Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We needed SNMP monitoring for several clients and network devices. Auvik is for availability monitoring of network devices, like switches and routers. We also use it for monitoring CPU and a few other functions, but it's mainly just for the availability of our high-priority clients that require 24/7 alerts.

Our entire company uses Auvik, and it's deployed to customers willing to pay for it or customers of a certain size. The environments vary. Some of our clients are in education, government, and the private sector. Some clients have one massive site, but it's also used in companies with multiple branches around Australia. They range in size from 20 network devices to 2,000. We deploy it to any client who will buy it. Otherwise, we can't guarantee that we can monitor the network. Nearly 75 percent of our large customers have adopted it. Internally, about 90 staff members have access to Auvik. 

Auvik has enabled us to stay competitive with similarly sized managed service providers by allowing us to sell the latest products and services. Some customers have asked for Auvik by name, so it's great to be able to offer that. 

It has centralized and standardized our monitoring, making it much easier to deploy. Because of the cloud-based nature of the solution, we're more confident that we can receive alerts for critical network infrastructure 24/7 without constantly checking that systems are running. We're monitoring about 800 different points, so we need to have the ability to manage all our customers from one portal. The deployment method is consistent too, which is also vital.

Some of our customers had their own systems when they started doing business with us. SolarWinds was heavily used, but they weren't integrated into one management console before Auvik. It's hard to measure, but it reduced the time we spend on monitoring tasks by about 50 percent. It cuts down on network monitoring, setup, and adding devices. Overall, it has reduced that time by at least half. 

Auvik reduces a lot of repetitive, low-priority tasks. We can filter out alerts we don't want to see or customers who don't require 24/7 monitoring. It has made management much more straightforward. We have one team who manages the whole environment and people who receive the alerts at the end of that process and take action on the issue. It has dramatically reduced the workload of our 24/7 NOC team that manages network monitoring. It's almost like a set-and-forget solution where you have to do very little work once it's deployed.

I work remotely, so Auvik has been a game-changer. When combined with, say, a photograph of a rack, that network diagram makes it feel like we're there, and we have a much better understanding of how everything is laid out. It has helped us and integrates perfectly with our ticketing system; the alerting itself is just fantastic. Auvik has revolutionized how we do business because we can achieve much more remotely than before. In the past, we had to do site visits more often. It has dramatically reduced our on-site requirements.

Visibility is everything. We need to see what's up and down. It's critical for our business. It reduced the amount of time employees have to spend on tasks, so it allowed them to focus on other areas to improve the business or the customer's environment. It's made a considerable improvement in our availability. 

Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date automatically, and the reporting is excellent. You can rely on Auvik as your asset management tool for the network. It can grab serial numbers, IP addresses, model numbers, and firmware. Auvik functions as an asset management tool for any equipment that can be managed by an SNMP.

Instead of doing a physical audit and collating multiple systems from various clients or one client across numerous sites, it's an instant automatic system that provides a device inventory 24/7. You don't need to gather all the data and create a report. You click a button, and it's there. Auvik has reduced our asset management tasks by at least 70 percent. It might be closer to 90 percent. Auvik has sped up our resolution time by reducing the time it takes for the ticket to get into the system and delivering all the details the engineer needs to resolve it. It has decreased the resolution time by at least 50 percent.

Auvik's cloud-based solution and past on-prem solutions we've used are almost incomparable. After you put the credentials into Auvik, it practically does the job for you. You're only dealing with a few network nodes, whereas you would have to consider VLAN, various network subnets, and several other factors when deploying an on-premise solution. You also required a server to run it and a server to do the reporting, so you save a lot of money from not having to deploy all those physical components.

Auvik seamlessly integrates with our ticketing system ConnectWise, which provides a basic alert via email. I also like how it automatically draws the network map and how you can easily filter by the alerts. If you click on the type of alert, it'll show you all the other alerts of that same type. 

I love the visualization. It makes it so much easier to feel like you're there on-site. Everything is remote these days, and I'm 100 percent remote, so I'm never on-site at the national clients. It's nice to see everything; I like how you can drill down. For example, if a switch or a router is down, you can see what other items are going to be affected. They change color to tell you if they're up or down, so I spend a lot of my time inside the map and searching for items. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for ease of monitoring and management. The interface is highly intuitive. I've seen a few other network mapping tools, and they never seem to work out well. It's miles ahead of its competitors.

I want to be able to customize the layout more in terms of showing the alert timeframes. For example, I would like to customize it to show all the alerts in the last three hours, six hours, etc. You should be able to customize it so that it shows you the most critical information. We don't need to see CPU usage. We only want to see the up and down time. It would be nice to filter out many of those metrics we don't use. 

We have been using Auvik for about 12 months.

Auvik's availability is as close to a hundred percent as you can get. I don't think I've seen an outage in 12 months.

Auvik is highly scalable. Our clients vary in size, ranging from small to medium-sized companies. 

I rate Auvik support 10 out of 10. I rarely contact support, but they're excellent when I need them. 

SolarWinds is another solution we've used. Switching to Auvik was about centralizing everything into one cloud-based tool. It wasn't a cost issue. Instead, it was more about getting a cloud-based solution. We try to use only cloud-based tools to work anywhere without a bunch of tools installed on a particular device. 

I wasn't involved in the deployment. The network operations center is responsible for Auvik. I'm not on that team. I'm on the proactive team who receives the alerts. 

As far as I know, Auvik requires practically no maintenance. The NOC team cross-references a customer's infrastructure with Auvik's reporting, and they periodically extract a report on devices that are uptime or devices that are used. I'm not involved with any daily maintenance apart from using it to investigate network issues.

The return is almost immeasurable. The most significant benefit is probably the reduction in the time it takes to deploy for a new customer versus installing another product or trying to use a customer's existing solution. One engineer dedicated to monitoring in a month is 160 hours, so you could probably say it's equivalent to saving the cost of one full-time engineer per month. 

You get what you pay for, and it's worth paying a little bit more for quality, a robust feature set, and high availability.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. Once you compare it to other products you've used in the past, it's an easy decision. If you want to simplify, centralize, and automate your monitoring alerts, Auvik is definitely worth the investment.

We use Auvik to monitor configurations, devices, and discovery.

Our staff has a much easier time managing devices, networks, and configurations. We're in the middle of a project involving a full-blown switch replacement. There are about 80 switches, and we can grab configurations quickly and easily. Our staff doesn't have to worry about configuration backups or look in 10 different places for logins to hit a switch or firewall. Auvik discovers rogue devices that happen to be on the network, which saves us time and stress. It makes our lives easier.

Auvik saves us a lot of time. For example, for configuration backups, we used RANCID. It's been around forever, it's free, and it's open-source, but there's no support. It would take a lot of time to stand up to the three to ten different solutions, which would be required to get what Auvik gives us out-of-the-box. The amount of time it would take, the number of sites, the networks, and the cloud or on-premises environment would vary from company to company. If it's a 10-person company, standing up those solutions would be a little bit easier. If it's a 3,000-person company, it could take months to get everything correctly stood up. Auvik is a click-and-go solution. It has easily saved us hundreds of hours.

The solution affects our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally. If there's a network problem, it's normally given to a network engineer or somebody who at least knows what they're doing. With Auvik, each of our staff members has access to it. They can make changes according to their best judgment. It helps a lot of our staff understand basic networking, VLANs, trunks, and how networks are laid out. If somebody says, "Port 12 on Switch 2," they can find it.

The automation has a positive impact on our IT team's availability. It saves us time, and our team is more available to help with other tasks.

Tasks that would take hours now take minutes, especially if somebody doesn't have a lot of knowledge or skill set. Auvik doesn't turn someone into a full-blown network architect or engineer, but for people who wouldn't necessarily know how to crawl around on the command line or do discovery, everything is in front of them and they're able to set it up.

We've been able to delegate low-level tasks to our junior staff. Right now, someone is manually doing around 50 switches, four core switches, and a firewall deployment by leveraging Auvik. He's had very minimal network experience prior to this, but he's learning about the network, port, and VLAN through Auvik.

We have seen a reduction in our meantime to resolution. Between the alerting and the ability to leverage Auvik to find it, fix it, and roll it back, we've cut down our response time by at least half, if not more. We haven't needed to keep track of that metric because we hit the ground running with Auvik. At my last company, the amount of time we spent on issues was insane. There were meetings on an almost daily basis about why people were spending so much time on network-related issues.

For example, we had a major customer that was down for over a week and a half due to a network issue, and they weren't pleased about it. It happened again after we started using Auvik, and I was able to identify the issues with Auvik within five minutes and resolve it within ten. The amount of time it took to resolve the issue went down from a week and a half to 15 minutes.

All of the features are valuable, but the ability to remote into anything, whether it's a terminal or a browser, is really big for us. It makes things a lot easier day-to-day. It keeps track of all the firewall or switch configurations, so if anybody makes changes, we can roll back and have an alert on it. Discovery has been useful.

It's easy to use Auvik's monitoring and management function. We can roll out a site in under 15 minutes, so it's up and working right away.

The solution's ease of use has been very important to our operations.
We have a lot of tool sets, so we don't want to spend a lot of time deploying and tinkering with it. Auvik is a click-and-done solution, so there's minimal effort involved.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform, which is pretty important to our organization. Everything is one pane of glass. We don't want to have 20 different portals for 20 different customers because managing each one individually would be a nightmare scenario. It's a lot of overhead. It's pretty useful in general, but it's also incredibly important because the more time we spend managing those tasks, the less time we have for everything else.

Auvik helps to visualize the network mapping and topology for our organization. It's just there, so we don't really think about it. It makes it very easy. As it discovers, it draws out the map. We can see where things flow and what they're connected to. We can answer all kinds of questions like, "What happens if I unplug this," or "Where is this machine, generally speaking?" We've used it to hunt down everything from rogue devices to a missing laptop. Thanks to the topology view, we were able to see which AP it was connected to.

Customers like to see what their network looks like. They may think they have a tiny network, but they actually have 500 devices that are just sitting on their network in a 20-person company. It helps them understand that we're actually doing something and not just saying that the network has a problem. It's good for visualization and for keeping track of where offices are located so we don't need to commit it fully to memory.

It's very important to us that visibility helps our IT team focus on our networks. We want our staff to be aware of the network, what's on it, and how to manage it. We've used it as a learning tool. It discovers everything. One of our guys wants to get more into networking, and we said, "All right, go into here, go to this switch, get all of the port configurations, and figure out how to apply it to the new stuff," because they're not the same. It's a manual process, so he's learned more about networks and networking in the past week than he has ever been exposed to before.

Auvik helps us keep device inventories up to date. It's helpful to know when the software ends and what the last support dates are.

The higher-level and more experienced guys on our team have been able to delegate simpler tasks to our help desk and people who don't have 10 years of experience with network engineering. It frees up our team, and it helps our less-skilled employees get a hands-on education, which is usually the best way.

Sometimes it's a little bit slow to load, but I can't think of anything else that could be improved.

I have used this solution for two years, in my previous company and now in my current organization. 

We have never needed to use technical support.

We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks. We used Device42 for asset management, discovery, and collection. We also used an RMM and SolarWinds.

There are no other solutions that do what Auvik does. Other solutions can get very convoluted. You could have a monitoring solution, a configuration backup solution, a Syslog server, a SIM, and a Device42 or something similar to track hardware life cycles.

Auvik has packaged everything into one solution. I remember thinking, "No one really does everything the right way." The more you see a solution smash different facets into one product, the more you think, "There's no way they can do everything really well." Auvik does what it says it will do. It meets all expectations. The monitoring is just as good, if not better than a dedicated monitoring solution. Cisco is happy to charge you boatloads of money to do Syslog and configuration backup, but Auvik does it out-of-the-box.

The icing on the cake is all the integrations. You can throw it into Teams or into a ticketing system. We've used other solutions, but for the rest of my career, Auvik will be the default solution that we use.

I deployed Auvik myself. It only took 15 minutes to set up. After giving some credentials and installing a collector, it started up immediately. We had usable information within half an hour and fully discovered networks within a couple of hours. It was insanely easy.

We're a little bit different from most organizations because we include what Auvik does in our monthly fee for our customers. Technically, we're definitely making money. We don't actually break it down and say, "We made $500 on Auvik this month," but as soon as we have a customer, we're making money, and part of that is thanks to Auvik.

Auvik's pricing isn't astronomical. Auvik is extremely fair in how they break down a billable device versus something that isn't, especially compared to PRTG, which charges for a number of sensors. Auvik makes it really easy to understand that you aren't going to get billed for certain things. They're cutting themselves short, in my opinion, but I've never had to worry about pricing from Auvik. It's always been very affordable.

We evaluated five other direct competitors of Auvik. Essentially, we did our due diligence and put it through the paces. We did a demo and a trial.

I would rate Auvik as 10 out of 10. 

I see absolutely no point in an on-prem monitoring solution anymore. If the collector goes offline and something is down at the site, you know that you're looking at a very minimal amount of issues: either the firewall just burst into flames or the ISP is down. Because everything is in the cloud and we're able to see it 24/7/365, I wouldn't deploy an on-premises monitoring solution anywhere.

Auvik is the best piece of software we have used across the board because of the value it offers, especially compared to what it costs and the value it adds to the organization. I've worked for major companies like ESG, Abiomed, and Akamai. I wish I knew about Auvik earlier in my career because it would've made my life a million times easier as a systems administrator, systems engineer, and architect.

We use it to monitor the network infrastructure and assets of our clients. We are a managed service provider and it fits neatly into our role. We also use it to keep configuration change records, which is something we didn't have before. It's nice to have that in one platform.

When we are onboarding a new client with network infrastructure for monitoring, Auvik makes it very straightforward and simplified. It can map out and easily visualize the customer's network so that we don't have to manually do it. It definitely has increased automation.

We used PRTG but it lacked the mapping function to visualize the network with an interactive map. It also lacked the configuration backup tool, the hardware life cycle, and good NetFlow insights. Moving to Auvik has saved a good 30 to 50 percent of our time.

Another thing that I love that Auvik does and that PRTG doesn't do is the integration with a lot of our MSP tools like ConnectWise and Teams. PRTG would open tickets via an alert, but it would never close them if the alert cleared. All those tickets from PRTG would go to me and I would have to manually close them. I would get inundated with tickets. Auvik will also open a ticket but, once the alert clears, it will automatically close the ticket, saving me from having to close a lot of tickets. That too has reduced repetitive work for me by 30 to 50 percent.

Our MTTR has almost been automated because of the tickets. About 90 percent of our tickets have been automated. I still have to manually look at the rest and maybe do a little work against them, but it's not crazy. It has unquestionably helped out with resolving issues.

It has also helped tremendously with quarterly business reviews because, with just a click of a button, we can get the hardware life cycle and export all the data to an Excel spreadsheet. That helps our management.

And because most of our clients are remote from us, that visibility that Auvik gives into their environments is in a better overall layout than our previous platform. The UI of PRTG was very '90s-esque, like a poorly designed website. It had the functionality but the UI was lacking tremendously when it comes to ease of use and organization.

The visibility Auvik provides almost makes it so that we don't have to be actively monitoring things. We don't need a NOC or a SOC to get alerts. We're more confident now in the network management solution that we have. Before, we were getting alert upon alert and my phone would be blowing up and then I would get all the tickets. Auvik has put that kind of stress on the back burner.

Overall, it has freed up about 25 to 30 percent of the time I used to have to put into things.

Another advantage is that I didn't want to show a junior tech our previous platform because they wouldn't know what to do with it. Auvik, on the other hand, is more geared toward all levels, rather than just the high-level engineers. It will tell you what might be the cause of a problem rather than just alerting on something that it sees. While we don't have it geared toward our lower-level team yet, it's very easy to use and they should be able to pick it up.

Among the most valuable features are the hardware life cycle and configuration backups, when applicable, since that's not applicable for all vendors, platforms, and networking types. When it does show you the hardware life cycle for, say, a Cisco device and the configuration backup, that's the most useful aspect for me as a network engineer.

Once it's set up properly with the SNMP strings or credentials, it's very straightforward to use. It has a small learning curve, which is nice for a network monitoring tool. Ease of use is very high on our list of requirements, not just for me as a network engineer, but when I want the help desk or the level-ones to be able to look at something. It needs to be easy to use.

It's also very much a single pane of glass, which is especially helpful for our business model as an MSP.

In addition, I greatly appreciate Auvik's ability to visualize network mapping. It's very good for visualizing how the network is formed and the interconnections. Since it's interactive, it's more helpful than a static map or static video diagram. It's a very helpful feature.

I like how you can request features, and one feature that I think they're working on is the ability to export the topology map as a video.

Something else I would like to see would be additional vendors for the hardware life cycle. Right now, they mainly focus on Cisco stuff, which is fine, but not every customer we have uses Cisco. I'm not looking for them to add every networking vendor, and these just might be legacy devices, but Fortinet is a big one that we've used and I don't think Auvik has the hardware life cycle for that. I don't know how it does on Aruba, but we have some legacy HPE as well. I do like the Meraki integration, although it would be nice to see a Juniper Mist and Aruba Central integration.

Another improvement that would be nice, one that should be at the top of their list, is the ability to properly identify vulnerabilities, based on a vendor's security alerts. If it could recognize, "You're on this version of firmware and you're hitting these types of vulnerabilities," that would definitely check off a big security feature for this tool.

We demoed Auvik early in the year and we fully signed up sometime in the summer, so we have been using it for several months.

Overall, it is very stable. 

Every platform or NMS has its own quirks or kinks that have to be worked out, but it's nice that Auvik will update on the backend. I don't have to worry about updating a server platform.

Its scalability is very high. It gets a 10 out of 10.

We have Auvik across multiple organizations. We monitor, administer, and maintain, network monitoring for dozens of clients. It's deployed across all their different environments and in organizations with multiple branch offices. Our clients include the smallest, one-branch organizations up to medium-to-large enterprises. It definitely fits all those use cases.

The technical support that Auvik provides is very good. They're very quick to respond. They have a live chat feature, which is very nice. They're pretty knowledgeable since it's their product. There's no comparison between the support from Auvik and the support we received from our previous vendor.

Positive

We used PRTG before and we're still using it now. We're trying to slowly migrate from it. We put all our eggs in that basket, even though it was a very flimsy basket. We used it for networking servers, mainly.

We didn't use it for endpoint and computer assets. That was handled by ConnectWise Automate. We wouldn't want Auvik to do that.

The deployment was very straightforward because of the user interface. This is where it's more straightforward than Domotz. Sometimes, when you have too many choices, it can be a burden. With Auvik you decide: Do you want the OVA? Do you want to install a .exe? It's very simple. I could probably have someone on our level-one team actually set it up.

It took less than 10 to 15 minutes after the collector was implemented before the network mapping started to populate with basic devices. Then it was a matter of fine-tuning. It was up to me to categorize devices as I saw fit and tune the SNMP so that it got the data that I wanted.

Overall, our implementation of Auvik took a few weeks because of the number of sites and devices and the fine-tuning. Also, an NMS is always being worked on. You're rarely perfectly happy with how it looks. It's constantly being fine-tuned so that alerts generate correctly without over-alerting.

That's one thing I have liked compared to PRTG. Auvik's out-of-the-box alerting is very straightforward and handles the alerts you are likely to see. But that's also where it could do a little bit better, in the customization of alerts. With PRTG, we could alert on almost anything, whereas with Auvik, you're somewhat zoned in.

We have definitely saved a good amount of time on the setup of Auvik, compared to PRTG. PRTG was significantly cheaper, but there was no onboarding help. It was a matter of, "Here you go, do it yourself." Auvik had a customer success team to walk us through and help iron out any kinks, which was greatly appreciated. That was part of what we're paying for. The pricing helps with support. PRTG's support, while it was okay, wasn't as straightforward and easy to get a hold of someone compared to Auvik.

The maintenance involved with Auvik is around fine-tuning for data collection, but it does not involve updating the agent or the backend. It's nice that I don't have to worry about updating the platform itself. I just have to worry about the data getting collected and making sure SNMP strings are updated.

I was the only one involved in the initial deployment, from our side.

I didn't set up PRTG but compared to my brief time with PRTG, Auvik has been night and day and the value has been very quick. For some of our customers, we never had a solution in place to back up configurations. Auvik now provides that. There's definitely peace of mind knowing a config backed up. It is definitely proving its value.

I don't think Auvik's pricing should be based on device, which it is right now. I don't know what their market share is or how they compete with Domotz, but if they want to stay competitive, Auvik should have simpler pricing. Domotz is $21 per month per site, whereas Auvik is per device, so it definitely adds up very quickly.

In addition to the other issues I mentioned, Auvik and our previous platform are night and day in the following way as well. We would almost be scared to put in a subnet for PRTG to scan because we wouldn't know what we got. Now, it's easy to see what we're getting in terms of the devices and prune it from there. 

It's also helpful that it's not onsite because we're trying to move servers and services off-prem. Auvik is definitely a step in the right direction. It's one less piece of infrastructure to worry about. You don't have to open up your environment to collect monitoring information. It just needs outbound traffic, which makes things easier. That's where it shines compared to an on-prem solution. Also, you don't have to maintain or update software or the agent. It does that automatically. I don't have to worry about updating firmware.

With an on-prem solution, everything is hub and spoke and everything has to go back to our data center. Auvik, as a cloud solution, eases up on that usage of our circuits and internet.

While Auvik is geared toward network infrastructure for an MSP, it could probably do a little bit better on the server side. PRTG definitely had that as an advantage over Auvik. It could monitor servers and that type of infrastructure better than Auvik can. 

Auvik also doesn't have some customizable automations for a specific use case that might need an if-then-that statement to run a script or commands. That might be very niche, but one of our clients is using PRTG like that. 

It is nice to see that Auvik has an expanding roadmap. I don't know what PRTG has on its roadmap for new features, but it's nice to see that Auvik is not getting stale.

I did evaluate Domotz and the pricing worked out in favor of Domotz, but we ended up going with Auvik. We're only in Auvik for a year and we'll see how it goes, but unless the pricing becomes too high, I don't see us moving away from it. Domotz was the only other one that was within reach and more geared toward MSPs.

An MSP business can almost flip a coin between Domotz and Auvik. Auvik is priced per device, whereas Domotz is priced per location or site. It works out in Domotz's favor, although I can't speak for its feature sets. Domotz does have a leg up in terms of deployability. It has a hardware appliance, almost like a Raspberry Pi, so it's easy to deploy on anyone's network, whereas you have to run Auvik as a virtual appliance. It can't run on ARM, which is not a deal-breaker, but it is nice to have options when deploying. You're somewhat locked in with Auvik for deployment because you need to run it on a server or in someone's vCenter. It's not that customizable, whereas Domotz can run on ARM as well, I believe.

Auvik has two versions, Essentials and Performance, which is similar to Domotz's model. With Performance you get NetFlow visibility and another feature and that increases the price per device. But the device types they charge for are only those that are part of network infrastructure. Overall, it's probably cheaper via Domotz, but if you have a lot of sites with just one device, it might be cheaper to go with Auvik. Auvik doesn't charge for access points, but they do charge for switches, routers, and firewalls.

Auvik definitely helps keep device inventories up to date. If I have the scan running, it does a really good job of finding devices on the network when the subnets are put in. However, the network infrastructure shouldn't change that much, so I don't typically have it running scans all the time. We're mainly using it for network infrastructure and not as much for endpoint devices. It primarily shines when it comes to network infrastructure, but it did do a pretty good job of doing the initial inventory of the networks.

My advice would be to do a proof of concept if you are in an MSP role or organization, because the costs can quickly add up.

Auvik is our main network monitoring platform.

We were struggling to monitor our network hardware for uptime, bandwidth usage, and errors, all while managing firmware updates and configuration changes. Thankfully, Auvik solved all these problems for us.

In our VMware environment, we use a virtual appliance for Auvik. This appliance acts as a data concentrator, collecting information from all our network hardware. The collected information is then uploaded to the cloud by the virtual appliance.

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

The network map is user-friendly, though initially, the text can be a bit difficult to read due to its spread-out nature. However, zooming in and navigating different sections allows for easy readability. Thankfully, all the objects are clickable, providing instant access to detailed information for each one as needed.

I took advantage of Auvik's 30-day trial, and within that timeframe, I became thoroughly convinced of its benefits.

Auvik has significantly improved our mean time to resolution. Before using Auvik, troubleshooting network issues could take hours of investigation to pinpoint the problem. Now, with Auvik's features, I can typically identify the cause within just a few minutes.

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

The most valuable features for me are network monitoring and alerting. This means I automatically receive an email notification whenever an issue arises, eliminating the need to wait for users to report problems.

There's room for improvement in the interface. While we only have one location, logging in presents a world map designed for multiple sites. This unnecessary extra step to access the information I need could be eliminated by offering an option to disable the world map view.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one year.

Auvik Network Management is stable. We have not had any problems.

While our current environment handles our needs well, Auvik's easy scalability allows us to seamlessly expand into a larger environment in the future. The multi-site dashboard lets us manage everything from a central location whenever we're ready to grow.

The technical support responds within 24 hours.

Neutral

At my previous company, I relied on a combination of SolarWinds, Lansweeper, and an open-source tool for IT asset management. While Auvik offers a more user-friendly experience compared to these free options, it doesn't provide the same level of detailed functionality as SolarWinds.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The deployment took a couple of days. One person was required for the deployment.

Auvik helped us deploy the system remotely. The on-site process itself was very straightforward: it involved downloading the software, installing it, and then entering information into the interface.

Auvik holds its own compared to other contenders. It's priced fairly, avoiding any underestimation of its value. What truly sets it apart is the per-network device licensing structure, with additional device monitoring included at no extra cost.

I would rate Auvik Network Management nine out of ten.

Minimal maintenance is required.

I am an MSP and I use Auvik to monitor my client's networks.

When we experienced network issues, we simply lacked the visibility to understand the underlying causes. Auvik provided us with much-needed visibility into our network, enabling us to effectively diagnose and resolve problems.

We are using Auvik's SaaS platform with an on-premises connector.

Auvik provides an intuitive interface that is easy to use. The user-friendly interface is helpful when troubleshooting network issues. Auvik alerts me if something being monitored goes offline, allowing me to track it down. Additionally, there are various locations where I can access different pieces of information, enabling me to review audit logs or alerts. This feature is quite helpful.

Auvik's network map and dashboard give us real-time visibility into our network.

Utilizing the network map and dashboard provides a straightforward approach to gaining real-time visibility into our network. While the network map may contain a wealth of information that necessitates further exploration, the ability to visualize the network in real time without the need for Visio development is helpful. With the proper configuration, the network map dashboard provides full network visibility.

Auvik helps minimize blind spots and provides an additional resource for monitoring and tracking network performance. Proactive alerting is crucial, as it's often preferable to have a system notify me of issues before users do. While not always possible, Auvik enables me to be proactive in addressing network problems.

Auvik has helped reduce our mean time to resolution by 50 percent.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on resolution.

The most advantageous feature is the ability to back up the configuration settings on switches and routers. This has been immensely helpful, and I am proficient in utilizing Auvik's premium network monitoring service, Traffic Insight. It provides comprehensive network visibility. Furthermore, I appreciate its integration with my ticketing system, Autotask.

I'd like to see some enhancements to Auvik's network map, including the ability to focus on specific areas without viewing the entire map. This would allow for more granular analysis and troubleshooting. Additionally, introducing security-related features would be beneficial. For instance, implementing abnormal traffic detection would alert us to unusual network activity, potentially indicating a security breach. Furthermore, incorporating baseline snapshots would enable us to compare current network behavior against a standard reference point, facilitating the identification of anomalies. This could be achieved through simple checkbox controls.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

I would rate the stability of Auvik nine out of ten.

I use Auvik for small businesses, and it scales to meet my needs.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We had been using ConnectWise, but it did not meet our needs. When we informed ConnectWise support that we were switching to Auvik, they acknowledged that Auvik was a more suitable solution.

The deployment wasn't as straightforward as I had anticipated, but it wasn't overly difficult either. It required careful attention to the instructions and a thorough understanding of the installation process, making it somewhat more complex than initially envisioned. I would rate the complexity of the deployment five out of ten. I completed the deployment myself and it took a few days.

Auvik's pricing is generally reasonable. However, I have occasionally encountered discrepancies between my expected and actual billing amounts. I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact cause of these variations, but I'm unsure whether they stem from additional service inclusions or unexpected price increases. The lack of clarity regarding my consumption compared to the pricing structure has been an issue. Despite not making any perceived changes, my pricing has fluctuated, and the company has denied any alterations. This has left me perplexed about the underlying factors.

I would rate Auvik ten out of ten.

I have Auvik deployed for multiple of my small to medium clients.

Occasionally, Auvik's automated agent upgrades malfunction, requiring my assistance. Maintenance is minimal.

I recommend Auvik.

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 use Auvik to monitor net flow within our primary core switch and firewall. We look at the health and traffic flow alerts from our wireless access points or switches.

We don't use any of the automation features. Our company uses Auvik strictly for managing alerts. Auvik acts as a dashboard to give us oversight and a sense of the overall network health. We don't do a lot of troubleshooting within Auvik. It's more of a documentation and dashboard tool that lets me see all the problems and drill down.

We only have one location where we're using Auvik, but we're expanding to a second location under construction and being rebuilt. We'll eventually have two more locations. We want to monitor multiple sites and how they interact because we use SD-WAN between the sites.

We previously had multiple solutions, and implementing Auvik has saved me a lot of time because I'm solely responsible for the infrastructure. I probably save an hour or two daily on my morning run-throughs, so it has saved the company the equivalent of a part-time employee each month. 

In addition to saving time, we get better traffic insights. We can look at the entire inventory from a networking standpoint. It lets us see all our pieces and what's online, like a network topography. If somebody submits a ticket about internet issues in one of the areas, I can check that area to see how many other things are affected. It makes troubleshooting smoother. You can more effectively triage a problem because you have more information in front of you.

Auvik keeps our device inventories updated. We pair it with our asset management platform to double-check if things are discovered that haven't been asset-tagged. We want to see if the things that are live on the network match what we have in our asset management platform.

Auvik also helps me delegate. I can see alerts on the endpoints that are not necessarily licensed, but it gives us traffic insights. I can message the person at the help desk, "Hey, I noticed we're having Wi-Fi issues in this area. Can you check the staff computers on Ninja and see if anybody is having any issues?" They can go in remotely and communicate with the staff to see if they have noticeable issues. Is it an advisory thing we're seeing or something deeper that must be solved on the network side? Maybe it's on the endpoint side?

Keeping our devices updated helps me take the pulse of each device. We use a remote management platform like an MDM, but then we also use ScalePad as a cost and inventory platform. Auvik tells us if all these things are up and running. There are three of us on the team, and each tracks inventory differently. Whenever we do annual inventory, we pull MAC addresses and devices to see what's in use and the usage rate. It helps a lot at the end of the year. Inventory takes an hour instead of a week.

Auvik helps us get ahead of the curve, so we can see many potential issues before they become problems. We'll get alerts for particular items before getting a ticket. In those cases, we can say, "I noticed you've been having some issues with Wi-Fi and sporadic connectivity. Is your computer okay? Are you having issues?" 

It depends on the person, but most people don't like to complain and don't want to go into the trouble of sending in a ticket or anything like that. When you can get ahead of that and reach out to them, it's a great value.

I like Auvik's mapping. Your home dashboard has a map view where you can see potential issues on the endpoints. If an AP or switch has a problem, you can drill down into those to see how it's affecting the endpoints.

The monitoring and management features are straightforward. Getting everything configured is a little tricky, but it's easy once everything is set up. The management is highly intuitive. It has tons of little tools you can use for your hardware. You can monitor network traffic, device health, and lifecycle management within an easy-to-use dashboard.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform that covers everything. We are considering adding our primary servers to get utilization stats and different telemetry from our primary hosts for our on-site VMs. Having all the features on a single platform is crucial. We use many services and platforms, and it's convenient to log into one dashboard and see everything from a bird's eye view.

It's super easy to use. Everything is easily mapped out. If you've navigated any website, it should all be intuitive. It's easy to lift a pane and see all the general areas. As you click into each site, you can drill down into each area you want to see.

People who don't dive as deep into the infrastructure as I do can go onto the site to see the dashboard and get a sense of the network's overall health. I don't need to push out reports and share alerts constantly. I'm the only one getting those, and the other team members can see from a bird's eye view whenever they're looking into things or trying to troubleshoot.

I would like a Power BI-style dashboard that you could show to a non-technical person with metrics like the number of devices accessing wireless, the amount of internet, total issues resolved each month, etc. 

Those kinds of features would be nice, but that's more of a feature for executives. Many platforms are adding these features because they understand in-house IT staff need to deliver those reports to management.

We used Auvik with our MSP for a time. It was an account through somebody else. This month, we started using it as the primary account. In total, we've been using it for a year and a half.

We haven't had any issues. I've been able to load the website from any location without any lag or delays.

One reason we chose Auvik was its ability to scale for multiple locations. It's effortless to scale by adding different locations. We have it at our headquarters and plan to add our Central Austin location, then go from there. Within the organization, it's easy to build out and add.

We used Meraki's built-in monitoring platform because we have a full Meraki stack. We used the topography and alert systems there, but it lacked many features because you're only seeing the network side. You don't see any of the devices. You could see some insights, but Auvik provides much more clarity.

I like Auvik's secure cloud-based solution and the ability to check the dashboard no matter where I am. If I'm remote and looking at multiple sites, I don't have to worry about VPN connections. I don't need to worry about opening the ports. It's huge for us to see everything from multiple sites.

Setting up Auvik was straightforward, but sometimes you forget the passwords when setting up SNMP or Syslog. We had to go back and look for passwords, but that wasn't Auvik's problem. 

It was simple to deploy Auvik right out of the box. All we needed to do was get our SNMP credentials and input the subnets I wanted to scan. I deployed it by myself, and it took less than one day. I probably spent about four hours on it.

After deployment, Auvik hasn't required any maintenance. The only thing that I've had to do is change the password for an SNMP credential if I got it wrong, but that's about it.

We saw immediate value from Auvik. I think it's brand and device agnostic, which is incredible. The time to value was almost instant because we could see everything. We didn't have to go onto a Netgear portal, a Meraki portal, Azure AD, Intune, RMM, etc. We can see everything on one dashboard. The time to value was the time it took to implement: less than a day.

Auvik is much simpler to set up and maintain than my previous solution. It's night and day. Dealing with multiple platforms and solutions was unwieldy. Time is money. Having everything combined is a value-add and saves a lot of money. We no longer need to outsource this and have somebody monitor it. Bringing all the monitoring in-house saves us $2,000 a month, easily on top of all the other support hours we've saved.

Auvik's pricing is spot-on. It's one of the better values I've seen. 

I tried Netskope and SolarWinds, but they were both somewhat clunky. At times, things can get over-engineered. It's like a lousy buffet where all the food is mixed in. That's what I feel with some platforms.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you're thinking about implementing Auvik, I recommend watching videos online before deployment. Watch the videos for ideas and attend demos so you can ask questions ahead of time. 

We deployed so easily because all the questions were answered before we started. We did our research and watched videos when we were checking out Auvik. Auvik was at the top of our list, but we looked at other solutions and didn't find anything that came close. 

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.