Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

As an MSP, we install Auvik on our managed service clients' networks to gain a comprehensive view of their network layout. This allows us to monitor overall network health, receive performance metrics, and identify outages across all SNMP-manageable devices like firewalls and switches. While Auvik excels in network device monitoring, we rely on other tools for managing aspects like Windows systems.

In larger environments, we typically deploy a dedicated agent directly on the network for comprehensive scanning and monitoring. For smaller environments, a cloud-based agent provides a more efficient solution.

Auvik provides a close to real-time picture of our network.

Integrating with a network map might seem straightforward, but the complexity depends on the network size. Larger networks require more effort. Fortunately, most of our clients have relatively small setups, typically one to two sites, two to three firewalls, and five to six switches. This keeps our integration time to a maximum of thirty minutes, making it a quick process to get them up and running.

While entry-level technicians don't heavily rely on Auvik for troubleshooting itself, they do benefit from its automated ticketing system. Auvik alerts them to device outages, allowing them to perform basic troubleshooting. If the issue persists, they can escalate the ticket to an engineer, who can then leverage both the technician's initial efforts and the information provided by Auvik for further diagnosis.

Auvik has significantly improved our ability to resolve issues quickly. It saves me at least 30 minutes per ticket because I no longer need to remote into individual network environments and run diagnostic tools manually. With Auvik, I can pull up an overview of the network, saving valuable time on troubleshooting, updates, and other tasks.

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

I like Auvik's detailed device dashboards that show everything from uptime to configuration revisions. The new Northstar feature is particularly useful for troubleshooting network path issues. When someone reports slowness or connectivity problems, Northstar quickly maps the device's connection path, helping pinpoint or narrow down where the problem might lie.

Auvik's interface can appear cluttered at times, reflecting its feature-rich nature, but despite some occasional messiness, it remains fairly intuitive for new users.

It would be helpful to suppress credential prompts for specific sites in Auvik. Currently, we have to dismiss the "enter credentials" or "new devices found" alerts for each site, which can be repetitive. An ideal solution would be a per-site checkbox to indicate that we've discovered all the devices we expect on that network and don't want to be prompted for credentials again. This would streamline our workflow and eliminate the need to dismiss repetitive messages.

While Auvik offers good integrations with SNMP, WMI, and VMware, there's room for improvement with Hyper-V, a platform we heavily rely on. Additionally, enhanced UPS integration would be valuable, particularly for alerting on critical events like a switch to battery power, which currently seems to be missing. This limitation may be specific to our UPS setup, but improved UPS monitoring within Auvik would be beneficial.

The speed and performance can be improved.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two years.

Auvik Network Management can be a bit slow at times, causing us to wait for it to fully load information. While it doesn't crash frequently, occasional lags can interrupt the workflow.

Our experience with Auvik's scalability is positive. While very large networks with many sites and devices can experience slow loading times, this isn't a concern for most of our clients, who typically have just a few sites. For the handful of larger clients we do have, sub-dividing their networks into smaller groups has mostly addressed performance issues. Even our largest client, with its complex network of eight core switches, 20 labs, and a main firewall, only experiences minor slowdowns when loading everything at once. Overall, Auvik's scalability seems well-suited for the needs of our client base.

In the past, I reached out to Auvik support a few times regarding general SNMP issues, where I had trouble getting Auvik to communicate properly with some devices.

My communication with Auvik technical support was via email, a back-and-forth process with replies within a few hours, which is fairly typical. While it took a few days to resolve and initially involved directing me to the knowledge base, the support escalated to someone who identified the specific fix needed. Overall, it wasn't exceptional but certainly not substandard either.

Neutral

The overall setup of Auvik is straightforward. One person is enough to handle the deployments.

I would rate Auvik Network Management nine out of ten.

Having used similar network monitoring tools in the past, I was already somewhat familiar with the core functionality of Auvik when I joined the organization.

I recommend Auvik Network Management. While the training and documentation are helpful, hands-on experience is key. In my case, after reading the manual, I dove right in with a client's network and spent a few hours exploring the software. This practical learning made a big difference during my first rollout, as I had a much better understanding of Auvik's capabilities. Having prior experience with network monitoring tools like Nagios and OpenNMS helped as well, since they share a similar core concept of agent-based monitoring and network mapping. This familiarity made Auvik relatively easy to pick up.

We primarily use the solution for traffic insights or traffic monitoring. It's for network management. While we're also using it for managing some of our network devices, the main reason for this was traffic insights.

The network map can provide a full network visibility or maybe just partial - it depends. For me, for my use case, it gives me plenty of visibility and also sends me alerts. I can set up different alerts based on enterprise system utilization and things like that. For my use case, it does pretty much everything I need it to, and it can do a lot more than I'm using it for.

The traffic insights are excellent. It's amazing how it works. There are really well built features on it. It's not a very common feature that you see in a lot of these network management tools. It's a game-changer. 

The setup is amazing. Most of the work is automatic. You just set it up, and then it just does its own thing.

The interface is pretty straightforward. The dashboard is there. There are some advanced features as well. 

They walk you through everything. If you need some help with something, like, navigating or something, they'll help. They provide ongoing support. If I need to find out anything about any feature, I can just set up a call with them, and they will walk me through it. 

The ease of access is pretty straightforward. I had used the solution in the past, but not as much. Maybe just to check a device's status here and there, but not to the point of deploying and using it heavily. However, then I found out about the traffic insights and the other features they offer. We bought some licenses internally and deployed them to our team sites, and now I use them much more. It's not very intimidating. The navigation and layout are easy.

The network map gives a real-time picture of the network. If you have a network set up right, it gives you a nice overview. 

The map I use is usually when I'm deploying a new site. That's when I try to make sure everything is there. I get a real quick overview to make sure everything is adapted - instead of going down into inventory and going through each single line item. Instead, I can just look at the map. 00:08:53 Speaker 0

I saw the benefit before implementing it when I was doing my research. Auvik was one of the very few solutions that had the features I was looking for. That's why I signed up for the trial. Immediately, I knew it's what I was looking for. Once you sign up for the trial, they send you an invite for a call to go over everything.

The meantime to resolution has improved. Let's say you have just one source of visibility on your network where you are relying just on your controller or something like that; then, of course, it will take a lot longer to get to the issue. Auvik shows all the nodes or all the devices online, and it makes it much faster to resolve these issues. 

Auvik allows me to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution. The setup is especially well thought-out. You just create a site and install a collector, and it does most of the work. It searches for networks and asks if you want to add them.

It sometimes lags, especially in larger deployments. There's a little bit of an issue there where if you're trying to open the Auvik network map, however, for the most part, it's pretty straightforward. It works pretty well.

Recently, I have noticed they are having some issues with the cloud instances where it was causing some issues. It could be more responsive.

For traffic insights, if there is a way to export or automate exports, that would be something I would love to see, especially in the traffic insights. 

I started using the solution in November, 2023.

I'd rate stability eight out of ten. We had an issue earlier this year, however, other than that, it's been solid. 

I'd rate scalability ten out of ten. It's easy to add more sites. 

I've called technical support twice. Both times, they were pretty responsive and knowledgeable, and they resolved my issue immediately. The engineers are great.

Positive

I've used a couple of alternatives, including PRTG. There may have been better performance, however, nothing provided the amount of insights. You can really narrow down the data.

The initial setup was really easy. They have a nice knowledge base as well. It's really streamlined. They also have device-specific configuration help as well. If you want something particular, they have guides for that.

In our case, we're using a lot of Ubiquiti devices, and they have a knowledge base specifically for that, which allows you to see more information. There's documentation for Cisco, for Juniper, et cetera. 

I handled most of the deployment myself. We're often adding sites and for the most part, we can have a site done in less than half a day. It might take an hour or two to get it up and running. If you have a bunch of sites to do, it will obviously take longer. 

The pricing is great. For some organizations, it may be expensive if they're managing every single device. However, it's priced pretty fairly.

Part of it is modular, so you can make it as extensive as you want, and that depends on how much management you are doing. If you are managing a lot of devices for CI,it can get expensive. They only charge for managed devices. Any critical device I'm managing, I'm paying for. However, I'm only managing physical devices on my sites. I'm not managing non-critical devices. 

I'm a customer.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We primarily use Auvik for network monitoring and occasionally to remotely access some devices. It helps us monitor clients with a multi-site setup. We can monitor the network and overall network connectivity. The configurations of the devices we monitor are synchronized into IT Glue for documentation.

Auvik was part of the company's toolset when I joined as an engineer, and we have been perfecting it. We had a couple of big clients when I started. Everybody was under one site even though there were multiple sites. There was a site-to-site VPN and more. For some projects I worked on, we got directions from Auvik's account managers on how to implement multi-site within Auvik properly. That helped us manage these individual sites efficiently without creating too much burden.

Auvik's alerts notify us about an outage before our clients call us, so we can tell them that we're already on it when they call to say their internet is down. It gives them a sense of comfort and trust. Auvik is also crucial for any troubleshooting. If a device is down and we can't get to it from one way, it's always helpful to have another look through Auvik to start troubleshooting from the outside.

The cloud-based platform gives us ready access to necessary information without the need to go through additional steps to remote into a client site. Otherwise, we would need to set up a secure tunnel through a site-to-site VPN. Auvik makes it more convenient. 

It's arguably a more significant security risk in some ways. However, from the perspective of a managed service provider, it's more accessible to have a single pane of view for all our clients from the cloud-based portal. The initial setup and configuration are more straightforward. You don't need to pick a server or use many resources aside from setting something up in the portal and installing the Auvik collector. It certainly simplifies things.

It increased our visibility into remote networks since we can't be everywhere simultaneously. We don't need to deploy separate tools internally, which reduces the workload. It helped us improve network visibility in conjunction with our other toolsets.

As a managed service provider, we have multiple clients, so it's crucial to have visibility into their networks and our own. We have Auvik set up to cover our critical infrastructure. When the tool is set up correctly, it hums along pretty well. We can relax and let Auvik do the monitoring and documentation. It can gather the information or at least confirm it. If something changes, Auvik can pick it up. It does a lot for us.

Auvik helps keep device inventories updated. We have a couple of toolsets. For example, we have remote monitoring and management agents on servers. Auvik and some other tools can update the documentation automatically if one of the engineers forgets to do it after we change something on a server, such as an IP address. It provides another check for us and a general reminder, "Hey, this was updated. You should update the documentation for it because it looks different."

I like the ability to remotely access devices securely. The multi-site setup has also been useful. Once we learned how to set that up, we could customize each site and push out common information like SNMP credentials from the parent site to other multi-sites. The automatic network layout is excellent, and the overall monitoring is also beneficial. 

Auvik's monitoring and management features are relatively easy to use, but it depends on what you work with daily. When I started, there were features I didn't know about until somebody told me, "Set it up this way, and you could just monitor the internet connection as a whole." I didn't know that existed until somebody showed me. The basics are easy enough, but the advanced features require some training. 

They added two-factor authentication to access some of these devices remotely. It was a significant step forward because someone with access to Auvik has a lot of power. 

The network visualization is nice. We have some large clients with many devices, so the initial visualization might be overwhelming, but we manage that pretty well. There are some devices that we don't need Auvik to monitor. We lower the noise from workstations and printers because we have a separate toolset for that. However, it does get a little cluttered when you have a lot of servers. It was just a matter of getting used to it. I don't know if any platform has figured out how to do that properly, but it's pretty intuitive.

The solution integrates with our ticketing and documentation system. We use Auvik as our primary network monitoring system and alert system if something goes down. It provides a lot of benefits by putting everything in one place. Having a single integrated platform simplifies the process of looking. We don't need to go to multiple vendors and look at everything or have several windows and applications open. We also use PRTG to provide network monitoring for some of our clients, and that's more on the internal side. Auvik is good at monitoring anything outward-facing.

There have been times when our SNMP community strings were incorrect or weren't updated for whatever reason, and Auvik kept trying to scan them. Changing it was a pain, and there wasn't a way to extract that from Auvik. I understand there are valid security reasons why we wouldn't want to do that sometimes. In those situations, we had to recreate those community strings and reapply them to various devices.

Maybe they could implement a way to do that securely. It could be restricted by the role a person has within the organization. For example, perhaps a junior engineer wouldn't have access, but it would be available to a supervisor, manager, administrator, or higher-up. 

I have been using Auvik for a little over a year.

I haven't heard any complaints about Auvik's stability or performance degradation. Auvik has scheduled maintenance windows, but they're transparent about when they will be. It hasn't impacted us. Reliability is crucial because Auvik is part of our service to our customers. We've had issues with a few vendors where they've gone down or had quality issues that affect our services and reflect poorly on us.

Scalability hasn't been an issue so far. There is one thing to keep in mind, and it's probably less of a scalability issue with Auvik itself. However, we've learned from working with large clients that having multiple Auvik collectors is best. It would be best if you strategized about how to distribute the collectors throughout your servers and put redundancies in place. 

I rate Auvik support a ten out of ten. The knowledge base articles are pretty thorough. Once, I had to look up how to confirm SNMP credentials or set up SNMPv3. Auvik's team is excellent. Our support and account managers have been responsive and helpful. 

Positive

I rate Auvik a ten out of ten. I recommend planning and going through the steps to evaluate this. It's a powerful tool with an extensive suite of features, and the support is there if needed. Auvik has good people working there. 

Going back to the SNMP portion, you need to plan how to design and implement the solution, especially if you have a multi-site situation or are monitoring many devices. You need to plan for scalability and collector distribution.

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.

Our use cases would be mapping our network automatically, monitoring events to get stats and trends, spotting any impending issues before they get noticed by our users so we can address them, and doing device reconfiguration. 

Auvik automatically updates network topology. Our network team members in our operations all dig it. It is just something that makes finding devices easy, e.g., if you don't necessarily remember where it is, the IP, and so on. Especially if something needs to be reconfigured, it makes it really easy to go to the LAN or network in question, find the device, remotely get into it, and then make whatever necessary changes.

The goal is to have Auvik help us put out fires before people or end users even know that there is a problem. That hasn't really happened that much, other than power outages where we can get somebody en route, which makes us look like we know what we are doing.

It is kind of a toss up between its nice interface and ease of deployment. 

It is pretty easy to use for the type of product that it is and what its use case is. Anyone who is going to use such a thing generally should have a fair bit of knowledge about networking, devices, etc. 

Auvik is excellent when it comes to its network discovery capabilities. It has good stats. We can look at our network and visually see what is going on, if there are any issues, and just the entire topography of how it is laid out. It generates the network map automatically, so that is not something we have to go do. It just lets you see things, maybe not necessarily at a glance, but close to it. 

We were able to trim down and get a decent signal-to-noise ratio on notifications and events, because these devices generate a ton of telemetry. Otherwise, it's like things are always crying, "Wolf!" That has been a problem, not just in this niche, but other categories as well. If you get too much stuff that isn't anything to look at, then you will quit looking at it.

The automation of the network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. They can see if it is something as simple as a power issue in a wing of a building. This lets them pick the low hanging fruit. Then, if a configuration needs a more skilled person, they can easily escalate it.

There are a couple things that you need to do, and then Auvik provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. It backs up the configurations, and that has been awesome, which makes it possible and practical. Otherwise, it is really difficult because we would then have to go from device to device, get it to spit out its config, copy it to the clipboard, paste it to a file, and organize it all. That is all now automatic, which is great.

Generally, once stuff gets configured, it is fine. Previously, it was a matter of remembering to get the copy of the config and save it someplace. Depending upon the workload, sometimes that got put on the back burner. Now, because of this solution's automatic, out-of-the-box device configurations, I don't worry about it.

I would like firmware/software updates for hardware, for at least switches and routers. I already have the feature request in, and it is on their list of things to try and do. Cisco stuff has been notoriously and historically kind of a pain to do, and that is what we use primarily. So, that would be a wonderful thing to get, as it is a device-by-device process. It would be nice to be able to get through that at least in a less fiddly way. It is a pretty manual process now.

We have been using it for a little less than a year.

It is very stable. We have had one very minor incident with logins. They had that resolved in 15 minutes to half an hour, tops.

There is almost no maintenance required from our staff. Compared with other solutions that I have used, the level of maintenance affecting my operations is much better with Auvik. I feel like I can trust it a little more than some of the things that I configured myself. I just never had the time to polish those other solutions out the way that they really needed to be done.

I haven't run into any issues with it. I suspect it could handle multiples of more devices than we have in our network. It doesn't seem to break a sweat. Hopefully, they have enough scalability on their end that it won't impact us unless other customer stuff impacts us.

The technical support has been great.

We have used different open source things, like Nagios, but they were just so configuration heavy. We basically got rid of them. We didn't have anything in a while prior to getting this solution, but now we have Auvik. I do kind of miss having that early warning system, but I just didn't have the time to configure anything, because that is a very non-trivial thing for a lot of those systems. Having sufficient time to be able to spend on it, that was really the problem. This alleviated that completely.

I happened to run across an ad somewhere, and it's like, "Hey, I want to look at that. If this solution is half as good as it claims to be, this might be for us," and if it was at a reasonable cost.

The deployment was very simple. The network discovery accuracy was great. Other systems like this that I have worked with required a lot of configuration. This did not take much effort at all. The initial deployment was quick. We had something kind of up and running in an hour, if that long.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution. Luckily, we have a pretty stable network; we don't have a lot of issues. However, it can be trivial to just get to a device. For example, if we have to change a port setting or something on a switch from a printer to a phone or VLAN assignments, it is now quick and easy. Assuming everything goes well once you get to the device, it probably cuts the, "What was that device IP?" thing down by 80%.

We have saved more in time and efficiency than any hard monetary savings.

It took us just a few days to get a return on value from the whole implementation.

The pricing is by device. We have 75 devices, which is a little more than we really need. With school and volume discounts, it is still a little over $16,000 annually. Our WiFi access points are not being billed, but all our switches and routers are. 

Usually, I'm cheap. We are a school so I have to be cheap. Therefore, when there is an open source solution, I am usually reluctant to look at commercial things. Now, with a little more leadership support as well as technology becoming more mission-critical than ever before, it is part of the deliverable to produce an educated student. So, they are willing to invest more. It wasn't crazy expensive, but in the past, it would've been a hard sell. 

In addition to Auvik, I also looked at SolarWinds and HPE OneView, which was breathtakingly expensive. We mostly went with Auvik because of its ease of use for non-technical people. The ease of its configuration and deployment was big. Those were huge factors. We have added so much technology of all sorts in the last year or two that mental bandwidth has become an issue. For example, how much time can I even hope to spend on a given project, which might suffer greatly from mental interruptions.

This solution has stopped me from looking at other stuff. 

I don't want to really add any more complexity to our environment, but if we do, it'll get picked up and mapped automatically. So, once we get the device online and configured, it will just show up.

Auvik has been really handy. I really can't say enough good things about it. I have just been really impressed with the quality of the product, support, and training. It just works well.

I see a lot of value in Auvik. I was really happy with it very early on. I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10. I can't say enough good things about this solution.

We're in the healthcare industry and in our organization we have what we call a "backup machine" to be used in emergency scenarios. Should there be a brownout or internet service provider disruptions or any major catastrophe, we can move digital charting to paper charting for a certain duration of time. We have the Auvik probe installed on those backup machines, and it sends feedback back to the main Auvik dashboard where we monitor such things as ISP latency, devices on the network, and certain network elements like switches and access points.

We also have a probe sitting in one of the servers in the data center and it performs a similar function, helping us review our network infrastructure within the data center and to see where potential bottlenecks are, at what times of day, and to analyze trends.

We use it for basic troubleshooting as well because you can see everything on the network within a particular facility. At sites that don't have Cisco Meraki within the building, we use Auvik to isolate which ports' devices are connected to and for general troubleshooting. If, for example, an uplink port on one of the switches goes out, we can see, "Oh, that was port 26. Please switch it to port 25." We can duplicate configurations from one port to the next port and make sure that the facility is up and online.

It's been a very useful tool for us.

We can automate alerting systems based on certain criteria. For example, if a switch is undergoing high CPU usage or access points show high CPU or memory usage, we'll get the alerts for those and address them accordingly.

Auvik also sends us a text message whenever one of the internet circuits goes down, as we have a main fibre circuit at every building and a coaxial backup. That helps us ease the burden in switching over the necessary connections or the tunnels back to our centralized data center.

In addition, the network discovery capabilities are very insightful, coming from our previous situation where we had absolutely nothing. They have made us aware of certain switches within certain parts of the building that we may not have known existed. They have also helped because in our industry we're built by acquisitions. Oftentimes, we find an acquisition has an IDF and MDF in a particular building. With Auvik installed, we might find there are two more switches around that building. Sometimes these switches can be in the ceiling, but even being able to isolate what port they're connected to, disconnecting them, and finding where these items are has been extraordinarily helpful to us.

The solution has ultimately improved the response time of our help desk team when troubleshooting issues. It has also helped to identify older equipment when doing a refresh. We've been able to find 100-meg switches and old Cisco switches that are in places that we didn't anticipate they would be. We have also been able to isolate key pieces of the infrastructure within a building, pieces that needed to be replaced to provide a more friendly user experience.

Another benefit is that the automation of network mapping enables our level-one network specialists to resolve issues directly, and frees up senior-level team members for more important tasks. Our level-ones have read-only access, but that allows them to see the different topologies, see where things are connected, and then help facilitate a solution, either remotely or with the help of onsite personnel. It's kind of like having Cisco Meraki insight without actually having Cisco Meraki. While we only use Cisco Meraki gear at our HQ location, which provides us a high level of insight within one portal, Cisco Meraki is fairly expensive and it's not something that we can afford to put into every building. Auvik provides us with all the features that Cisco Meraki might have to offer within one pane of glass. 

The solution also automatically updates network topology, although it requires SNMP to be enabled on a particular network device. So when we're provisioning things that are going out, we have to pre-program that information into the switch and make sure everything is compatible. But once it's in place, it provides us the same level of insight that the previous network device did.

Also, in the cases where we've used it for resolving issues, it has reduced our MTTR. We're using it more as an insight tool. We don't have a lot of network-related issues within the environment, but in the instances that we have used it for resolution, it has helped us resolve the issues a lot quicker, on the order of 40 percent quicker.

It helps us to put out fires before end-users even know there is a problem, especially when it comes to internet service provider latency on a particular circuit. It alerts us to high bandwidth usage or increased latency and allows us to flip the connections from fibre to coax in anticipation, and then dispatch a fiber technician to resolve the issue on the primary line. All that can be done without any user noticing an impact at the facility level.

We use Auvik's TrafficInsights feature in the data center, but not the facility level. TrafficInsights is really the most beneficial within the data center because that's where high bandwidth is going and that's where it's most important to know exactly what's going on at all times. It shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, and with the projects that we currently have on our plate, that's incredibly important. We're currently transitioning data centers right now, and being able to isolate what traffic is going where and what's taking up the most bandwidth helps us put in certain traffic shaping rules. If something were to potentially impact at the facility level, we can get ahead of the curve and make the appropriate changes as necessary.

TrafficInsights also helps show where our system is experiencing performance issues, because we're using fibre optics within the data center as the backbone for everything. Whenever we're moving virtual machines, it helps isolate which ports are experiencing the most usage. We correlate the ports that are used to the host machines themselves and determine what virtual machines are reliant on the host that's using the most bandwidth, and we then see what services are impacted from there. TrafficInsights enables us to prepare ourselves to minimize end-user performance impact. We make changes based on what we see through TrafficInsights. It's a useful feature for doing exactly that. It allows us to maintain a steady level of performance within the data center.

There are also the automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups which have saved me quite a few times. The ability to back up a configuration from a firewall and have it housed in one central location where we can get the backup config and restore it to a new device, should a firewall or a switch blow out, decreases our restore time significantly. We don't have to figure out which rules, traffic shaping, or port-forwarding were on the switch, or what was on the firewall. We confidently know that the backup being pulled from Auvik is the most recent one.

Typically, before we had Auvik, when a firewall went out, it would take us a full day or a day and a half to turn around another firewall, to make sure it would be plug-and-play. With Auvik, that time has been reduced to a few hours. That's what it takes to procure the actual equipment and get it sent out, because we just pull the backup, restore it, and send the equipment out. No one from our networking team is then working, via tickets, to discover what was on the device previously. It's all in one place. If it's local, we have the building up and running within two hours of equipment configuration.

It's hard to say how much the device configuration backup saves us because every scenario is different. But if we're paying someone $45 an hour, instead of 12 hours of their time we're only using four hours of their time.

The alerting feature has been a very key piece for us, especially in the data center because we manage it ourselves. It gives us special insights into how certain projects and migrations are impacting the center of our operations, out in the field. Within the data center, we have an RDS farm that all the users from the facility connect to. Whenever something may be slow, we can look at the alerting and it helps us troubleshoot whether the issue is at the facility level or at an infrastructure level.

Also, the audit logs it provides are very detailed and can be tailored to our needs within the organization for things like management audit logs and user activity. The TrafficInsights have been really helpful.

The deployment of the probe onto a particular device could be improved. That usually requires one of our level-two people to step in from the help desk team. It would be much better if it were a click-and-go deployment. What I would like to see in particular is the ability to download an MSI builder for a probe for a particular building. We would simply double-click and install it onto the machine and have it work. Having to roll through with the entire API key is a little time-consuming.

I have been using Auvik for about two years now.

We've never had issues with it until recently when we started to see a lot more maintenance come up because the dashboard might be unavailable. But its uptime is about 99 percent.

Scalability is dependent on cost because they charge by network elements. In some of the nursing homes we handle, it's very cost-effective because they only have three switches, a firewall, and about 20 access points. But in larger facilities that have three or four IDFs, it becomes a little bit more costly because you have the additional switches and access points.

Since we don't have a lot of networking issues within the building itself, Auvik is being used as a general guidance tool, and to help the level-one help desk technicians troubleshoot a couple of things a little bit quicker, figure out where items are attached, and help the onsite maintenance director swap a cable or something of that manner. Our use of Auvik will be expanded based on acquisitions. If we bring on a new nursing home, we'll configure all the equipment into our network ahead of time and it will be plug-and-go. We'll just pay for the additional licensing for the network devices.

The first couple of times that I tried to get in contact with the tech support, they were very responsive. With every third-party vendor, wait-times can vary, but the tech support has always been good. I have recently noticed a little bit of a slower response time.

One thing that would be nice would be for them to reach out to us once in a while to check in and see how things are going, rather than only being reactive. A little bit more of a proactive approach would help. Outside of that, I haven't had any issues with their support or their customer team.

Overall, I would rate their tech support at nine out of 10.

We used to use OpenNMS for WAN connectivity purposes but with Auvik we were able to replace that. As far as backups go, we used to use an in-house-built solution for automating an SSH protocol into the firewalls and doing manual backups from there. But that took time to maintain. Auvik has consolidated those two things in one place. And the additional features of network insights for an entire facility is something that we didn't previously have. Auvik is saving us $3,000 to $4,000 per year in licensing costs.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. From start to finish, it took us about five days to have the entire environment up and running. We're a fairly small team. For organizations that have more dedicated team members, such as a NOC team and a server team, it would probably be a lot faster. But we were all filling in for those roles.

Our implementation strategy was simply to make sure that we had the different sites built out within the Auvik collector, entering in the IP information for each site, and then installing the probe facility by facility.

There was a time where it was a little confusing to get set up, but Auvik really helped to bridge that gap in knowledge by providing training to our end-users, meaning me or someone on our help desk team. They gave us more in-depth information and helped us to really understand the product features and to ensure that we were using everything to the best of its capabilities within our circumstances.

We have 10 users of Auvik: three system administrators, two level-two help desk technicians, and about five level-one help desk technicians. As a cloud-based solution, once it's deployed, unless we're making certain IP schema changes, it doesn't require much maintenance at all from our staff. On occasion, a backup machine needs to be replaced and we have to reinstall the probe. But outside of that, it's really click-and-go. The Auvik probe will pick up on a new subnet too. It's all available within the dashboard itself. You can literally turn off the old subnet and turn on the new one and begin scanning those elements just like they were before.

We did it on our own.

We've seen ROI in terms of the time that Auvik has saved us in the instances where we've had configurations that needed to be cloned, for example. I don't want to say the product is stale, rather it's insightful. You get from it as much as you want to get out of it. For us, the insights, manageability, and troubleshooting go a long way because we're saving man-hours.

When it comes to time-to-value, the setup time is fairly easy and the network discovery is very helpful. 

Because we had nothing previously, it's a very valuable tool. Having everything in one place, enabling our teams to react faster, decreasing the time to resolution, as well as identifying weak places within the infrastructure—it's hard to put a value on all that it gives us.

It has saved us a considerable amount of money, given that everything had to be done manually before, such as FaceTiming with a member of the facility and trying to get a physical view of a particular issue. Just having a central pane of glass that easily identifies various pieces of information goes a long way. We're saving tech time which can ultimately then be better spent supporting the organization and end-users. As far as infrastructure planning and rip-and-replace go for certain network technologies, it's provided much better insight and we can plan for which network switches actually have to be replaced. There are cost savings there because if we've got gig switches here and we're only looking to replace 100-meg switches, we can really drill down and know what we need ahead of time, going into a particular building, when we redo some infrastructure.

The solution is billed per network device, so there are devices that are not subject to billing in your environment, such as dumb switches because they have no higher reporting protocols. If you do have those, Auvik won't report on them in the same way. It won't give you port-based or traffic-based analyses.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We initially looked at SolarWinds and, thankfully, we didn't go with that product. Its setup time and configuration were pretty extensive and we never fully finished it after putting about 10 days' worth of time into it. As much as I'd like to say some good things about SolarWinds, it really wasn't for us because of the lack of communication and support that I got from them in helping to set things up. Ultimately, we steered away from that product.

The biggest pro for Auvik is its ease of deployment. It was as easy as I've personally seen a setup of this type of solution to be. It has an abundance of features and functionality. The only con is that the install is a little bit more tech-intensive as far as time goes.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Auvik is that every organization should have something like this. From our perspective, it isn't very expensive, although in smaller organizations it might be considered more of a luxury. But every luxury has its benefits. All the aspects it helps us with make it phenomenal. It's definitely a "need," not a "want."

I would advise making sure you have a very good, thorough count of the SNMP-enabled devices you have within your network. Also, be cognizant of whether you have any non-managed switches because you can't really get visibility into them. 

Also, make sure that you have full control over your network elements within the environment. We had a couple of switches that we had to factory-reset to get back into them, because there were lost credentials. Assuming that your infrastructure and your documentation are good, you really shouldn't run into any terrible issues. If you're sound on documentation, credential handling, and credential guarding, this tool will be very easy for you to implement. And if your infrastructure is pretty sound and everything is consolidated, this will be a phenomenal tool.

I originally purchased Auvik to assist in troubleshooting network issues on the local area network and wide area network. We were having some slowness issues, but they were only in certain segments of the network. I had no tools on-site to help me find where the problem was.

I was able to realize the benefits of Auvik Network Management immediately. I knew I was having network problems. I got it up and running in a day, and I was immediately able to seewhere my issues were.

It does not cover everything I need, but a part of that is because I have not implemented Auvik 100%. I got Auvik up and running far enough to do my troubleshooting, and I then left it while I worked on other major projects. So I still have a lot to learn. I am taking all their classes, and I learn more in every class. My frequent comment is that it is like drinking from a fire hose, but

Auvik is putting the classes online so I can then go back and run it again, open up my Auvik and go through the items covered in class. Going through those training sessions has helped me configure Auvik.

I am 90% positive and 10% negative about its user interface. Most of the time, it is very intuitive, and I can find what I am looking for, but sometimes, it is a struggle. What is awesome is that during the training sessions, the instructors always end with Q&A, and you can ask any question. You do not have to ask a question just about what the training was on. They answer your question, and they always lead me to where I need to be on the interface.

The network map is currently giving me partial visibility. I do not have visibility to my portal to the Internet, but that is partly because I do not have it configured and partly because I am not sure if I want to allow that password access to my firewall.

The network map along with the dashboard gives a real-time picture of your network, but my network map is still messy. I am not sure if it is because it does not have all the permissions yet to do everything it wants to. About half of my devices are stranded in the middle of nowhere, and the other half are connected through multiple connections. A part of that is that Auvik does not have the Ubiquiti stuff down yet, so they do not really know which devices are talking to each other, but it is enough. Especially with the connectors, I can see what device is talking and figure out where my bottlenecks are. It is nowhere near perfect. When they give their training sessions, their network map is beautiful. Mine is pretty chaotic.

Auvik Network Management decreased the mean time to resolution for the initial problem I had.

So far, I have used it only for one initial problem. It helped with that problem.

I like the way that Auvik auto-configures itself to do the mapping. I wish it was a little more accurate, but as soon as you start getting your authentication correct for the different protocols that Auvik uses for discovery, it starts putting together your map for you.

It is not backing up my configurations on much of my network equipment. For some reason, it struggles with Ubiquiti equipment, and it is a known issue. They have a ticket open for it. Some of the issue could be the way Ubiquiti handles authentication. Ubiquiti handles authentication differently. Auvik expects to be able to log in to a device and then go into Config mode, whereas you are already in Config mode when you log into a Ubiquiti device. There is no additional authentication required, so they are having difficulties getting their scripts working on Ubiquiti.

The piece that I would like to see the most is getting those configs backed up. That is my chief complaint. If Auvik can get that work, they would be perfect.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for about seven months.

I contacted Auvik about how often they were down, and their response was they had not been down. They have just been doing maintenance that temporarily takes the system away, so it is not 100% stable yet. It does seem to go down a couple of times a month, but it is never down for long. Usually, they are fixed quite quickly.

We have just a single site with a couple hundred devices. I know that they have very large customers' data centers, so I am assuming that Auvik scales well. 

I am the sole IT person for this facility. It is a school for the intellectually disabled. We are a live-in facility 24/7 and 365 days. I have 300 students and about a hundred staff. I provide support for over an 850-acre campus.

We have just a single site with a couple hundred devices. I know that they have very large customers' data centers, so I am assuming that Auvik scales well. 

I am the sole IT person for this facility. It is a school for the intellectually disabled. We are a live-in facility 24/7 and 365 days. I have 300 students and about a hundred staff. I provide support for over an 850-acre campus.

Positive

I used PRTG. PRTG proved to be too complicated for one person to set up and use. It took too much care in feeding. Auvik is definitely better.

It is a hybrid setup. I have a collector on-site, but all the actual work is done in the cloud.

Its deployment was pretty easy. 

The only additional maintenance is if any equipment comes online and it does not recognize the equipment, you have to go into Discovery and give it the appropriate username and password.

That is the only maintenance required.

I deployed it myself.

The school I work for was founded in 1893 by a private family. It is still run by that same family, and that family dislikes the subscription model. They much prefer to buy equipment and own it, so trying to convince management to use a subscription model for a piece of software was pretty difficult. However, I was able to get Auvik to present it more as a multi-year contract instead of a subscription model. It is something their sales can do for other customers, but I do not think it is something they advertise.

For the size of our school, it is expensive, but I understand the reason behind the pricing. All my servers in the network are monitored by Auvik at no charge. We are only paying for network devices, so I pay for switches, access points, and firewalls, but I do not pay for all my user PCs and MACs, and my servers, which are my critical devices.

You need to understand the permissions required by your different pieces of hardware, especiallyfor different hardware types such as Windows, VMware, your networking hardware, and your Internet interface. You need to have all the permissions ready so that you can set up your Discovery. The hardest thing to get running on Auvik is getting the Discovery set up properly.

Overall, I would rate Auvik Network Management an eight out of ten.

We primarily use Auvik for managing and monitoring devices, including network devices, access points, and printers. We utilize Auvik's alerts to notify us of offline devices or any unusual behavior it detects, such as high interface utilization or low disk space. Additionally, we employ Auvik to automate the backup of our network switches.

We implemented Auvik because we lacked visibility into potential network issues, such as switch or access point utilization. While I have a wireless controller that provides some insights, Auvik unifies this information into a single, comprehensive view. This centralized visibility enables us to proactively identify and address network problems.

Auvik is deployed in a hybrid model because we have an on-prem collector that sends the information to the cloud.

Auvik is intuitive.

The ease of use provides me with peace of mind. It eliminates the need for me to independently explore certain aspects.

It has significantly reduced our mean time to resolution. For one particular issue, it saved me an estimated 10 to 20 hours at a minimum. Additionally, it has enabled me to respond to a handful of other issues one to two hours quicker.

We have been enabled to dedicate less time to the setup and maintenance of the solution and reduce the time required for issue resolution.

I have utilized configuration backups to replace equipment. I have employed alerting mechanisms to correlate user concerns with known alerts, enabling me to grasp the situation promptly. I can inform users of the need to replace toner cartridges or alert them to power outages caused by switch failures. Overall, this process aids in identifying the expected network status.

One of the primary advantages we observed with Auvik was the immediate availability of switch backups. This enabled me to seamlessly track configuration changes between backups. This was particularly valuable during the initial months when I was implementing numerous network switch installations. Auvik's ability to quickly adapt and incorporate new information is impressive. The only aspect that might require a time investment is understanding the normalcy of specific bandwidth or statistical data. However, this is not a learning process but rather a data-collection exercise.

The monitoring and backup are the most valuable features.

The Auvik network map and dashboard are not reliable enough to provide a real-time view of our network.

Metrics should be reported for individual devices rather than IP addresses.

I believe it would be highly beneficial to display the paths over which each VLAN is accessible on the network map.

I have been using Auvik for almost six months.

The stability of Auvik is excellent. The only time it goes down is when they announce it beforehand for maintenance.

Auvik should be extremely scalable. I have not seen any issues in that regard.

The technical support response time is slow. With 20 years in the service industry and nearly 30 in IT, I find that while the technical support representatives are polite, I sometimes feel more knowledgeable than they are. It's frustrating explaining my concerns to level one support only to have them escalate the issue to an engineer, leaving me in a communication limbo for potentially weeks.

Neutral

The initial deployment was uncomplicated. While Auvik itself was very easy to use, it requires SNMP to be configured correctly on all devices. This is the time-consuming aspect of the process. If SNMP is already configured on all devices and we have the necessary information, the setup can be quite straightforward and likely take less than an hour.

I was the only one from our organization involved in the deployment.

We used Auvik for the implementation.

Initially, I was an enthusiastic advocate for this product. I told many people about it and was very excited about its potential. However, once I started using it regularly, my enthusiasm waned somewhat. While the product does excel in certain areas, the recurring cost can be a deterrent. Overall, I believe the product is fairly priced, but I would consider it a better value if it were improved in certain areas.

If an alternative monitoring solution is not available, Auvik will take care of it. While we pay our MSP to monitor the servers, Auvik provides me with the essential information I need to stay informed about their status at no charge.

I would rate Auvik seven out of ten.

Auvik may require minor maintenance after adding or correcting connections, as some of these changes may not be displayed correctly.

Ensure the SNMP configuration is accurate, as Auvik relies heavily on it for network monitoring and management. Additionally, use managed switches instead of unmanaged switches to avoid potential network disruptions and complications.