Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

As a network engineer, I rely on Auvik Network Management primarily for troubleshooting network issues. Auvik's visual representation of the network is particularly helpful, allowing me to gain a clear understanding of how everything is connected. Additionally, Auvik facilitates remote access to switches and firewalls, streamlining my troubleshooting workflow.

Our organization previously lacked any network monitoring capabilities. This made it difficult to identify and troubleshoot issues. We've implemented Auvik, which has addressed this challenge. Auvik provides us with valuable insights into our network health and allows for easy remote access to devices. This overall improves our network management efficiency.

Auvik has a well-designed and user-friendly interface. It's easy to navigate and understand.

The network map dashboard is a valuable tool because it offers a near real-time view of the network. Additionally, it allows for filtering elements. As a network engineer, my first instinct is to focus solely on network devices. I want to see switches, access points, and firewalls – a clear view of just those critical components. This filtered view usually provides me with a good understanding of the network's health. However, there have been instances where a device appeared on the map but wasn't actually being scanned. This highlights the importance of ongoing learning about the tool's capabilities. I'm confident there are features I haven't yet explored that can further enhance my network monitoring experience.

The network map dashboard provides full network visibility. I am able to see all the devices.

Auvik has been instrumental in reducing our mean time to remediation, which is a major reason I want to migrate all our customers to the platform. Without Auvik, I lack a clear view of their network, making it frustrating and difficult to troubleshoot issues effectively. Having all our customers on Auvik would provide a central vantage point to monitor and manage their networks, ultimately leading to faster resolution times.

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

The most valuable feature of Auvik is the remote access functionality. It eliminates the hassle of manually remote accessing a PC and figuring out its IP address and password. With Auvik, everything is stored securely within the platform. It's as simple as a few clicks. I can easily launch a remote browser session or access the terminal directly through Auvik, saving me significant time and effort. Additionally, Auvik allows me to quickly configure SysLog settings and even view device configurations, like switch configurations, without needing to establish a remote connection. This is incredibly helpful for situations where I just need a quick glimpse of the settings. These are the functionalities I use most frequently at the moment, but I'm constantly exploring and learning more about what Auvik can offer.

The responsiveness of the UI can be sluggish at times. While I understand occasional lag when remotely accessing devices, the overall performance of the application itself could be smoother. In other words, it would benefit from improved responsiveness for a more seamless user experience.

I was working on a device in the AP that had disconnected from the network. I needed to troubleshoot the issue and wanted to find the switch it was connected to using LLDP information. Ideally, I wanted to know the specific switch port it was plugged into. Unfortunately, when the device went offline, Auvik didn't retain this information and it was lost. Having Auvik automatically save this data, even for offline devices, would be a valuable troubleshooting feature. This would allow me to quickly locate the device, even if it's currently disconnected, by looking up its historical connection details. Currently, according to the support team, this functionality is not available.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one month.

Auvik Network Management appears to scale and handle large networks easily.

I've contacted technical support several times now. While the chat representatives are helpful, the escalation process has been slow. I opened a ticket a week and a half to two weeks ago and only just heard back. I understand they might be busy, but perhaps some additional resources could be allocated to expedite escalations.

Neutral

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

Auvik has been a lifesaver for me and I would recommend it to others.

We use Auvik Network Management to monitor client sites for various network issues. Auvik provides us with a view of the entire network, including all connected devices. This allows us to visualize how these devices are interconnected and how data flows throughout the network.

A network topology map provides us with a near real-time picture of our network's activity. It constantly updates as scans run or new devices are added. Typically, within 30 seconds to a minute, the map reflects the new device, making it one of the most current representations of our network's state available.

The topology map is user-friendly. Nearly every element on the map is clickable, allowing us to zoom in on specific components with ease. This interactivity makes the map far more useful than a static image, as we can quickly drill down to the precise area we need to investigate.

Auvik's benefits were clear from the start. Previously, we lacked any tools to understand what was happening on our clients' networks. This made it difficult to work with potential customers. When visiting a site, we couldn't readily assess their needs and provide a quote for our services. Auvik's network discovery function was a game-changer. It revealed devices on customer networks they weren't even aware of, instantly justifying the investment. This level of visibility had been completely absent before. The previous tools we used were nowhere near as efficient. Additionally, Auvik's ability to monitor client sites and set up alerts provided invaluable insights, something else that was previously lacking. Overall, the value of Auvik was undeniable and immediate.

Auvik helps reduce the mean time to resolution of network issues. Auvik allows us to see exactly which device and port are experiencing issues. This significantly narrows down the problem area, especially in larger facilities. By pinpointing the exact switch and port, Auvik tells us precisely where to go to investigate and resolve the issue quickly, streamlining the process for the network team.

Auvik significantly reduces the time we spend on setting up networks, maintaining them, and resolving issues. Before using Auvik, our technicians had to perform lengthy site surveys. This involved the technician spending several hours at the customer's location, depending on the size of the site. During this time, the technician would physically examine network rooms, walk the entire building, and manually count the number of devices and their locations. This process required a significant amount of time analyzing the customer's site, including all the computers and other devices. In contrast, with Auvik, we can now map a complete network in under an hour. Auvik also automatically identifies the connected devices and the number of access points. This translates to a two-thirds reduction in the time a technician spends on-site gathering information.

The most valuable feature for us in Auvik is the network topology. This feature creates a visual map of all connected devices on the network, showing their location. This is incredibly helpful when we need to locate a specific device, as it significantly narrows down the search. Overall, the network topology is the functionality we utilize the most within Auvik.

The Auvik interface, while functional, doesn't feel as intuitive as some competing products. Compared to modern software, the design appears a bit dated. After using it for a couple of years, I've learned where things are located, but I still find myself occasionally clicking the wrong buttons because the layout isn't very logical. Overall, the interface could benefit from some improvements to make it more user-friendly.

The Ubiquiti line of network products is gaining significant popularity, but Auvik currently struggles to gather in-depth information from them. It's unclear whether this is due to a lack of communication between the two companies. It seems beneficial for both parties to explore a partnership to improve data availability. While Auvik emphasizes its close relationship with Ubiquiti, there's still an information gap compared to other vendors. It's difficult to say definitively if this is an issue with Auvik or Ubiquiti, but initiating contact between the right people at both companies could likely lead to a solution.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two years.

Auvik Network Management is stable. We have never encountered a stability issue.

Auvik's scalability is very impressive. We haven't encountered any limitations on its capacity to handle our needs. In our experience, it seems to be adaptable for any size of network environment, from very small to extremely large.

Auvik's deployment process was straightforward. Their clear instructions, broken down into three steps, made it easy to follow. The system wouldn't allow us to proceed until the current step was completed, ensuring we didn't miss anything. There may have been some initial bumps a few years ago, but a recent deployment we did just a couple of weeks back showcased a noticeably smoother process. It seems Auvik has continuously improved its deployment experience.

While deploying the system, two people were involved. The second person's role was to ensure we were all in agreement on the desired functionalities and configuration. This was especially important for the advanced configurations, which went beyond getting the system to a basic functional state. The advanced configurations, such as defining the types of alerts and ensuring they weren't overwhelming, required a collaborative effort. It took a couple of people to sit down, think through them carefully, and analyze what truly mattered to avoid generating meaningless alerts.

The first deployment of our system did take a couple of weeks. This was because we were still refining the alerts and simply didn't know what to expect. We were unsure how background noise would affect the system's ability to detect silence. As a result, the initial deployment took longer to get everything configured exactly how we wanted it. Now, however, subsequent deployments are much faster. Typically, a new site can be up and running within a couple of hours, depending on the specific setup and credentials required. Overall, the entire process from start to finish is now generally completed within two hours.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Auvik offers two publicly available pricing tiers, but there are also additional options that require contacting a sales representative. Despite this, Auvik seems to prioritize customer needs. Their pricing models are generally clear and competitive. In fact, Auvik can sometimes be more affordable than some of the bigger players in the market. Through conversations with their sales team, we found that Auvik is willing to work with customers to ensure they can get started with the software, even if it means offering a customized license that fits their budget. This customer-centric approach was valuable to us.

In our search for a network management solution, we explored various products, but none quite fit the bill. Existing options didn't offer the comprehensive functionality we needed. Ultimately, we chose Auvik because it combined several functionalities we desired.

One competitor, RapidFire Tools, offered some network discovery features. However, their access limitations were a concern. We needed a tool with deeper network access than what they provided, which wouldn't have been readily granted on our clients' websites. Another contender, Domotz, also emerged later, but their hardware requirement on the network was a deal-breaker for us.

Auvik, on the other hand, seemed to seamlessly work with any network-connected computer. Its scanning capabilities were far superior to both competitors. Additionally, the ability to map the network topology comprehensively without requiring extra hardware solidified our decision. We tested Domotz for three months and RapidFire Tools for a year. The year-long contract was the only option available. While both ran concurrently, our initial exposure to Auvik at an industry event presentation, sparked our interest.

Upon setting up the Auvik trial, we were impressed by the salesperson's ability to grasp our client needs quickly and demonstrate the tool's functionality effectively. This helped us realize the value proposition almost immediately. Auvik's superior feature set, compared to the others, stood out. The ease of setting up and getting started further solidified our choice. In fact, our team was convinced of Auvik's value before the trial even reached its halfway point. It was that good.

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

Some critical devices on our network are not currently billed for because Auvik cannot monitor our Ubiquiti firewall. This lack of monitoring means we can't even tell if a device is up or down, which is crucial information. Fortunately, we've found some workarounds to gather basic information about these devices for our Auvik network monitoring system. The good news is that the support representatives have confirmed these workarounds won't incur any additional billing. They've even offered to help us implement them. While these devices won't be fully monitored through their standard system, the support team has gone the extra mile to ensure we can still gather some essential information about their status within our network.

Auvik is a self-updating system. Once we set it up, there's minimal ongoing maintenance required. The only time we typically need to revisit the software is when we add new equipment to the network. In those cases, we simply ensure Auvik recognizes and inventories the new devices. Otherwise, Auvik runs seamlessly in the background. We only interact with it again when an alert pops up, notifying us of a network issue that requires attention.

The most important advice I can offer is to be prepared for the learning curve associated with Auvik's interface. Navigating the interface and finding specific features can be the most challenging aspect initially. However, once you become familiar with the layout, Auvik's capabilities are extensive. While the interface might not be as intuitive or modern as some users expect, rest assured that Auvik can handle any network management task you need it to perform. Just be patient as you become acquainted with its functionalities.

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.

We're an MSP and we deploy Auvik for every single customer that DP Solutions has. We use it for network monitoring and infrastructure provisioning alerts. We also use it for troubleshooting, and for backups and configuration.

We used UniFi or Ubiquiti for our switching and access points, but that didn't get us into firewalls, so we had to have a separate pane of glass for the firewalls. Having one piece of software to manage it all is the reason we love Auvik. 

We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks, including the Ubiquiti portal and whatever firewall portal the customer had. That included Cisco, FortiGate, SonicWall, Palo Alto, Juniper, and Barracuda. We have used a lot of firewalls, but having one piece of software that has all that combined is really nice.

Auvik has saved us hours, per issue. We've caught multiple network loops due to user error, and that problem is usually incredibly hard to troubleshoot and pinpoint exactly what the issue is. Auvik pinpoints it and tells you exactly what happened: when, and which switch port—all the kind of stuff that no other piece of software can do, at least in a single pane of glass. Without that single pane of glass for us for troubleshooting and monitoring and alerting, it would take us hours to troubleshoot, not minutes. 

It can find the network loops and configuration errors without us even having to lift a finger. The minute we sign into Auvik, we see the alerts. At times, like in a network loop situation, the reduction in MTTR could be over 100 percent. At other times, it could be 50 percent. It depends on the issue.

In addition, the fact that it automatically backs up configurations is outstanding. That way, if there's any kind of change or something has to be reset, I can just copy that configuration, put it back in, and call it a day.

When it comes to visibility into distributed networks, we have clients all over the Lower 48, especially on the East Coast. The amount of time it saves us from having to actually go out to a site to do something is phenomenal. That visibility is critical. Without that, it would be really hard to really stay afloat and make money. Every time a tech has to go out, we're talking about money, labor, and time that we could be using for something else.

At this point, we have close to a couple of hundred clients, and we dedicate a technician one day a month to each client to do documentation and keep inventories up to date. It is probably saving us 200 hours of labor every month. That amounts to tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, Auvik definitely helps keep device inventories up to date. I'm able to tell how long ago the device was offline. Being an MSP, we don't always know everything that happens at a customer's company. They might switch phone providers and not tell us, but we'll get the information because we can see they switched on date XYZ because instead of going online, now it's not. Now, we have more information and it gives us much better insights into the customer and network.

The ability to change the severity of alerts is also helpful. If it's a level-one, then we can have some junior people look at it and determine that it's not important or that it should be escalated if they know it's a bigger issue. It keeps the critical alerts to the upper-level staff, which means they're not dealing with a service advisor or a service director and looking at every single ticket to delegate it. That is saving us plenty of time.

I love the alerting. With a single pane of glass, it's able to tell me that there's a firewall error, or that something is offline, there is a switch configuration error, or a configuration change has taken place on a certain device. I don't think I can pinpoint a single favorite feature of Auvik. I use almost everything.

Using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik is really easy, but I'm a little bit biased because I am Auvik Certified. (The certification process includes super in-depth training. Before the training, I was able to use Auvik, but I wasn't using it full-strength. Once I did the training, there was not a whole lot I didn't know about the software). The ease of use is incredibly important. If it wasn't something that is easily accessible or has the tools that we need, we wouldn't be using it.

It's also fantastic for helping to visualize the network mapping topology. It saves me countless hours of time every time a customer asks for a network topology map. Normally, I would have to wing it and roughly create one. But with Auvik, I'm able to just hit "filter by network elements only" and it prints it out. I can take a screenshot for the customer and send it back to them within minutes. 

And that network visualization functionality is right there when you sign in. It's front and center, which is great. It especially helps when we have junior network engineers work on it because, when they sign into that Auvik device, it gives them a good start into the network and its complexity. It gives them a brief description of what they're getting themselves into.

The automation side needs improvement. I'm a regular in the Auvik forum, and there have been a couple of automation requests to remedy some things that a normal single pane of glass would have. 

A really important one was about a SonicWall firewall that needs to be rebooted every single month. You can do that in the SonicWall GUI, but you can't do it in Auvik. Hundreds of people have endorsed the idea of having an automated command line interface command run on any device that supports it. When the device goes in it would run the command and the device would reboot (just as an example, because that's a really simple task). 

Having a scheduled task like that would save lots of people from having to go into a different pane of glass, such as the SonicWall GUI. Or, in a worst-case scenario, if I have to schedule a reboot at midnight, I have to be up at midnight to schedule that reboot instead of just letting Auvik run the command. That kind of automation would be really beneficial.

I've been using Auvik for 10 months, since January of this year.

The software is incredibly reliable. We really have never had any issues with Auvik. We have issues with Windows more than we do with Auvik. Perhaps that is pretty standard because Windows is not really that reliable.

The scalability is very good. The addition of the multi-site feature was a great touch. We can have one customer with multiple sites, which really reduces the load and the horsepower needed for an Auvik device. It reduces the bandwidth needed to monitor multiple sites when you can split it up between multiple devices.

We manage close to 200 customers. Some customers have one site and some have 30. Each Auvik instance might have multiple VLANs and multiple networks on top of that. And the number of actual users that are affected by Auvik within our clients' environments is between 20,000 and 30,000.

We had a previous network monitoring tool, which I believe was Arctic Wolf. It had some of the security features that Auvik has, but it had none of the technical troubleshooting capabilities. It was mostly a backup and security appliance.

The blessing of how simple Auvik is to deploy is that, once I'm done setting it up, all I have to do is put the device back in the box, ship it to the customer, and tell them, "Call me with this number, plug the device into this port, turn it on, and we're done." That allows me to deploy 20 in a week, as opposed to five. The setup is completely straightforward. It's one of the easiest.

The amount of time it takes after a collector is implemented until the network mapping starts to populate depends on the device. For smaller things like standalone PCs, it can take 30 minutes. But when we have devices with a little more horsepower behind them, it could be within 15 minutes.

I am the only one involved in the deployments. That's how easy it is. You can have one person assigned to it, and it's just plug-and-play. And the maintenance side is incredibly lightweight. The only thing we have to do is manage the Windows part of it, which we were already going to do.

I love the pricing. It makes a lot of sense. It allows you to use your own metal, which is great because it enables us to go higher-end for some clients and lower-end for others. Sometimes we have it just run as a service on a Windows Server. You really can't beat that kind of flexibility. Even having the flexibility to switch clients between the Performance (expert) and the Essentials (simple) version of Auvik, on the fly, is really unheard of.

If someone is comparing network monitoring solutions' pricing, Auvik makes itself worth it very quickly, as soon as you get anything happening that involves labor hours. It completely pulls Auvik out of any kind of argument.

We pretty much had our eyes on Auvik.

One of the best parts about it is that it's a cloud-based solution. A device runs on-prem and only sends out the information it needs to the cloud. That saves so much bandwidth by having it local. Clients that might not have the fastest ISP circuit can still enjoy the benefits of having something that I can remotely manage.

My advice is that you absolutely have to get Auvik Certified. That unlocks so many things that aren't necessarily intuitive, things that are a little bit more hidden behind the curtain. When you get that certification, it's like you have all the keys. You can go behind all the doors and you know how to navigate the system really well. I wish that Auvik would push their certification more. It's incredibly hard to find that training. When you set up the account for the first time, or even when you're a new user, they don't really even talk about the training and they never talk about getting certified. The fact that they have a certification training course is news to everybody.

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.