Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use Auvik for monitoring and alerting on customer environments.

We lacked visibility into specific aspects of our Local Area Network. Therefore, we required a solution capable of monitoring and alerting us about port activity and other relevant information at the switch level.

Although Auvik does require some experience and knowledge within IT, it is easy to use. Auvik works relatively well with a great intuitive interface.

Auvik's ease of use makes it easy to get to the root of the problem.

Auvik's network map provides a real-time picture of our network as long as the agent is up.

The only waiting time we faced was for the agent's installation and subsequent discovery process. This typically took around 24 hours to ensure it had enough time to identify all network devices.

Before implementing Auvik, we could not readily determine switch outages. This necessitated manual inquiry and on-site troubleshooting. Fortunately, Auvik has cut our mean time to resolution down by 50 percent.

Auvik's reliability is impressive. It effectively alerts us to switch outages and high port utilization, making it a perfect fit for our needs. We are extremely satisfied with Auvik and have no plans to switch to another solution.

While Auvik provides us with good network visibility, there are some features we'd like to see implemented in the future. Specifically, we're looking for an alert system that notifies us when new devices are added to the network. For example, one of our customers experiences recurring issues with an unidentified router appearing on their network. Unfortunately, Auvik doesn't currently alert us when this ghost router appears.

I would like Auvik to alert on IP conflicts. Although it doesn't happen often, we sometimes see duplicate entries for IP addresses.

I have been using Auvik for six years.

We have never had any stability issues with Auvik.

Auvik is highly scalable. We currently use it on networks ranging from small shops with around 40-50 workstations to larger locations with 500-600 endpoints. I am confident that it can easily scale to even larger networks.

I have contacted Auvik's support team a few times and they were consistently great. Their resolution time was super quick.

Positive

The initial deployment is extremely easy. If we have an understanding of the customer's environment, the deployment takes five minutes and one person to complete.

The implementation is completed in-house.

Auvik's pricing falls within an acceptable range for us. While management typically handles pricing negotiations, I haven't heard any concerns from them suggesting Auvik's cost is excessive.

I would rate Auvik ten out of ten.

Auvik does most of the maintenance and they advise us before they do it.

I recommend trying Auvik with a trial version if possible, followed by the available Auvik training. While the initial training is not mandatory, I highly encourage newcomers to try the software first to get hands-on experience. This will make the subsequent training, if available, much easier to grasp.

We utilize Auvik for monitoring our clients' environments. 

It plays a highly critical part in our operations. A part of the product that we sell to our clients involves a service level agreement that we will respond to within X amount of time, and we'll monitor their environment for them. Because of that, this plays an absolutely critical function.

The collectors that they use are constantly connecting to Auvik to make sure that you're aware that it's active, it's running. You would think all of the other monitoring solutions out there do the same thing, and many do claim that, but most can't deliver that, whereas Auvik can. There have been many times when some of our other tools that are also monitoring things should be reporting that there's an outage at a location or a server is down or something like that, but that's just not the case. With those other tools, it doesn't even blip on their radar that the system is completely hard down and it's a big issue, whereas, with Auvik, the moment a collector disconnects, and it has been disconnected for the amount of time that we defined, it immediately alerts us and says, "We can't communicate with this machine." It's really handy. You can sell the feature all day long, but if that feature doesn't work, it's not a real feature. Auvik works. It's very reliable, at least from our experiences so far.

I enjoy it when it comes to visualizing the network mapping/topology for the organization. It doesn't just provide a network map. It gives us a global view, an actual Earth view, and it allows us to see where the devices are physically located, which is very handy. Especially if we need to dispatch something or if we need to compare a power outage to maybe a storm that's passing by, it gives us the map and visual of where a device is located. When you drill down into it, you can click on the actual nodes that are on the map and go down as granular as you want. You can see the actual network topology of the environment. It does a pretty good job of figuring out how it's all laid out. You've got a collector from Auvik that's sitting there, and it explores and discovers the devices. So far, I haven't seen an instance where it couldn't figure out the exact network topology. There's always this rare case where something gets kind of wonky in regard to how your server is set up. You might have multiple connections coming in or whatever, but so far, it has been able to define all that. That's something that a lot of people don't realize is normally a manual task. You have to break out Visio and start dragging and dropping a lot of icons, name it yourself, define the IPs, etc. Auvik does it automatically, which is just cool.

Our client environments are not a single vendor product. There are multiple vendors coming in from different directions. We deal in data systems, which is the industrial automation type of stuff that deals with wastewater treatment plants, water treatment plants, etc. Due to the nature of our business, being able to have an accurate inventory of what's at what site, what's the IP address, or what are the specs on a server is super important.

It provides an integrated platform for a few brands. It doesn't provide a fully integrated platform for all the brands and manufacturers out there. It's probably a little bit more skewed toward Cisco products, which we don't use a lot. It would be nice if they had full integration into Dell's tools, as well as VMware for Hypervisor and things like that. Having a single integrated platform would save us a lot of time across the board. Currently, we have to use Auvik for monitoring. It's probably the most reliable one that we have so far. We've used quite a few in the past, including Ninja, some Microsoft options, and several others. Everyone promises it, but far and few can truly deliver a single pane of glass experience. The Auvik tool gives us a single pane of glass for all of the monitoring needs, and then, if we need to drill into on a system-by-system basis and remotely manage the system and remote into a machine, we have to use other tools for that.

My favorite feature so far is the alerts section. We've got our main company at the top, and then all of our customers are underneath that. We can either filter by a single customer or one of their sites specifically, or look at it from the top down and see the whole picture. It's an easy way for me to be able to have a high-level overview. I can see the status of all of our sites simultaneously without having to really dig in and get super granular unless I want to. It gives that ability too, which is cool.

The functionality on a PC is definitely better than in a mobile environment. If you are logging in to Auvik on your phone or on a tablet, it's a little janky at times, but on a PC, it's fantastic.

If I could make a wish list of things that I would like to see from Auvik, I would definitely love to see more vendor integration with specific manufacturers. They've got that integration with Cisco, but it would be awesome to also have that with other major brands, such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. It should have integration with more vendors, and in general, being able to quickly and easily access vendor-specific tools from the portal would be amazing. A real-life case scenario would be that we know that Dell servers have iDRAC cards on them, which allows for remote control and a remote KVM keyboard, video, and mouse functionality. It would be nice to be able to have the direct link baked in and be able to quickly just say, "I need to remotely manage this machine," and then you can just click, and you're in. In regards to VMware, VMware is one of the top three hypervisors for virtualization. It would be awesome to be able to quickly and easily identify that this is the VMware cluster, this is the ESXi server, and this is a vCenter. We should be able to quickly and easily log into consoles and remotely manage things as needed from there. This kind of functionality for the Cisco products is baked into Auvik right now, but it doesn't exist for other manufacturers. It's one of those things that will happen as time goes by. They need to make sure that it's embedded and done properly and that they're working with the manufacturers directly, instead of trying to duct tape a solution.

The other improvement would be more on the software side of things in terms of understanding that patch management happens and vulnerabilities are security patched all the time. There should be more direct integration with Microsoft updates. Pretty much everyone uses Windows, and being able to easily identify that there's a patch pending, and maybe even be able to push it, would be awesome.

My direct experience with Auvik has been since August.

In terms of full stability, which also includes their response to security issues, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

The sky's the limit. There don't seem to be any actual limits on the number of collectors that you're able to deploy. We started out at 40, and we're at 63 right now. It scales easily and effortlessly. So, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

It's decent. It's a little difficult to get a hold of them sometimes, but, overall, it's not bad. Comparing it to the big three computer manufacturers, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, they fall in Dell's mid-tier level support. It's pretty decent.

Positive

We use multiple tools. We went for Auvik because of its dependability. We have to have a reliable report as to what's up and what's down. Ninja is great on a surface level, but it doesn't update live. It has a periodic updating process. You don't really know when it's going to update next. You would expect it to be live, but it's not. Having accurate, live information was the reason why we started with Auvik.

This isn't just a one-application show for us. We've got Auvik. We've got Ninja, and we've got several other tools that we use for monitoring to cover redundancy and any spillover situation. By far, Auvik is the cleanest. It's the most up-to-date. It's the most accurate. Ninja, for example, is a decent competitor against Auvik's platform. Ninja reports things, but the information is very clustered up and very hard to read and discern. Once you get used to it, you're okay, but on your first experience with Ninja, it's horrible. Auvik is very clean. It has that modern look and feel to it. Anybody who uses modern apps and web apps is going to be able to quickly and easily figure out his or her way through it.

The most important thing when comparing Auvik versus other competitors is that we have found Auvik to be the most reliable. It will report when things are out. It will report everything based on how we have it set up and defined. This reliability is very important. Ninja is great, and as a team, when we were using only Ninja, and we weren't utilizing Auvik at all, Ninja would report things, but it wouldn't always report that live, up-to-date view of what's going on. You might have alerts saying, "Oh, it's out." You're like, "No. No, we cleared that alert. Why is it still showing that?" There's no real easy way to discern how to clear the alerts if it just doesn't detect it automatically, whereas Auvik is always up to date. It's always communicating, and if it ever drops that communication, it immediately notifies you, which is awesome.

The alerts that are provided to us correspond and correlate directly to the SLAs that we are selling and promising to our clients. So, in the event of a full outage or whatever, it gives us the ability to quickly and easily identify that there is an outage at this site, and it's this device that is currently causing the problem, or we haven't had any communication for X amount of time to this IP address. We are then able to say, "Okay, this is a high priority because it's affecting outage, and it's affecting the service for our client," whereas, something like when disk-based utilization is 80% has a high priority, but it's not a major issue. Auvik allows us to quickly and easily prioritize types of incidents, for example, outage versus 80% storage. It allows us to clarify whether something is an incident or not.

I was not involved with the setup, but I was involved in the sourcing and options. That was me working with the company, before I actually worked with the company directly, and looking at all the different options that were out there. Auvik seems to be the one that made the most sense. In regards to the setup process, I can see that the general setup itself as an administrator is not difficult. It takes 15 to 30 minutes on average. You can add in some videos to watch if you want to figure out how to do something or whatever, and you're probably going to be up and running within about two hours.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It does that itself. It updates its own collectors. You have to just install the collector. Once that's installed, it'll update itself. Outside of that, it's a web or cloud tool. It's software as a service. So, they handle all the maintenance and things like that on the backend from there.

Being a cloud solution, the always-on communication between Auvik and its collectors gives you that real-time status, and it's amazing. With an on-prem solution, if something goes wrong with your equipment, that's going to cause issues. If you're doing it even in your own private spot or even public cloud or whatever, you're having to control that kind of infrastructure, environment, and things like that. It's one of those things that annoys people when they see that there's going to be an outage for a tool because of updates, maintenance, and things like that, but Auvik has been always on the spot making sure that we're aware, "Hey, heads up on this date at this time, maintenance on these machines is going to be happening. These are the things that will either function or non-function. These are things that are going to be changing and so on, so forth." I've also seen several instances where they responded to a security threat, and they did that really quickly. Our outage time on that from Auvik was measured in minutes. If we were doing that and hosting it ourselves, even though we have a decently-sized team, we don't have the time to do all that kind of work. Monitoring and maintaining all that is amazing with the whole cloud option.

It's hard to measure what it's providing. However, considering the cost that we are paying in regards to what we're getting out of it, it has easily paid for itself within the first few months just based on our current deployment environment. We have to have accurate information. We have to know when something is up and down, and if it's not, we break SLA, our service level agreement, with our clients. If we do that, we have to pay money to our clients because we broke contracts. One broken contract is going to cost us five grand, and this prevents us from losing that, so it's awesome.

There is a reduction in our mean time to resolution. When we were using just Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware that there was an issue until Ninja just had an update. Now, we're aware within the timeframe that we assigned, which is 15 minutes, that communication has been lost. We give it a couple of minutes to make sure that it's not just an internet blip or whatever, and then we're able to quickly attack it. With Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware until a customer calls us to say something is broken. It's time lost in regards to the fact that we should have been aware of it before the customer even had a chance to pick up the phone and do that.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about price, I would say that it's the cost of doing business. It's just the fact that it's going to cost something. The amount of money that you're spending on these tools is a fraction of what you would be paying for an individual to be doing the same thing live as a person. I believe that our bill is somewhere around the $600 range per month. We're monitoring about 63 machines. Most of them are servers. So, $10 to monitor it for an entire month is amazing. You couldn't get somebody in India for that cheap.

We definitely evaluated other options. We use Ninja in-house, so it was one of the first things that we originally evaluated. We also evaluated ConnectWise and a few others. It was not very difficult to pull up a list of the competitors and look at them all. We originally had decided on Ninja because it was something that most people knew about, but then we're like, "Yeah, it's great when it works, but it doesn't always work." That's when we started looking at the other options, and we landed on Auvik.

It's a newer company on the horizon. They're still developing features. You can tell that. So, if a feature that you are wanting isn't available, give it time. It'll probably come.

It takes a little bit of time to get used to. When I first started, back in August of this year, I was getting my feet wet with Auvik as a tool. I had heard of it, but I never really personally used it and experienced it. I've been in my IT field for well over 16 years, so it's not like I'm not capable of understanding how to use something. One of the things that come into play is understanding that the default view that you see is like a zoomed-out version. Being able to traverse that, being able to go back and forward, and understanding where you're at in the tree takes a little bit of time to get used to and follow.

On top of that, there's the reporting functionality below it, where it's reporting alerts and things like that. At first glance, you're like, "Oh, everything's fine. There are no alerts," but then you realize that you are only looking at the last 15 minutes or the last three hours or whatever. You need to understand that there's that little date field midway on the right side and of purple color that you choose to select the date range that you're looking at. It will automatically redraw and redo things based on the selected range, and you can drill down into whatever system you're connected to, which is really cool.

We haven't experienced much automation so far. Right now, we're using it just as a reporting tool, but it's something that we're looking at doing. Outside of that, it's just reporting and doing the network discovery and watching for outages and any types of alerts. The process of doing that is kind of pseudo automation just in the fact that that's what Auvik sells as their core option or whatever. As a reporting tool, it's great, but so far, we haven't really dug into many of the integrations or functionalities past that.

It hasn't helped our team focus on high-value tasks while delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because, in our environment, we're all equal peers. We all have our own specialties, per se, such as networking versus storage or VMware versus Hyper-V, but, in general, we're all of the equal stances.

As a solution for monitoring and things like that, it's awesome, and I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We are an MSP that monitors various customers' infrastructure, including firewalls and switches. We use Auvik for monitoring and creating network diagrams. Our environment consists of a data center with VPNs for each site we monitor and manage. 

From the data center, we have a probe where we can access every device we manage. We authenticate in the cloud and access the monitoring on-prem.

The network visualization Auvik provides is critical. The only clue we get as an MSP is, "My internet is not working." Getting alerts that separate all these services and companies helps us pinpoint the correct location of the issue and saves time. That increases customer satisfaction because we can resolve their issues quicker.

Auvik saves lots of time. The network mapping and diagrams make it easier to do inventories and check the lifecycle of devices. You have to spend time configuring things the way you like. It does an excellent job of monitoring, but I think it takes more time to tailor to your needs than other monitoring systems.

Auvik's auto-detection feature is something I haven't seen in other monitoring systems. We can keep track of our internal device tables to map the devices on the network. The diagram saves us a lot of time. Usually, our new customers don't provide much information about their networks, so we need to spend a lot of time logging into every single device, going into the CDP and LLDP, making nodes, building diagrams, and adding more information. Auvik does it instantaneously.

When we can recognize what devices are connected in the table, we can easily find out, for example, what networks are passed through the devices, which is also very useful. Otherwise, we would need to download the configuration and start building our database of networks. It provides a simple way to look at many devices and subnets.

I've been finding some features difficult. It might be because I'm used to PRTG, and Auvik works differently. When it comes to monitoring a simple IP address, Auvik makes it a bit harder and more complex because you have to create a service inside the site. It's not just creating a sensor and having it ping the device. You need to go to the site and create the service. 

The service must be created from either the device or the ping cloud. When you create many services because you need to ping or monitor several IPs, it can be challenging to find all the services because you have to go into the services. Once you are in the services, you must search for the main item. Inside the main item, you see the services. It's a little bit harder to work with.

With PRTG, you open the main website, and all the sensors are on the main screen. It's more intuitive. Auvik's technology is better. The design and functionality are more practical, but it's more expensive as well. But I think it's easier to use PRTG without any training because it's more intuitive. Auvik is not that intuitive. I had to open several cases to figure out how to create a ping sensor. Sometimes, you can't modify them as you like. You have to create it this way, and there are no options.

I don't think you can modify the names of the services. After discovery, you must create it repeatedly because you can't modify the conventional names. For example, if you're looking for all the sensors from this specific ISP, we can name the sensors by site, ISP, and IP address. It's easier to manage because I can ask it to give me all the IPs from Comcast. It's not one site. It's all over the place.

While Auvik provides everything in a single interface, I don't use it because it's slow. From Auvik, I can SSH or HTTP a device, but I'd rather use Putty or mRemote because I'm old school. I open mRemote and have all the devices on one site. From Auvik, I have to open the platform, authenticate it, search for the site, and search for the option. It takes more clicks, and if you're doing it every day for several devices per day, I would rather use mRemote to connect to the devices remotely.

Network visualization can also be complex. If the network follows the rules, it makes a good diagram. However, an ISP might sometimes be connected to a switch connected to three other switches in a row, like a daisy chain. For some reason, that's where the provider connects at the last mile. In those cases, Auvik makes fancy diagrams that are not very intuitive. Auvik makes excellent diagrams if you have everything structured with the firewall, core switch, distribution switches, and access switches. We don't use the device inventory feature. Instead, we rely on an Excel sheet. We can't add every device to Auvik because it is costly.

I have been using Auvik for a little more than two years.

It is highly stable.

Auvik's scalability is excellent.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. I've contacted them a few times. You can reach support quickly through chat. Maybe the chat doesn't have much access to the device, but it would be nice if I opened the chat from my session and they already had my information and configuration. Maybe they don't do it for privacy, but that would save some time.

Positive

I previously used PRTG but switched to Auvik when I joined this company. I don't know why this company uses Auvik. It could be because Auvik has more design. It has more features running, and they are built-in, so you only need to figure out how to configure it. Once you post the credentials necessary to get information about a server via WMI or SNMP, gaining more insight from the devices is very useful. 

I haven't seen WMI on other monitoring systems. I might not search for it, but I know Auvik does it. We haven't used it, and I believe it doesn't charge for the servers or Windows machines. If you want to monitor everything, like computers and network devices, Auvik might be a better deal in terms of features and pricing. I'm monitoring every computer and network, which might require many sensors. I understand that Auvik will monitor the Windows devices for free, if I'm not mistaken.

Auvik saves a lot of time for network discovery and device inventory by getting the information from the devices for networking.

I'm not on the procurement side, but I understand that the license is based on devices, not sensors. If you have 10 switches and one firewall, you count per device. You'll have 100 devices if there are 10 sites with the same setup. I think it's much more expensive to monitor 100 sensors in PRTG. 

The pricing is monthly per device. Some other monitoring systems charge an annual license, giving you a set number of sensors, like 1,000  or 2,500. This is what I've been seeing, but I'm not the one who purchased the solution. 

If someone is concerned about price, maybe Auvik is not the right solution. If they're genuinely worried about the cost, it might be better to use an open-source or free network monitoring solution. If they want to invest in something, maybe the second step would be something like PRTG. Companies with a lot of resources might try SolarWinds. 

I wasn't involved in the decision-making for Auvik. I believe it was more of a management decision than a technical decision. For managers, Auvik is an attractive solution. It might be less attractive from a technical point of view, but it looks fine to them. It has a fresh design, great graphs, excellent website design, and nice integration features. Maybe it looks better than other options from a sales perspective.

I rate Auvik seven out of 10.

We mainly needed a tool for managing or monitoring our firewalls and switches. We do have other tools for general server environment monitoring and applications monitoring, but they are not as good for managing and monitoring firewalls and switches. We specifically needed monitoring and management of firewalls and switches for our data center environment.

It provided the ability to track down the changes in the firewall and the ability to have centralized visibility into our networking stack. We are able to compare and correlate functions from one environment with another environment, which is helpful when we upgrade the code or the framework in one location. We can compare how the stats were previously, and we get to know whether the new code is doing anything funky or if we are seeing any issues. It allows us to compare sizes that are running on the older code and sizes that are running on a newer code. We can see if there is any difference in the CPU usage, RAM usage, or the utilization of the firewalls themselves.

It's a single pane of view. There is a single dashboard, and you can add multiple sites and multiple users to it. You install collectors in different areas, but the management is from a single location. Everything is cloud-based. So, you can access and do monitoring from pretty much anywhere. The beauty of it is that if you have multiple physical locations across the continent, you can see the networking stack on one single page. This single integrated platform is very important for us. The most important factor for us was that this platform is cloud-based. If we were hosting it in a single physical location, it would have been hard to be accessible by other locations. Having it in the cloud and being able to see everything in a centralized location was super important for us because in the case of the old or other tools that we had in the past, or we still have, we need to log into a different tool or different console to see the information, and it's hard to correlate all of them in a single location. Auvik gives that ability. We can compare the states and the information from a firewall located in the east of the US and a firewall located in the west of the US, which is super helpful.

It is nice to be able to visualize the network mapping/topology for the organization. You don't have to do anything. You add the subnets and the VLANs you want to be scanned. As long as the collector can access those subnets, it is done fairly quickly. It depends on how complex your network is, but it can take less than 30 minutes to map everything and give you a visualization, which is pretty nice. Otherwise, it could take you hours to stay up-to-date with the charts of your networking topology because the topology changes from time to time. With Auvik, you can see every node, every switch, and every firewall. You can see how they are connected. You can visually see how your network is and what you have. The best part is that it adjusts on the fly. If I add a new switch, the topology would adjust, and the new switch will be there. If I take out a switch or create a new branch, it will automatically show that. It's really nice and easy for the day-to-day understanding of where you are, but it's also very important when you have a new network admin, and you need to get them up to the speed of your network. In the past, we had to pull out various diagrams and explain what we have and then figure out whether all the diagrams were up-to-date, whereas now, we can just show the dashboard, and they would understand that. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization. It's really intuitive. From what I was able to see, everything was correct. It's not that you get raw data and some visualization and then you need to work with it or adjust it. It connects everything. From what I was able to see, everything was pretty correct in the diagrams.

It has helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. Previously, we were doing daily backups of the firewalls, but now, we don't have to do that part. That has been a help. The automation of the backups was helpful. 

It has significantly improved the visibility into the networking topology. It can see the access points, and it can see pretty much everything on the network. It can detect servers and physical hardware as well. It has significantly improved our visibility. This visibility is not the most important aspect, but it's definitely important and significant to have this visibility and know what you have in the topology.

It keeps device inventories up-to-date. We can quickly search and find out the devices we have or check what we have. That part has been really helpful. Instead of tracking in an Excel spreadsheet, we can search the inventory in Auvik.

It has definitely saved time to do other tasks. Some of the daily tasks that we had to do are now done by Auvik. With Auvik, our team spends less time checking things, getting dashboards, and pulling up reports.

We have multiple applications and tools to manage and monitor various aspects of the networks. Auvik has saved us a few hours a week. When you have three or four different tools, you need to take information from each of those tools and then get some insights out. With Auvik, we log into a single location, and we get all the information. It has been time-saving for sure.

Few of the features are valuable. One feature that is the most valuable for me is that after we added all of our firewalls, every time we make any configuration change in the firewall, it creates a backup and retains the change history for months. We can see and find out when a change was done and what was the change. The best part is that if we want to compare the current config with the config from two weeks ago, the tool pulls up both config files and tells us what the difference is. If something is not working today, instead of asking around who made the change, what was changed, and how things were two weeks ago when everything was working, we can just pull both configs, check them out, and know what exactly the problem is and investigate.

Auvik is a cloud-based solution, and it definitely has advantages over on-prem network monitoring solutions. We don't have to manage anything on-prem, and we don't have to patch the backend. We don't have to allocate resources for the management console to work, and it's accessible from anywhere. We don't have to back up the virtual machine or the appliance because everything is managed by Auvik. We really like that part. You definitely need internet connectivity to send all the logs and data to Auvik. If your internet goes down, then technically, you don't have visibility at that time, but then, you likely have a bigger problem than being able to get the data.

It takes significantly less time and effort to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solutions. With the previous solutions, we needed to get somebody trained. Somebody had to go and watch tons of videos to understand how to deploy the solution and how to properly install and configure it. With Auvik, we just provide the executables to somebody, and they just install it. We then go to the console and the data starts to come there. It's way easier and faster to set it up.

They can improve its monitoring capabilities for the physical servers or operating systems. At the moment, they do have some visibility. Even though you don't buy Auvik for monitoring your servers, and it is more for network monitoring, it would be nice if they can do end-to-end monitoring so that you don't have to use a different tool for operating system monitoring. You can get all the information from Auvik.

I have been using Auvik for about three months.

It has been very stable so far. I don't see any issues. I'm not concerned about its stability.

It can scale. I don't see that as an issue.

We have various firewalls and switches in HA. We have various models and vendors. We have a three-layer topology. We have a core layer, a distribution layer, and an access layer. All that is visible and monitored from Auvik.

Their technical support has been good. They come up with solutions, and they are there to help. I'm happy with the experience so far. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

We used PRTG, and we used Nagios. We used these two recently. They were more for monitoring. They didn't have the capabilities of management. They weren't keeping backups, and they weren't alerting us where there was a new firmware update. They also did not have the topology visualization.

Both of them were on-prem solutions. So, we had to have a system or VM to install them. We installed PRTG on Windows. We needed a dedicated box to run it. They weren't cloud-based, and they weren't highly available.

I deployed it, and I worked with my network engineers to set it up properly. I started the initial deployment or initial installation of the collectors, and then my team took over. I worked with them to deploy it in multiple locations. It was straightforward and pretty easy to deploy. You need to do some configurations to add everything, but the initial configuration is straightforward.

We just downloaded the out-of-the-box solution and just clicked on next, next, and next. We haven't done any customization. It took about 30 minutes initially because I added a few subnets. It took 20 to 30 minutes to get the diagram. Initially, you get some data depending on your network. We have a fairly large network, so it took about 30 minutes. It is awesome to get that information in 30 minutes.

It was pretty straightforward and easy to use for firewalls. You set up a connection to the firewall, and then everything pretty much works on its own. Some tools require you to learn for weeks before you figure out how to deploy. Auvik, in that regard, is pretty easy. We had a little bit of a challenge adding the switches just because we have specific switches, and they communicate with the firewall on a specific protocol. There was an API or a way to add them up, but we just didn't know how to add them up out of the box. Auvik's support was able to help us out fairly quickly, and overall, it was an easy and smooth deployment.

We did it ourselves. I don't see a need for an integrator to do it because it's straightforward.

It doesn't require any day-to-day maintenance from our side. Everything is managed by Auvik. They run the updates and the patches. The only thing that you need to do is that when you add a new device, you need to provide a new password, or if you change the password, you need to update that in Auvik. Other than that, there is no maintenance.

I would like it to be more cost-effective or affordable. It's not the most expensive one, but it's also not the cheapest solution out there. You pay month to month. It is what it is. It is not for everyone, but it depends on what you're looking for in your budget.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that Auvik is not the cheapest solution out there. You pay per device you monitor, but there is value in it. If you monitor the key systems and components, then you can make it cost-effective. If you want to monitor every single switch in your environment, it certainly won't be a cheap solution. You need to evaluate what you need to monitor. Do you need to have every switch? You can have maybe the top-tier switches and get all the information from those. You don't necessarily need to have every switch monitored because it doesn't really distinguish. You pay the same price whether you are monitoring your core switch or your access switch. To make it more cost-effective, you need to pick and choose what you want to monitor.

We've evaluated FortiMonitor from Fortinet, but it wasn't a good fit for us. We also evaluated LiveAction. That was also not a good fit for us.

I would advise giving it a try in the trial period, adding all the devices you have on the network, and seeing what value you are getting. I would also advise assessing what you need to monitor and what you don't need to monitor because you pay per monitored device.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Primarily, I'm using Auvik for alerting within client infrastructure and then using it for investigation into issues. We're trying to make sure we are accurately and professionally monitoring IT environments. It helps with tracking issues as soon as they happen immediately and not having to wait to act until users report issues.

We can access information quickly. For example, when I have a device and I get notified that it's offline, I can click on the alert from the email. When I click on that, it'll take me to the overview page and give me all the information I need. So very quickly, I can see its last known IP. I can see what the device is. I can see its history and what's happened over the past ten minutes or the past twelve hours. I can see that very fast - in a matter of seconds. That way, I can figure out what's happening faster and troubleshoot more efficiently.

The alerting is very accurate. I like that the devices have great overviews and we can quickly assess information. 

It simplified tasks and made things easier. It's made it possible for me and my team to be able to get an email that will notify us of an issue so we can put that into our ticket system and start tracking it immediately. It cuts down the troubleshooting time by half - or even more. It's tripled or quadrupled our efficiency.

Auvik and its dashboard give us a real-time picture of our network. It makes it pretty easy to gain visibility. It's also extremely helpful to have that map up by default. For viewing infrastructure for clients where maybe I haven't been on-site before, it helps me quickly get an image and a picture of what's happening there, so it's extremely helpful.

It's definitely made our team better at catching issues faster, which results in happier clients.

Auvik has empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own. Its ease of use is great. The alerts, map, and dashboard overviews let our team know where to start even if they don't have any context going into it. Even for entry-level team members, it's just made us overall faster and more efficient while having fewer escalations. My team feels happier and more productive when dealing with alerts. 

I don't have many critiques. It's a really great tool. If I did have to think of one, I would say maybe there could be a wider knowledge base for auto-determining what devices are would be useful. Sometimes we get a generic device, then we can't tell what it is quickly from the details. Just having a better knowledge-based integration for determining what devices are, and what their make and models are, would be helpful. 

I've been using the solution for two and a half years. 

I'd rate stability seven out of ten. There may occasionally be downtime, but never bugs or glitches. 

Our clients are typically medium to large companies.

We have about 70 or more people directly working with the solution.

I'd rate scalability eight out of ten. It's easy to keep deploying and integrating with our portal so that all technicians can access all clients. 

I've only had to reach out to technical support once or twice and it has always been a great experience. The support experience reinforces why we want to use them and work with them.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

We use local drives at each client site that do the detection and use a cloud deployment. 

The process is complex, however, Auvik does a good job of making it pretty simple. We had it up and running within a couple of days. Typically, it's a one-man job and we have one of our senior engineers deploy it. We deploy based on client requirements with engineers determining the best options for each client. 

The solution does not require any maintenance from our end. Auvik would handle any maintenance. 

I don't have any insights into price or cost.

We're an MSP. 

I definitely would recommend the product to others. It's a very powerful tool that can make your IT company more professional and make your clients happier.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are using Auvik Network Management to monitor switch configuration and usage.

I'm looking to improve my network visibility by implementing effective alerts and enabling remote CLI access for switch management.

Auvik's user interface is user-friendly. While I'm currently fine-tuning the setup after a quick initial process, everything seems logically placed and easy to find.

The network map and dashboard's design are appealing, though the layout might need some adjustments. I suspect this is because my network insights aren't fully configured yet, preventing the system from automatically placing everything in its optimal location.

We can see a real-time picture of our network that reflects changes as they are being made.

I would rate the ease of use of the dashboard and network map seven out of ten.

Auvik provides full visibility into our network.

We saw the benefits of Auvik on the first day.

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

The in-app remote terminal and alerting system are Auvik's most valuable features. In less than a week, it identified previously unknown issues on our network.

It would be helpful to be able to send CLI commands to multiple devices in Auvik simultaneously.

I'm currently going through the process of setting up and getting acquainted with Auvik Network Management software.

Auvik's stability is great; I haven't experienced any unexpected session terminations or unresponsiveness, which is a major factor in our consideration of it as a potential replacement for Aruba Central.

Auvik scales easily by allowing us to deploy additional collectors throughout our network infrastructure. If the system seems overloaded, simply adding another collector is straightforward, especially with their virtualized management system. They even provide a user-friendly OBA to simplify the deployment process.

Our previous network management solution, Aruba Central, fell short in several areas. The interface lagged significantly, it could not provide the level of detailed network insights we require, and its user interface was not user-friendly.

Auvik stood out on the Gartner Square. The demo that we were given by our sales rep was impressive, and then moving into the actual trial that we're working on now. It has checked a lot of the boxes that we are trying to fulfill.

Auvik's initial setup was easy, taking only 45 minutes to an hour to get basic functionality like alerts and configuration changes. Now I'm refining it for better visibility, but the core functionality was up and running quickly.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Auvik is a good product and worth the premium price tag for a lot of people.

Auvik does monitor some of our critical devices at no charge.

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

Building successful connections requires understanding your specific environment – its current configuration, ideal setup, and the unique adjustments needed to make everything work together seamlessly.

We use Auvik to monitor our network and troubleshoot when things go wrong. It also helps us automate and discover network components 

Without Auvik, the onboarding process involved an extraordinary amount of effort and labor because we needed to identify and document all of the client's networking components manually. We had to remote into the servers or physically inspect the issues on site. It was an overwhelming task, especially for large clients. The ability to automate that work made things much quicker for everyone. 

Our engineers have said that they've saved a lot of time because they can immediately identify the root cause of the issue and address it without having to poke around and troubleshoot to find exactly what the issue is. The engineers are resolving tickets faster, making the clients happier.

We realized the benefits almost immediately once it was fully deployed. It was a staged rollout for the clients. Within the first couple of weeks, we identified a failed disk on a virtual server host. VMware didn't report that to use, but Auvik caught the problem before it caused any issues.

I like how Auvik automatically backs up some device configurations. For example, we had a Cisco switch connected. Each time we change the switch, Auvik will automatically back up the configuration so it can be restored when needed.  

Auvik creates a visual map so you can see where things are connected in real time. It will alert you when a device goes down.

Auvik's interface could be more intuitive. It can be daunting if you don't know what you're looking for. I've been using Auvik for a year, so it's no big deal, but a new user may struggle a bit. There's so much in there, so it could be more streamlined. 

Overall, it's pretty easy to figure out what's connected to what and to see the network topology on the map. However, sometimes we're working with more complicated networks with many interconnecting parts. In those cases, we run into trouble identifying where things are connected and putting it into a visual representation that makes sense. It's gotten better, but it's still a little quirky.

The alerts are still a bit noisy. I know they are working on that. They're testing some changes to the data to dial down the noise. Sometimes, we'll get multiple alerts for the same issue until it's fixed. Since it's tied to our ticketing system, it's also generating tickets each time, so we had to turn off the ticketing until we got a better grasp on that.

We started using Auvik last May.

We've never had a problem with Auvik crashing. The dashboard sometimes takes a while to load, and there are a few minor outages, but it isn't unstable. We've been told they're addressing the slow load times in an upcoming update.

Auvik's scalability is only limited by the number of licenses you can afford. The rest is a matter of deploying the collectors and adding the credentials. I don't see why it could be deployed on a massive scale.

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. They're fantastic. If the first-level support can't give you an adequate answer, they will escalate it rapidly, and they're quick to respond. 

Positive

The deployment wasn't that difficult, but it was somewhat time-consuming. Once you install the collector, you must manually input all the credentials to get the devices to talk to Auvik. Depending on the size of the network, this process may take several hours. Fully configuring the solution to the client's specifications may take up to three months. Sometimes, it may take longer to track down all the credentials.

After deployment, Auvik doesn't require much maintenance on our end. The collectors must be updated from the cloud, but that happens behind the scenes, and we never need to touch it. Once it's deployed, it's pretty hands-off unless we need to change the device credentials.

Auvik isn't cheap. There are two tiers: Essentials and Performance. We're still on the Essentials plan, but we may upgrade to Performance, which is double the price. They bill based on firewalls, controllers, switches, and routers. Every client has wireless access points, routers, printers, etc. Those are monitored for free. 

We also looked at Liongard. One feature we wanted was the ability to automatically document things in our IT documentation systems. Auvik and Liongard had this capability, but Auvik documented more and had more network troubleshooting features. 

I rate Auvik Network Management eight out of 10. Once you get Auvik deployed, I recommend having your subject matter expert provide all the employees who will use it with detailed training on how it works and where to find things to ensure you get the most out of the solution.

We're a video game company with high bandwidth needs, and we use Auvik to identify bottlenecks, back up configurations, and other network management tasks.

We were having bandwidth issues on parts of our network and didn't have a central point to investigate these problems before Auviv. We were inspecting logs, jotting things down, looking at error calendars, and doing everything manually. It took forever. Auvik helps us have more visibility in nearly real-time. We realized the benefits almost immediately. 

There are fewer bandwidth problems because we can identify the bottlenecks quickly and resolve them, so I think that has reduced strain on the help desk. Our resolution time is several hours faster because we don't need to manually compare error logs and stuff like that. 

I like the ability to see bandwidth utilization on all the interfaces, and the automatic configuration backups are also useful. Auvik's user interface is fairly easy to use. 

Auvik's network map could be better. It's a little confusing at times and not always accurate. I wish it showed the connections between switches on the map. You can find that by drilling down into the network device, but that isn't visible on the map as far as I know.

We have been using Auvik for six months to a year.

We've had no issues with lag or downtime while using Auvik. 

Auvik is super-easy to scale. 

We have used PRTG. Its interface is not good. Auvik is user-friendly, whereas PRTG looks like a free tool, but you have to pay for it. The user interface, ease of use, rollout, graphs, and bandwidth utilization are much better in Auvik.

With PRTG, we saw value within the first couple of weeks in terms of setting up alerts, but the network monitoring took forever to set up. It was not easy to use. All our employees hated using it.

Deploying Auvik was straightforward. One of my employees was skeptical because he had used Auvik at a previous company and said the rollout was difficult, but he did not experience that here. He's one of our dynamic engineers, and he said the rollout was super easy here. I'm unsure what happened with his last company. Maybe they were not doing it right. 

We had an onboarding meeting with Auvik, but our deployment was entirely in-house. It was a simple setup that involved inputting all the device credentials. Our team had two network engineers. One was probably enough, but we have several sites, so it made sense to divide the work. It doesn't require much maintenance. A few times, the credentials were not working, but that was something on our end. 

Auvik was way more than PRTG. It was the most expensive of the three, but we saw how much it helped us, so we felt the price was justified. Auvik doesn't charge for the connectors. I'm not sure how the licensing works, but I've heard that they only charge for certain devices. 

We did an extensive trial with PRTG and also tried Domotz. Auvik was the clear winner between those three.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I recommend doing a trial of Auvik. They're willing to work with you and give you time to demo the product. I think you'll see Auvik's benefits if you demo it.