Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We are demoing Auvik to see if it makes sense for us to implement. As a managed service provider, we are utilizing it to monitor our clients' networks, perform inventory of devices, and diagnose and troubleshoot network issues.

I wouldn't say that we couldn't do business without Auvik, but it's a way for us to be more profitable because it cuts down on the total hours it takes to service our clients. We gain efficiency in areas that, otherwise, would have been manual tasks. We're no longer spending a lot of time manually digging into each network device when there is an issue. We can easily track down where something is happening.

We've benefited from better efficiency as well as from better clarity into issues, sometimes even before they happen. Before a client is calling or beating down our doors saying things are down, we usually have an alert from Auvik saying there's a problem. When I'm able to pick up the phone and say, "Oh yeah, I'm already aware that you have a network outage," that is very helpful.

We have a more accurate view of everything going on within our clients' networks. Our clients are located across the United States and being able to easily view what's going on in their networks, and have alerting on top of that, is very helpful. That visibility is very important because of the way we are leveraging Auvik, which is for detecting and alerting us about issues before a client contacts us about them. Auvik is how we're being notified when there's an issue, ideally in a proactive manner. We can remediate the issue before any downtime is noticed by a customer. It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution.

It also keeps device inventories up to date. Ensuring an accurate inventory is one of the key components of our service to customers. Our business model is focused on consumption, so we need to have an accurate count of our customers' devices so that we can give them an accurate bill. Knowing that we have 100 percent accuracy on what devices are stuck to their networks is critical. The fact that Auvik does it automatically cuts down on the time we spend managing that aspect. It saves us a couple of hours per month per engineer. The customer is happy, our billing team is happy, and we don't have to spend cycles doing it. It's just a triple-win situation.

Also, because Auvik is in the cloud, we can troubleshoot with it from anywhere. Whereas, when dealing with an on-prem solution, if something's wrong with the internet coming in and I'm remote, I can't troubleshoot it or fix it. It's a different methodology and I feel that it is Auvik's special sauce. Because it's built around the cloud, it allows for a better, holistic view of what's going on and helps identify where the problems are. If you're on a broken network and you're trying to work on that network, it's very difficult.

The inventory and audit features are the most valuable. We are able to get a good map of everything in a network. Some clients don't know what they have or own, and having a tool that can compile all of that is a beneficial aspect of the solution. It cuts down on the number of hours required to search for things, because if you don't know what you don't know, you can miss things. Auvik is truly going to discover everything that is connected to the network. It gives us peace of mind and cuts down on the number of hours it takes to onboard a client.

We usually devote approximately an hour of time to onboarding a client environment. What that entails is gathering some basic information about passwords, SNMP credentials, et cetera. Being able to spend just an hour to get everything captured is pretty effective.

It is incredibly easy to use when it comes to its monitoring and management functions.

And it's incredibly important, given our work as a managed service provider, to have a single pane of glass environment. That is very crucial to being able to identify and diagnose issues with a network and fix them promptly. We don't have to log in to 15 different devices to track down how things are connected.

We've used different tools in the past for mapping network topology and we've also done it manually. The fact that Auvik is able to create a network map that is accurate and to do it automatically with its collector is supremely helpful. 

Since I last used the product about eight months ago, all of the things that I had complaints about have been fixed by Auvik.

One thing I would like to see is more functionality designed for managed services, such as multi-tenancy, to better manage things from an MSP perspective.

I have used Auvik for three different employers. I began using it four to five years ago.

I have never seen an outage with it. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to be on all the time.

It scales very well. You just install collectors on the different segments of your network where you need them, and it pieces everything else together in the background. It's really as scalable as you need it to be.

I have only had to deal with tech support once and they were able to identify what my issue was and referred me to their documentation platform for the resolution. If I had bothered to just read the documentation first, I wouldn't have needed to even have opened a ticket because they already had my issue fully documented. 

It was excellent support because not only did they know the answer, but they had proactively documented it and had it available even before I needed to ask the question. It was a good experience.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks before Auvik. Having switched, we are saving a lot of time, at least 10 hours per client-onboarding.

At my previous employer, we were using SolarWinds. The main and direct reason we made the switch is that SolarWinds had a gigantic breach. We've tested and talked through the security of Auvik's backend and we feel that it meets the various security controls that we needed to have implemented.

SolarWinds was, if I recall correctly, double the cost of Auvik. We gained cost savings and security by switching to Auvik. Also, when we were using SolarWinds, we had to have a dedicated SolarWinds server, whereas with Auvik, we do not need to have a server, we just have to have a collector device. And that device can be a "potato computer." We don't need a lot of resources or compute available to run the collector. We don't have to maintain a server or licensing or any of that other nonsense for the collector.

The initial setup was incredibly easy and easy to follow. They have a guide with very detailed and in-depth instructions for how to proceed. They also have detailed, in-depth instructions for every device on my network and how to get it talking to the Auvik collector. They provide very verbose, detailed instructions for how to make the tool work with a multitude of products.

For example, we had a WatchGuard device that was not communicating properly. I was able to go to the Auvik knowledge base, read through their troubleshooting article, and resolve it with some simple steps that they had documented.

For our implementation, it took maybe three minutes, after the collector code was implemented, until the network started to populate.

We have it deployed for multiple departments and multiple teams with a single location and a site-for-site VPN to another location. We have the collector installed on a VM in a Windows Server environment. It's connected to our switches and pulls through all the data.

With my previous company, we saw time to value within six months. With my current company, we're looking at closer to a year or a year and a half to break even with an investment in Auvik, but that's because of the clients we're working with.

Auvik is probably one of the more expensive options on the market for what it does. But if, as a managed services provider, you are working with clients that have large networks with large numbers of network devices, you can find efficiency to be gained that will make that value up.

It's been a harder sell for my current company because we are a very small MSP, and I don't know if we're going to be able to afford it overall. I know that the value is there, but when you have smaller clients that can't afford an extra few dollars a month, maybe it's not the right tool for them.

I think that Auvik is perfectly suited for a mid-range business model where there are many network devices or many networks that are segmented and connected in different locations. There is a ton of value in that scenario. Or, if you don't have a good inventory tool, the fact that Auvik builds that inventory has been really huge for our team. It cuts down on what tasks need to be done and allows for true transparency and knowing, 100 percent, that we have everything inventoried. We don't ever have to question what we see on Auvik, we know it's accurate every time. And that has helped us increase our billables because, before, we would have network devices that weren't being detected, but we were supporting them and not billing for them. Depending on your model for your managed services, there might be some ways to increase your billings.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing Auvik. That was mostly because Auvik was already in that magic quadrant. We just picked the tool and ran with it because we needed to be fast. We didn't have the luxury of time, we had to make a decision promptly.

Auvik's network visualization is intuitive to somebody whose job it is to work in that environment. It is not intuitive to someone who is a C-level executive. I would not want them to be looking at the tool. It's highly technical data. When you are a technical person you get the information you need. But if you're not technical, it's too much data. Don't use it as what you're going to present to a C-level. Use it to fix the problems and then make a different diagram to hand out to C-levels.

We have not leveraged a lot of the automation functionality within Auvik. We have not been able to use the tool to its fullest extent. We're gaining in that we can easily get the information we need, but we haven't leveraged the automation.

We use Auvik to monitor our client's infrastructure. It gives us real-time visibility into the devices, their status, and their availability at the device and interface level. Auvik monitors bandwidth utilization, TPU utilization, RAM, memory utilization, etc.

Auvik is deployed in a mesh environment consisting of five locations and the data center. We'll be moving toward Azure, but I'm not sure how well Auvik could cover us in that space.

It gives our customers a clearer view of their infrastructure and critical network points, which is visualized in a nice diagram on the website. The visualization part is really cool. It gives you an overview of the entire network at a glance. 

It's a crucial tool for helping our IT team to monitor remote and distributed networks. We couldn't visualize what's out there without it. We have data centers here and there and a couple of branches. We could see they are all connected and working, but we would not have a clue about the infrastructure underneath. Visualizing this helps us to understand what we have today. We know where to look or troubleshoot.

Auvik has an excellent scanning tool for our device inventories. It helps to have everything in one place. It saves time. Otherwise, we would need to ask around or check spreadsheets. Monitoring tools, in general, decrease the time of the resolution. Auvik performs about as well as other monitoring tools. They all do the same thing.

Auvik's features for monitoring device availability and bandwidth utilization have greatly helped us. From a cybersecurity perspective, bandwidth utilization tells us if we have a potential data exfiltration incident. It also helps us decide whether to increase the bandwidth for one of the links or if the current bandwidth is sufficient.

The interface is simple and efficient. You can quickly figure out where the icons and patterns you need to click to find information from Auvik. The ease of use is crucial because we log into Auvik four times a week. Having a single integrated platform simplifies the solution big time.

We're having difficulties with Auvik's regular maintenance windows. They do the maintenance on the cloud side, which affects the on-prem collectors that gather the logs from the different network assets. 

When they have the maintenance window on the cloud, we do not have visibility of the network assets on-prem. I've read a support ticket regarding this, but there hasn't been a solution.

We have been using Auvik for more than three years.

It is very stable. We haven't seen an issue at all, except for the maintenance windows they have every couple of weeks.

I believe Auvik is capable of scaling up. I haven't tried it but I think it is ready because they have the scanning tool. Once we add a new device or a new subnet to be monitored, it would definitely scan it and add the discovered devices on the spot.

I rate Auvik support 10 out of 10. They responded exceptionally well when I needed them.

Positive

SolarWinds has an umbrella solution where you need to subscribe or purchase modules to get different features. However, we bring all of these under Auvik once we subscribe to the service. It wasn't a SaaS platform like Auvik. The company decided to switch for business reasons. 

We've definitely seen a return. Keeping your infrastructure monitored increases the uptime of the network. It tells you if you will have a problem up ahead. We used it to manage an issue in the past where one of the devices had high memory utilization. Auvik helped us identify the moment that memory utilization started to increase. That increased the ROI from a customer perspective.

Auvik has a reasonable subscription model.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. It's a tool that's accessible to techies and businesspeople alike. It grabs the information out of the network, visualizes it, and keeps the history of everything that goes on, which is beneficial for real-time and forensic monitoring. 

We use it for our clients that have managed network services. We monitor their networks to see if there are any anomalies or unknown devices, and we use it for troubleshooting as needed.

One of the benefits is the insights into the network. We had one client that was having tons of issues. We put Auvik on there and we were able to isolate the problem to one device, remove it, and everything is now working well.

It has helped with visibility into remote and distributed networks, globally. For those clients that pay for the service, it allows us to see their networks, see what's going on, and sometimes even see an issue before the client knows and calls us, and that is what we want.

We have also seen a reduction in mean time to resolution, of about 10 to 20 percent, depending on what the issue is.

I like the traffic insights. That really helps to see what's using your bandwidth.

The monitoring and management functions, while there is a little bit of a learning curve, are pretty easy. Once you get it, it's straightforward and easy to go forward with. That's very important because we don't have time to sit around and try to figure out how to use it, looking at tutorials. It's pretty intuitive and their support is really great too if we have any issues.

And the fact that it provides a single, integrated platform for our organization is important as well. Having 50 different accounts to log into would make things difficult at times.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is great. It makes it easy to see everything and easy to follow and pinpoint what's going on.

The visualization of network mapping is good. The only complaint would be that VLANs don't necessarily show up as a regular LAN does. They do show up, but there is some manual tuning you have to do to make that look perfect. That's kind of the nature of how VLANs work, so I don't think there's anything they can really do to help make that better. Still, it does at least pick up devices that are on there, and tries to connect it all, but it doesn't always do a good job.

Also, it doesn't help keep device inventories up to date. It doesn't have any updating features.

It has been three years since I started using Auvik.

It's reliable. We haven't had any issues with it. We haven't had any downtime because the server wasn't available, or anything like that. It's definitely worth it.

It seems to scale really well. When we first started, we just had three clients in there. Now we have it on all 35 of our clients, and some of them have multiple sites. They're not all fully configured, but at least we have the agent on them and we're getting data already. I just need to go into each one and set up the SSH and SNMP settings, but that's no big deal.

It's deployed into our managed network clients who have anywhere from three workstations all the way up to over 300 devices on the multiple VLANs.

Their technical support is a 10 out of 10. They have direct support within the platform via a chat and they'll walk you through anything and give you the guidance you need. And their email support is great as well, if you have to escalate something. They'll even do a Zoom call with you if they're not able to resolve it by email or chat. They don't leave you hanging.

Positive

We didn't use any solution previously. We just used an ad hoc network scan to try to find issues, but that doesn't really give you a great view of everything.

I'm the one who does the deployments. The setup is straightforward. It's complex in the sense that you have to connect each device and configure its SNMP or SSH settings, but it's pretty straightforward overall.

Depending on the network, within 30 seconds to two minutes, max, the network mapping starts to populate after implementing the collector. It's pretty quick.

It doesn't require much maintenance. Once you get everything set up, unless you introduce new devices, you don't really have to mess with anything.

We did our initial implementation with the Auvik trainer. He helped us onboard clients and gave us training. Our experience with him was good. He was really knowledgeable and helped us out as we needed it.

Initially, it was me and our CEO involved in the implementation, but he passed it off to me after the first couple. And of course, we have had Auvik's help with it as well.

Time-to-value from Auvik has been the troubleshooting of that one client I mentioned, just by itself. We spent countless hours onsite trying to figure out what was going on, doing our own tests with freeware, but we weren't able to isolate the issue until we installed Auvik. If we had done that from day one, it would have taken three hours for the setup, instead of that ticket taking 22 hours of work. It's a big benefit.

Auvik's pretty good in terms of pricing. It can get pricey if you have multiple managed devices, but if it's just a simple network with only one or two firewall walls and smart switches, it's reasonable.

The one client that we had issues with has 15 managed devices. That client is pretty expensive, but it's worth it.

Our eyes were set on Auvik, based on reviews from peers.

It's not really replacing any tasks. Rather, it's a good tool to see if the network is down. We have others that do the same thing, but Auvik is more for investigating issues.

My advice is to take your time. Make sure that the credentials are correct when you input them. Go through their guide on setting up WMI for Windows workstations to get better results. Just don't rush it and get good data.

We mostly use it for network monitoring. We also use it for configuration backup.

With Auvik's network monitoring, the easiest thing is to see where issues are in the network, such as where the traffic is having problems flowing from one place to another. That is the biggest benefit for me. I can go into each company and see if there's a problem with the network. Auvik will pinpoint it and we can work through fixing it.

And something that is critical is the ability to visualize the network mapping. Most people just put something in and think it works, but without having much knowledge of what goes into actually planning the network and making sure they can't get to things they're not supposed to get to. With Auvik, the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is easily the best I've seen. It's very intuitive. There are pre-built filters and other pieces that allow you to visualize certain, tiny pieces of the network, instead of the entire thing. That means you don't have to move the map around.

The solution has also helped reduce the repetitive, very boring work involved in visualizing the network, where you literally map out everything. Auvik will do it for you. That manual process, for a typical company with a single site, may take 30 minutes. But if it's multi-site with multiple networks, it takes that process from roughly an entire day down to about 30 minutes.

And when it comes to IT team availability, we don't have to have someone dedicated to monitoring the network or documenting networks. We actually have him doing work that we need done, like helping our customers, instead of just documenting.

The ability to put in individualized SNMP checks that might not be in the automated playbook is a valuable feature.

It is also super easy to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. I've not seen something as easy as it is, although that use of ease is not so important to our company. Other companies provide knowledge base articles that make everything easy, but the management and monitoring functions in those products aren't as easy to use. That means you have to lean on the knowledge base. Auvik has a knowledge base, but you don't really need it. It's a lot easier in that way. It has a lot of documentation, a lot of information available, but you just don't need it because it's that easy.

Auvik is also a single, integrated platform, and because we are an MSP, that's a godsend. Other vendors have a single pane for each company, whereas Auvik has it set up so there is a single pane for multiple companies.

We use ConnectWise and it integrates with that perfectly. I don't know what else they could add there to have better integration, because it does everything we need.

Auvik doesn't help keep device inventories up to date in the way that I would like. It just helps keep us in the loop for anything that should or shouldn't be on the network.

The one thing that I need more help with is the networking of virtualization hosts. I need more information on those hosts and which virtual networks are attached to what, the virtual switches that are in there, and how they function. None of that exists currently. That's more of a need than anything else that Auvik is doing. If they wanted to monitor more of the network, specifically Hyper-V and VMware hosting, that would make it better and more robust, but that's not their goal.

I've been using Auvik for a couple of years.

The only time it's down is when AWS goes down, so as a cloud-based solution, as opposed to an on-prem network monitoring solution, Auvik means less worry for me. It's always there.

It scales very well, from a single site all the way up to multi-site. If you need more, you just add another probe and it automatically knows which probe does what, so you don't have to worry about that.

I have far less contact with Auvik's technical support now than in the beginning. I haven't opened a case with them in a year because everything just works.

In my experience, if their support can't fix the problem it's because there's a bug and they need to escalate it. I've never had complaints about their service. If there are any questions, support is there to help, and they will.

Positive

I am usually involved in the initial setup and deployment of Auvik and it is far simpler than anything else out there. Since we're an MSP, Auvik configured the initial, main site for us, and then I set up all of the subsites.

It takes 10 to 15 minutes after the collector is implemented for it to start populating the topology map, but it's not a solid "Here's the entire network" for a couple of hours.

We have two other team members, in addition to me, who do setups, but we just brought them on in the last six months.

A good tool like Auvik should literally pay for itself and it does for us, in time saved.

It showed value within the first week. That's how long it took for us to see it was going to save us money in the long run. As far as making money back on it goes, it took about two or three months. That's how long it took for it to have found everything and for us to configure everything.

They are way too lenient in their pricing. To put that simply, I can have an entire network being monitored and it will cost nothing, as long as I'm not monitoring the firewall or the switches.

There are three or four other solutions that I have used that do network monitoring, and none of them work the same. One was N-Central, which is the MSP version of SolarWinds. I also used SolarWinds, the full suite, for one company.

LogicMonitor is another one that we trialed but it didn't work nearly as well, and was way more expensive. 

We used something from Ninja, their network monitoring service, and it could handle a lot more than Auvik could, but you had to say specifically, "I want to monitor this device or that device," instead of just everything. 

I used all of those solutions before getting to Auvik and finding that it's better.

Auvik does everything through a single probe, whereas all the others require multiple probes and multiple connections to multiple VLANs. Either that or you had to know exactly what was on the network and then you could monitor the single pieces you wanted, instead of everything.

Most of what Auvik does is the high-level monitoring of what's going on, and then it does require the higher-level staff to see, when we have a problem, how we fix it. The lower-level staff couldn't figure that out. So it doesn't really help with delegating things to junior people.

If Auvik wanted to map out VLANs specifically, that could be added, but it wouldn't change my opinion of whether the mapping is good or bad. The mapping is good and the VLAN handling is good. Everything else really just comes down to having someone who understands network engineering to really suss out all of the issues that Auvik sees.

We did not see a reduction in mean time to resolution with Auvik. It is just one extra tool. We didn't have nearly the number of customers that we do now, back when we first started using Auvik, so we can't really point to a reduction. We've been using it for so long that we've brought on customers and put them in Auvik right away. 

However, when clients have networking issues, I'm sure it has reduced the amount of time it takes for us to figure out what the problem is. But for us, it's more the mean time to reconfiguration that has dropped drastically. For example, if we need to add another floor, expand a network, shrink a network, or add another site to it, instead of having to do a walkthrough of the network to see what's there, we hop into Auvik, spend five minutes looking at the map, and we're able to present a valid diagram to the customer of what needs to go where.

The solution is not perfect, but I can't think of anything that would make it better for me or my company. Between its cost and what it covers, I would give it a 10 out of 10.

We use it as our network management tool and configuration backup utility.

It's made us a lot more aware of the network side. A lot of MSPs traditionally have been more server/workstation oriented, with some firewall-related activities, but when you bring in the network, it allows you to bring all that full circle and troubleshoot network issues more easily. And in the same way that a backup is important for a server, a backup is important for a switch or a firewall. If you lose one of those, you don't want to have to rebuild from scratch. Auvik provides that configuration backup.

The configuration backup has helped reduce repetitive tasks. With network, there's not as much daily touch as there is with PCs. The automation has primarily been around backing up devices and alerting on down devices.

It has also helped with visibility into remote distributed networks. As an MSP, most of our customers are remote networks for us. Auvik allows us to manage their networks, whether they're local or in the UK or anywhere else. We're able to manage those networks much better via this tool. It helps our network engineers focus on those networks.

In addition, it helps keep device inventories up to date. That aspect helps a lot because people don't have to always worry about whether somebody added a switch or an access point. It scans each day and sees new devices. While that doesn't save us time on a recurring basis, whenever we need to provide a report, we don't have to manually gather the information. We're able to print it out and provide it, rather than having to do manual counts. But that's on-demand and not frequent.

We have absolutely seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution for network issues, using Auvik. For instance, if an alert comes through that a server is down, and we're also getting information that a switch or a firewall is down as part of that, we immediately know we don't need to troubleshoot the server. The server is down because those network devices are down. It allows us to get right to where the problem is, versus having to work our way back and that cuts out a lot of troubleshooting time.

If we get an alert that an AP is down and a firewall is also down, it may just be that the AP is not able to report back because the firewall is not up to allow it to. That's where it saves us a lot of time. It allows us to look at root cause better. When you're looking at that map and you see three things with red alert banners on them, you know which one is the closest point out to the internet and that you need to look there first, versus what's behind it.

The network management piece has been the most advantageous. First, it alerts us about network devices that are under duress or having issues. Second, it has historical data. That allows us to go back, if, for instance, a switch is having problems, and see if it is something that trends at a certain time of the day or a certain day of the week.

For what we use it for, Auvik provides us with a single integrated platform because it ties into their ticketing system. That is very important. The more touchpoints that people have to interact with, the less likely they are to interact. Trying to get it down to as few panes of glass as possible becomes an important piece. We previously used multiple applications for managing our network, and switching to Auvik has saved our organization a good bit of time, day-to-day. It has saved us the equivalent of half an FTE.

It's also the best that we have found for helping to visualize network mapping/topology. It does a great job of that, hands-down. The mechanism that it uses to learn about the network seems to be more robust than some of the others. The interface is very clean and sleek. It discovers devices well and the relationships between them, and the general aesthetic of the portal presents that information. It gathers more data than most and it presents it wrapped up in a really pretty way. Others can draw out a diagram, but they're just not as elegant as Auvik.

The network visualization is intuitive. It classifies devices accurately and presents the links and the relationships well. Plus, if something isn't discovered the way you think it should be, it gives you the ability to manually adjust it. For example, sometimes wireless bridges don't really present well. They don't show a link between them. You have the ability to go in and make that association manually so that it presents correctly on the map.

I've been using Auvik for a little over three years.

The stability is strong. They announce maintenance well in advance and it's not frequent. We haven't had many issues. I don't recall that it just went down all of a sudden. Typically, it's only down around maintenance windows.

It scales well. We've put large networks on it.

The solution's technical support is good. We didn't have to interact with it a lot, but when we did, they were able to answer the questions.

Positive

We used PRTG from a German company called Paessler, but it did not provide configuration backup, so we used a different application to provide the configuration backup. We had to use two products to do that function before. That was part of the reason we switched to Auvik. Bringing everything into one application, and that application being able to integrate with our ticketing system, were the two big reasons.

The initial setup was very straightforward. If you have intermediate networking skills you will be comfortable doing it.

We were able to implement Auvik out-of-the-box, meaning it was immediately available for use without intervention. When we signed up, we were able to download the agents to put on each remote site and begin scanning and gathering data. Once we decided to go with Auvik, we were instantly able to go with it. Within 15 minutes, after the Auvik code was implemented, our network mapping began to populate. 

Within about an hour or two, depending on the size of the network, the map was pretty well displayed. For larger networks—we have some networks that are 1,000 nodes—it might take several hours for it to scan, discover, and learn the relationships. It asks you to authorize networks that it finds. You may initially tell it to scan a network, but based on that network being scanned and the devices on it, it learns that there are other subnets out there. You have to approve those for it to scan them as well. That's why larger networks could take several hours and up to a day or so.

We did it all in-house and it required three people. They were primarily split up between

• networking components: switchers, routers, and wireless infrastructure
• server/workstation infrastructure
• integrations, such as ticketing.

Auvik helps us, but as I mentioned, it's a lot more for point-in-time needs. If a switch is down and we need to get information on the alert and possibly pull the backup to put on a replacement device, or if somebody needs an inventory, we can pull a report. Those are very moment-oriented. 

I can't talk about time-to-value over days, months, or years, but once you set it up, it takes care of itself. It scans the network for new devices. Once you stand the product up and have it connected to your ticketing system, it's just a matter of using it when you need to use it.

Auvik is not cheap. They've done a great job, it's a developed product, but you pay for it. When you compare, it's definitely in the upper tier of pricing.

Auvik has two price points. One is their Essentials license, and the other is their Performance license which includes flow data. 

For example, you may have a network with 10 switches and a firewall, and you really only want flow data going through the firewall. Auvik requires you not only to put the device you want under a Performance license, but all of the other network devices that are billable devices have to go to that same Performance license. It gets expensive in a hurry, so we haven't taken a Performance license with them for that main reason. If we need to do flow data, we'll use a different product. I wish they allowed you to only license the devices you needed to have Performance.

We looked at Traverse Network from Kaseya. It was very similar to Auvik in terms of capabilities, but we thought Auvik was more polished. It seemed to be further down the road as far as how well it had been implemented.

And Auvik's cloud-based solution, when compared with on-prem network monitoring solutions, is better. It's hard to monitor something on the network locally because if you lose your internet connection, it can't report out, which is pretty important. That's why we like it more than on-premises solutions.

It's an easy user interface to work with. They've done a good job with the GUI and how to navigate it. That's not of huge importance to us because a lot of us have been doing network management for close to two decades. That means we've used a lot of tools and we are very familiar with them. But for entry-level techs, it's easier because they can do some things without knowing a lot of what we've had two decades to learn. It makes people with less experience much more comfortable using it.

The solution's automation hasn't had that much of an impact because a lot of our frontline people don't have to interact with it on a daily basis. They use it for point-in-time troubleshooting. It's not a huge help on that side. It's mainly the networking engineers, who would have to do things through other systems manually, whose time is saved.

From a product perspective, it's a 10 out of 10. It's just that you pay for the product. It costs a lot compared to others.

The biggest issue is that if you need NetFlow, where you can actually see more information about the packets that are traversing the network, you probably need to work through your cost model first. Auvik is not going to be the cheapest out there, not even close. It's going to be, by far, the more expensive solution. If that is a strong need of yours, it may not be the best solution. It does NetFlow really well, just like everything else it does. It presents it well. But the pricing model makes it a very expensive proposition to do the Performance licenses.

We have a medium-sized business. We have two data centers and two small physical offices. Our main goal is to monitor the traffic between the data centers to get an idea of the traffic, and our current firewalls don't offer that as a solution.

The main selling point was the traffic insights feature, which better explains our network traffic. Auvik has many different features, but we primarily want it for traffic insights. It has monitoring and network discovery. Network discovery is useful, but we already have a monitoring solution. The network map is easy to use.

The onboarding could be a bit better for Auvik. We've had a few issues out of the gate because we already had an existing Auvik setup that was invalidated. Given that we're a new customer, it's taken a while to get support for these issues. It's taken a couple of days, but I would have thought that as new customers, we'd get priority support until the solution is running. 

I would like it if you could filter out workstations. We've got Windows workstations and servers, but we only care about the servers. It would be nice if we could filter out devices based on the operating systems, so we don't have to see the workstations, but you can't. 

We used the Auvik trial for about three weeks and then purchased the full product after a couple of months. We're now a week into using it.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10 for stability. I haven't had any downtime. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10 for scalability. It has the potential to scale because you can add collectors or create new sites as needed. 

I rate Auvik support seven out of 10. The people I've spoken to have been pleasant, but it's taking a while to deal with our outstanding issues. 

Neutral

We also use PRTG for our network monitoring. We invested a lot of money in PRTG, so we can't replace it all yet. We adopted Auvik for its traffic insights. 

It should be straightforward, but some things don't work, and the guides aren't necessarily correct either. We've used it for a week now and don't have much in there because there are a few teething issues that I've opened tickets for. 

The price is what I expect for a product like Auvik. It's reasonably priced. 

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. 

We initially implemented Auvik Network Management because we lacked network visibility. During the trial, the traffic analysis feature unexpectedly revealed malicious connections. This pop-out function within Auvik allowed us to break down traffic and identify TeamViewer sessions by destination, ultimately helping us pinpoint the source. This unexpected benefit, along with its core alerting functionality, convinced our executives of Auvik's value.

While the network map offers near real-time, full visibility into our network, it's limited to managed switches. This means the current drawback lies solely with outdated infrastructure, and the most effective solution is an upgrade.

The interface is intuitive and user-friendly.

After deploying Auvik Network Management within a week, I gained complete visibility into our network traffic. Alarmingly, it revealed a significant amount of unauthorized software and social media usage, with Facebook alone accounting for a quarter of our traffic within just a day. This immediate insight allowed us to take swift action and shut down the problematic activity, demonstrating the clear value of Auvik from the beginning.

In my experience with entry-level technicians at our co-op, Auvik Network Management has been a valuable tool. It simplifies network mapping and understanding for beginners and even helps me proactively manage tickets. With Auvik, I can identify potential issues before they escalate into major alerts, or use existing alerts to create tickets for faster resolution.

Auvik Network Management helps us spend less time on maintenance and setup of the solution and less time on the issue resolution.

Auvik Network Management was a time-saver, but more importantly, it provided greater network visibility which ultimately improved security. Instead of spending time sifting through logs for issues, Auvik's features freed me up to implement solutions and proactively enhance network security.

The most valuable features are the traffic analysis and the network mapping.

The network map is great overall, but it loses track of devices when their IP addresses change. This means we have to manually remove them and let them re-add, or use static IPs. Every month, a bunch of devices change IPs and end up in a random category, disrupting the map's organization. That's my only complaint - otherwise, it's user-friendly and functional.

I previously evaluated one of Auvik's products, but it felt incomplete as a standalone SaaS offering. Ideally, Auvik would bundle this product with its other solutions for a more comprehensive network management experience.

Auvik Network Management needs to improve its operational technology coverage. 

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one year.

Auvik's stability is good overall, with frequent maintenance windows that haven't caused major disruptions for me. While these windows could potentially interfere during a security event, they are thankfully short and reasonable.

Auvik Network Management handled my network well. It discovered devices across multiple VPNs and even unconfigured switches with default settings. This scalability was impressive, as it automatically connected to various sites with limited access, saving me time and effort.

I contacted technical support as soon as I noticed the issue with Auvik not being able to automatically remap devices that changed their IP. 

Positive

While I previously used Cisco Firepower for its rule-based functionality, it wasn't a true replacement for Auvik Network Management. Firepower seemed redundant for my needs since Auvik already provided the network visibility I required.

Auvik Network Management's deployment impressed with its ease of use. Installing the collectors, entering credentials, and letting it discover devices was a breeze. While building a complete network map took a couple of days due to complexities like potential network loops, it began providing valuable insights immediately.

The deployment took two hours.

I took advantage of Auvik's three-hour technical support to configure alerts and receive a high-level overview of their Network Management platform, but I handled the actual deployment myself.

Auvik Network Management's pricing was surprisingly reasonable. Even my C-suite executives, who initially anticipated a much higher cost, found it to be quite fair.

Cisco Visibility provided better coverage for the operational technology side of my network compared to Auvik Network Management. However, Cisco's high cost was a drawback, while Auvik offered a more affordable option with the added benefit of traffic analysis and alerts.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

Our entire IT infrastructure, including all servers and pretty much everything else, is managed by Auvik. The only area I'd like to improve is Operational Technology monitoring. Since our CNC machines run small Windows deployments, Auvik doesn't monitor them as effectively as an OT-specific solution would.

The only maintenance I need involves manually clearing out IP addresses instead of letting Auvik automatically refine and remap them, which can be frustrating. This can cause a device's IP to change several times, leaving outdated entries in a grayed-out section. It's a minor inconvenience but would improve the overall user experience.

Due to our focus on privacy, our company wasn't sold on Auvik's standalone SaaS solution, feeling it was excessive for our needs. While it excelled at shadow IT discovery and endpoint monitoring, it lacked vulnerability scanning and remediation capabilities. Integrating these features into their existing product would be far more valuable, allowing for automatic updates and patching alongside IT asset monitoring. While Auvik's SaaS product is okay, it wasn't the right fit for us.

Don't miss out on configuring Auvik's alerts! The default settings are overly broad, notifying you about everything from critical issues to minor inconveniences like low printer toner. Take advantage of Auvik's customization options to ensure you only receive alerts for important events.

Auvik is a tool that discovers all the networking assets within our clients' sites. Many other tools do this, but we like how Auvik integrates into our existing infrastructure. The primary use case is discovering all our networking devices, managing them, and setting up alerts. We use Auvik with a combination of other tools. It's integrated with our ticket management system where most tickets are escalated. 

We deployed Auvik at a new client yesterday evening, and we can see almost everything within the network now. We've had access to the firewall. After a bit more configuration, we can see the network map populate.

Auvik's network maps and diagrams are solid. Once everything is fully dialed in and the network devices are properly speaking to Auvik, you have a perfect network diagram. 

The solution is easy to use.  Learning Auvik only requires you to play some games on your machine, but there is no steep learning curve. There has never been a time when I didn't understand something about the technology. I don't think the learning curve would be high for someone without a technical background. It's so intuitive you don't need to dive deeply into various menus to find what you want. 

Auvik gives you a real-time picture of your network. I've never designed a network map that captures every data point, but Auvik does that. A network map gets cumbersome for end users because you see everything. You might see 25 to 100 nodes connected to an access point. If you are having issues with the network map, you can zoom in on the area you want to focus on.

To get the details about applications in Traffic Insights, you need to dive into the applications as a general category. You can see the users using the application, but I cannot pull each component into the report. Let's say I'm going to an end-user or a client. When I print a report, it comes out with 10 pages about the usage, resources, etc. 

I want to see details about the resources I use, and I can't do that. We have this data in a graphical format, and we can get the data provided in Traffic Insights by using other components within Auvik. I want a detailed report that we could present to the client. I was told at one point that we could produce this through integration with another solution. We tried that, and it didn't work. We did a service ticket again and spoke to the relevant persons, but there were false positives. 

They should pull the Traffic Insights feature until they're finished developing it. I cannot generate a report. It's all about monitoring, not configuring or backing up anything. It's just about monitoring, so I can't pull the report. Traffic Insights should be able to do that. 

The network map could be more customizable. You can decide whether you want a comprehensive map or only want to see the core network features. It all depends on the shape the end-users want for the network map. It's not the traditional shape that we're used to in IT. They could introduce something where the map can adapt to new shapes.

I have used Auvik for two years at two organizations. 

I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. They're great. Auvik responds to feature requests. A while ago, there was a useful feature missing, and Auvik jumped on it. 

Positive

The onboarding went smoothly. Some of Auvik's team helped us. It was very quick. The core solution was deployed within a month. 

Auvik offers a solid value because it only bills for the core components like switches, firewalls, etc. It isn't billing for every discoverable device. The cost is manageable. Many critical devices are covered but not billed. I would consider all of the clients' assets critical. We don't have a tiered system. 

I rate Auvik eight out of 10.