to have my laptop or a VPN. Auvik is faster.

Auvik automatically updates our network topology. The topology map is drawn in real-time. Seeing the network versus visualizing is helpful. With real-time and historical monitoring, we know when devices are offline or if there is high utilization, specifically with the SNMP monitoring and SSH monitoring.

Its network discovery capabilities are really strong. With the right access, it can detect additional networks, then scan those networks. 

It is easy to use, yet not easy to administer. If I am a technician, then I just need to log in to a switch or see what the network is doing and what it is connected to, which is very easy to do. If I am an administrator, then I have to maintain, clean, and label that environment. Auvik's utility in that regard is cumbersome. It is hard to find where certain things are configured. Also, it is sometimes hard to figure out why Auvik is doing what it is doing.

There is a weakness with the network discovery capabilities, e.g., if it has access to virtual machines, then it is picking up on networks that don't matter. These are private virtual networks on individual computers, but Auvik doesn't know the difference. So, it is constantly coming up with new networks that it thinks it needs to scan. In my environment, I have 250 computers with probably 100 people who are running Hyper-V. Each one of those instances is creating virtual networks that it is getting discovered, then I have to tell it to ignore it. I have never seen the ability to say, "Ignore the networks or submits that look like this."

Sometimes, the UX is difficult to navigate for certain aspects. For example, I like to keep the generic devices out of the topology, so I often will purge those, but I only want to purge the ones that are offline. In the managed devices section, although you can filter by generic device, you can't filter by up or down status. You can only do that in the device section, not the managed device section. So, I have to take a picture of the generic devices that are offline, then navigate to another area where I can actually delete these objects, then select them using a picture. I can filter in one place, but I can't delete. Then, in the other place, I can delete, but I can't filter the same way.

At this company, I have used Auvik for a year and a half. Prior to that, I would say that I used it for about three or four years.

The stability has been fine. I get notifications for network maintenance and there hasn't really been an issue with that.

It requires no maintenance.

The major limitation is the multi-tenant aspect. For example, if I was to put this in a business that had six corporate offices, which is a pretty big business, I wouldn't want all of that under one tenant. I would want that under separate tenants for each location, but there would need to be an eagle eye view of the six locations from a high level, and you wouldn't get that in multi-tenant.

Auvik for MSPs is great because you can segment/isolate the different clients. However, Auvik gets overwhelming when it is a big business with multiple locations, hundreds of networks, and thousands of ports. I think that would be difficult to manage. If you are talking 5,000 to 100,000 switch ports, then you are talking about a lot of networks with a lot of different viewings and protocols. There really is a limit. There is almost no support for any kind of routing protocol. Where there is the Layer 1 and Layer 3 bars that tell you if it is physically connected or Layer 3 routed, the Layer 3 router should really include things, such as, what is the routing protocol that it found or the ability to see a trace route of how it is routed.

Sometimes the technical support is really good, and sometimes it is just terrible. Some of the gentlemen and gals are extremely knowledgeable when it comes to networking. They know the product and are very helpful. Then, some of them don't really get engaged in the support. They will just send an article/link, like, "Read this and do it on your own." I don't reach out to support because I can't find an article or do it on my own. I reach out because there is something I don't understand or don't know how to do. Making sure that they understand what it is that I am trying to accomplish requires a conversation, and some are willing to get on a phone call and some of them are willing to. The ones who are willing to get on a phone call are the ones that I have the best experiences with.

The initial setup was pretty complex. The company that I work for moved out of an office where we had 60 to 70 switches. Now, we are down to about 12. Therefore, the setup was more complex back then, although we only had one location. Now, we have one location and one data center. The deployment took four to six hours.

Auvik's setup time and automated network mapping and documentation provides time-to-value. It is very valuable in that sense. For a small environment, it rolls out for you very quickly, e.g., five minutes. Roll out the collector and let it do its scan, label one or two networks that are there, throw in the credentials, make sure it is identifying everything, and you are done. Then, it just kind of works. The amount of value that you get then in perpetuity to the relative installation is very high, but as a single IT company or an employee in a single company, that quick rollout isn't as valuable because I am only doing it once.

I did the deployment myself. I have used Auvik before, so I just set the collector using VMware OVA. I put a collector in our office, labeled the networks and set exemptions from the scan, and then just let it go. Obviously, I tried to enter all the credentials that I could at the time, but then I found I had to make modifications to group policy so the computers and servers could be accessed. So I probably just threw it out there and then added the credentials later. If I had to do it again, I would have put the credentials in first then threw it out there.

We are not making a profit on Auvik. It is an expense.

Although networking is only a small piece of what I am doing, it can be a time-intensive aspect. So, the time required is significantly less using Auvik than it is to manage the devices individually.

As an individual IP company, Auvik is a little bit pricey. It is a little expensive, but as an MSP owner, I have a small side business. So, I'm an Auvik customer in that sense too. In that, I think it's reasonable to pay $10 to $15 a device or less depending on the endpoint. For the amount of capability that it has, it is very reasonably priced.

There are devices monitored at no charge, such as:

• UPS batteries
• VMware ESX hypervisors
• Wireless access points
• Printers
• Dell EMC iLO cards.

I would probably compare Auvik to PRTG Network Monitor. I think Auvik is a lot faster than PRTG Network Monitor. I am not a very big fan of other solutions. I have never really tried them. 

Auvik gives us inventory. I don't think PRTG Network Monitor does that. So, I can integrate Auvik with our IT Glue cloud status, then we have an inventory of network devices that we don't have to manually create. It saves some time there. PRTG Network Monitor doesn't do that.

PRTG Network Monitor is easier and simpler to set up because it is not trying to do everything that Auvik is trying to do. Once you point it at a device and give it the credentials, it just starts monitoring. At the same time, it doesn't show the relationships between other devices; it doesn't show those connections. It is not an apples to apples comparison. 

We haven't had any SolarWinds Orion products. Now, we wouldn't buy that at all. Auvik is far easier than Orion.

My team members aren't really using it. The other guy is kind of a junior IT guy, and I think it is still intimidating to him. My boss is a higher level engineer, but he is too busy managing to do anything technical. He just relies on me to tell him if there is anything he needs. He mostly wants the solution for the monitoring. He wants to know when a hypervisor module is failing or a hypervisor server goes down.

If you don't put in the credentials, Auvik can't log in and grab those device backups. Once you put those in, then it is automated. It logs in and grabs the configurations. Although, Auvik doesn't support all devices. So if you don't think you have certain types of hardware, it doesn't do anything for you.

Networking has a high learning curve and Auvik lowers that learning curve. It doesn't eradicate or eliminate it though. You still need a pretty strong level of understanding of networking in order to understand the GUI visualization that it is presenting. Just like any other tool, the time invested is largely going to determine the quality of your return.

Auvik has a little ways to go, but I still highly favor it, so I would rate it as an eight out of 10.

We're using Auvik right now for switch backups and general network monitoring.

The switch backups are great. If a switch goes down or gets fried, we can just plug in a new switch and be good to go. 

Its interface is pretty intuitive.

The network map, on the main dashboard when you log on, offers general topography. While I have in my head where everything is, it's nice to have a visual reminder.

The solution is easy to use. It gives you full net visibility. You can dig pretty deep in, and it'll show everything - from server to switches to access points. 

We realized the value of the solution pretty fast. We already had it and we brought it back. We knew what we needed.

It does help with some use cases and would allow for entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own. We are a two-person team, so we don't have too many concerns in that respect.

Overall, it's pretty straightforward.

We spend less time on setup and maintenance. If we have a switch we need replaced, we can just copy the configuration, and that saves a lot of time. 

There are spots in the interface that could use a little more work as it is congested with a lot of information in one spot.

We had the solution a year or two ago, then ended our subscription, then about three or four months ago, resubscribed. We had a change of staff at the time and didn't see the value, and then ended up regaining it once we saw that it offered features we needed. 

I have never had any issues with the Auvik even being slow. It's always been very responsive for me.

The solution should scale well. If we added another store, it would be pretty straightforward. 

I've never reached out to technical support.

We didn't have a direct competitor to Auvik. We do have Cisco, which has some similar functionalities.

I did the initial setup with the team. I went and installed it on a few switches and enabled DHCP and SSH, et cetera. The implementation was pretty straightforward. The setup took around 30 minutes to an hour. 

We do not have to handle any maintenance. We get the alerts and deal with those directly.

Auvik assisted us and we had an initial setup call during deployment. They ran us through the setup of one switch and showed us a few features.

I wasn't involved with purchasing; I can't speak to licensing costs. 

I'm a customer. 

I'd rate the solution a solid nine out of ten. I'd advise users to be prepared to go into all network devices and make sure they are talking to Auvik and reporting back. Just make sure you're spending a few hours getting it all setup.