What is our primary use case?
We use Auvik to monitor our whole network infrastructure. It helps us keep track of issues that arise and things that go offline. We have one main corporate office here that has multiple buildings and a lot of private fiber.
We have 68 access points, 46 switches, and 240 employees. Every person here utilizes the network on a PC, iPad, or iPhone. All of our CNC machines are on the network. That adds up to about 600 total devices on the network, including everything with an IP address.
How has it helped my organization?
Auvik allows us to get on top of issues before they become an outage. It alerts us about when dropped packets on an access point get out of hand, so I know to look at that. It speeds up the remediation time for network issues by about 25% to 50%. I get a heads-up about all the potential issues in my network.
I don't have to worry as much about the network because I have something telling me when issues are happening, so I can be proactive. If a situation is happening, I know where to look because I've gotten emails about what's going down before the problem hits my desk.
I know about power outages at our facilities before somebody calls me about it because Auvik sends me a report that the network at one of our facilities is offline. I can investigate and find that the power went out long enough that the battery backup for the switch gear ran out.
I have peace of mind because Auvik constantly records the state of the network configurations on all of my devices, and it provides one place to find everything. I don't need to waste time searching a million different settings in a million different pieces of software and endpoints. It's given me back some time. It has saved me time because I don't need to create Visio drawings of our network. That was massively time-consuming, and everybody does it differently. Nothing ever looks great, but Auvik's printout of the network map looks phenomenal.
We don't have a global footprint, but we utilize multiple buildings. Auvik has given us a lot of visibility by allowing us to see what's going on in other buildings a lot easier. We can remotely log into networking devices through Auvik, so you don't have to manually open a window and remember the login credentials. Everything is stored inside the app on the cloud. It's easy to jump in and hit the ground running instead of trying to look up an Excel document or a OneNote with information on how to get into the device.
We use a product called PDQ Inventory to keep track of our software inventory, but Auvik helps us manage our network inventory, letting us know what's on the network, and where it's located.
What is most valuable?
The network flow piece is the most useful. We can identify the busiest parts of the network based on the reporting from the switches about what is utilizing the most bandwidth on specific switch ports. I can narrow down which segments of the network might be having issues.
Auvik has everything I need in one place. I don't feel like I need other modules to use the product. In the past, we had about five different pieces of software, none of which did anything like what Auvik does. It provides a whole network map breaking down all the connections and ports so that you can drill down. I had nothing like that in the past that let me track everything. It has helped to see the state of my network at any time.
I like Auvik's cloud-based solution. I prefer to have a collector that pulls all the information and sends it up to the cloud so that I can access that from basically anywhere. It's all multifactor authentication, so I don't have to worry about people hacking that. At the same time, I also love that I don't have to tie up computing resources here in my data center locally. I like that better than setting up something that collects it on-premises. Then I have to back that up somewhere. It creates a larger overhead to maintain.
I love the network visualization because drawing the network out in Visio was becoming almost impossible because of our network's size. The ability to show a dynamic, updated view of our network has been a huge help. I enjoy that because you can drill down into visualization and focus on different segments of your network
What needs improvement?
When I change IP addresses on a device or on a server, I have to wait for Auvik to figure out that change. It will tell me the device is offline until Auvik scans the whole subnet again and finds it. If I change 25 devices, I'll get 50 emails in a short time because they've gone offline.
I'd love the ability to change that where I can update that device with the IP address without it going offline. That goes against the idea of a system that dynamically scans. It's information overload sometimes when you need to change a bunch of factors. You get inundated with emails. I would almost love a button whenever you first log in that says maintenance window, and then it would maybe take some of those alerts away.
It's fairly intuitive but sometimes you have to search for things because it's hidden in the user interface, so I think that could be improved a little bit. The search could be better because they have these strange search terms. Instead of being able to look for what you want, you have to lay out the query in a specific way to get results.
We've also been dealing with some weird bugs lately. We get alerts on miscellaneous items that go offline and online all the time. I've reached out to support, and they said that they've got a fix that they rolled out. However, we're still experiencing the issue, so I've got to work with them to fix that. They seem to be on top of the support.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used Auvik for a little over a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Auvik is pretty stable. I often get emails about preemptive maintenance outage windows, but there's never been a time when I needed to access it but couldn't. My computer also struggles with visualization because it's a little older. I'll usually remote into another computer that handles it better.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It seems to be like they would be able to handle quite a bit, especially being cloud-based. I feel that if I had to triple or quadruple the size of my network, they would be able to handle it really well. It doesn't seem like it would be tough for them.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. There have been times when it has been excellent. However, I still have some issues where things go offline and come back online. They reached out after the ticket to ask, "Hey, would you recommend Auvik to your colleagues?" That was the first time any company has reached out to me, so it sounds like they care about that score.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I used a free solution from a company called Spiceworks. It was a network monitoring software that listened to SNMP traffic. However, it got overloaded with the size of our network and wouldn't function how I needed it to. The alerts were out of control. It was too much for me, so I turned it off and looked for something else.
How was the initial setup?
We set up Auvik over a demo call, and they said they would set me up with a production-ready environment. I would have 30 days to play with it. After that, they got me into a little bit more in-depth setup. It took me and the technician 30 minutes in total. About 15 minutes after the installation, we were collecting data and setting up alerts.
It's phenomenal how quickly Auvik was set up. It reminded me of another system that I used called Action1, a remote endpoint management solution. We installed the collector for that, and within 20 seconds, it had installed its agent on every machine with a domain login in my environment. Auvik was very similar to that. It was up and running and collecting data within minutes.
The network map started to populate the same day. It takes a while to get most of the map worked out, but it started populating within an hour or so. My previous solutions were fairly easy to set up. Still, I never got them to work in a way that served my purpose, and I ultimately uninstalled them because the features weren't good enough to justify the amount of time it took to set them up and get them working.
The majority of them were free tools that I had looked at before going with Auvik. I generally understand why they were free, which led me to the point of needing to buy a service where I had support. I need support to fall back on if I don't know what I'm doing rather than just sort of meandering through a free tool.
Auvik doesn't require much maintenance. Suppose I'm looking for some information on why something's happening or what a device is, and I don't have any information besides spreadsheets. In that case, I go to Auvik to get an idea of that device because it has some good guesstimates based on a MAC address.
What was our ROI?
We saw value almost instantly because of the visibility we get into the network. If I'm curious about why a device is dropping offline, I have a map to see what devices are offline and dig into what's going on. I can check to see the state of the network if a lot of things are going offline. We didn't have that before. We were able to get value out of it within the first week.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Auvik is affordable. The license was under $4,000 annually for our setup. That covers a lot of switches, firewalls, and integration. It was well worth the price. I think it's around $20 per device per quarter.
It's the best monitoring software we can get at that per-device cost. They get pretty aggressive with pricing. When you add network switching that will be managed by Auvik, you'll see it on your next quarterly bill. You have to choose not to manage it whenever you install it if you don't want to be billed for it. You can keep your costs under control if you don't want to manage a device you're adding to the network.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I looked at SolarWinds. Their problem was that they had just been hacked at a pretty high level, and I didn't want anything to do with a vendor that had any hacking going on. The other one was called Netwrix. We had a demo of ManageEngine, but setting it up was like pulling teeth. I was in the middle of the demo with the people, and nothing was working right.
With Auvik, we were up in 15 minutes after downloading the collector and getting it on the network. It started populating data without the need to provide a lot of information. It went so smoothly. That sold me on it.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Auvik eight out of 10. My advice would be to try the demo and kick the tires as much as possible to find out if it's the right tool for you. Annual pricing is cheaper, but I believe they do monthly licenses if you're still not. Utilize it as much as possible before signing a contract.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.