Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

It is used for network monitoring.

Auvik hasn't really improved things for us. We tried Auvik, but it didn't meet our needs.

I found the ease of setup to be a helpful feature. The appliance was quite quick to get running. The fact that Auvik is a cloud-based solution, as opposed to an on-prem solution, meant there was one less thing to worry about. I didn't have to configure another device or provision a server and support it myself. It was easier having it supported by someone else.

The interface is also quite nice. Another part that is very easy to use is the monitoring and management functions. Ease of use is awesome.

The overall intuitiveness of the visualization was very good.

I require the monitoring of Linux devices and it doesn't support them. Although we've done a trial, we're not going to carry on with it. We've already gone with another product.

Also, seeing the topology is quite useful, but it's not really suitable for a large enterprise.

It also wasn't able to inventory everything. We're using Lansweeper, which pulls the serial of every single IP device, but Auvik only seemed to be interested in SNMP. It didn't care about non-SNMP devices. The solution needs to move past just having SNMP. If it could have other ways, like an agent, that would make things easier. The lack of being able to communicate with non-SNMP devices was the issue.

I used Auvik as a trial for a couple of weeks.

It was very stable. There were no outages that I was aware of.

Because it's cloud-based, it scales almost infinitely.

I didn't need to contact their technical support. The documentation was quite good. It was quite easy to get going.

Our current product was out-of-support, so we were looking for alternatives.

The initial deployment was very easy. We used the VMware template. It took under an hour after the collector was implemented for the network to start to populate. The actual deployment took about 20 minutes.

We deployed it in a test network. Obviously, we were not going to let an unknown product loose on the entire enterprise network.

It was just me involved in the deployment and there was no maintenance required.

If you're a small company, Auvik is probably quite reasonable. But we've got 500 servers, so pricing suddenly became a lot more of an issue. There needs to be better bulk pricing for it.

We evaluated Nagios and Spiceworks as well. We decided to try out Auvik because we were looking around and wanted to try everything we could.

Make sure that all your devices are SNMP-capable before implementing it.

Auvik was quite good at what it did, which is monitoring SNMP devices, but it didn't have enough there to monitor an IP generic device. If it wasn't SNMP, it didn't really work. It needs more agents and more monitoring methods.

We're an MSP, so we function as the IT company for multiple clients, and we primarily use Auvik for monitoring and troubleshooting network issues. It's deployed across various locations, from small to medium-sized businesses, plus one school system.

Auvik improved our organization by allowing us to stay on top of issues with our clients. It alerts us in a timely manner and allows us to react proactively. In many cases, we get alerts that something is going on before the client realizes it.

The solution affected our IT team's global visibility into our remote and distributed networks, which is helpful. It's great because we can access the Auvik portal anywhere in the world. The visibility it provides is essential, especially for our technicians and engineers working from home.  

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up-to-date, as it pulls in all the devices on the network and sorts them. We can filter by Mac address, IP address, type of OS and more. This helps tremendously in helping our teams focus on high-level tasks and delegating low-level tasks to junior staff. Most low-level alerts go to our junior admins, which allows them to develop experience and learn the product.    

Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date helped save us time and allowed us to find devices we didn't know about when onboarding a client.

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR), primarily because our customers don't need to call us; we get alerts and tickets through our ConnectWise portal when Auvik detects an issue. This speeds up our time to repair because we are alerted of problems almost immediately and can start working on a solution.    

The topography and historical data are excellent; the latter essentially allows us to see back in time, which is helpful as users don't always report issues promptly. The ability to go back and look at historical data is a good feature.

It's easy to use the monitoring and management functions; everything is intuitive and self-explanatory. The feature set is more important to us than ease of use, as we work with many intelligent people. However, ease of use is helpful for our level one help desk personnel, who aren't used to using network tools like Auvik. In addition to being intuitive, the ease of use flattens the learning curve for our less experienced employees.   

Regarding Auvik helping to visualize our network mapping/topology, it's elementary. It places devices logically in a topology that's easy to understand. We can collapse and expand elements, making it easy to find information and devices in the system. I rate the tool ten out of ten for the overall intuitiveness of network visualization. Everything is worded perfectly and makes perfect sense to anyone working in the IT field.     

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik; it helped us on many occasions when our clients had network problems. It assisted us in ironing out those issues.  

The performance could be better; it gets a little clunky and slow-moving at times, and I wonder if that's due to the VM or if it's just the nature of the tool.

Another issue is the solution sometimes signs users out at inopportune times without warning. I'll be working in one window perfectly fine, and I would have a second session open in another window, which can time out and force me to log back in, even though I'm still logged on to the platform in another window. That can be frustrating.

I've been using the solution for about six years. 

The stability is excellent as long as the network, VMs, and hardware are suitable. Running low-quality equipment would affect the stability and user experience.

The solution scales well. Once you reach around 2,000 devices, a second device is required on the network to offset some of the performance issues that come with that, but it scales easily. It would just be a second OVA running on a box.

The technical support is excellent and very quick to respond. They helped us with an issue concerning performance hits in some equipment due to the frequency of the scans Auvik was running.

Positive

We evaluated some trial solutions for other network management tools, and they didn't fit us. SolarWinds NPM was a resource hog, and it wasn't cloud-based, so we ended up going with Auvik because of the ability to use it in the cloud.

We primarily used the in-built networking tools from each vendor. Switching to Auvik saves us about 20 hours because we can see all the relevant data and manage the networks from a single pane of glass.  

The initial setup was straightforward; it consisted of deploying an OVA which searches for the Auvik instance in the cloud and locks it in once authorized. It's between three and five steps, so it's quick to get up and running.

After the collector code was implemented, our network mapping started to populate almost immediately. However, we had SNMP set up, which needs to be done ahead of time for network devices. The solution pulls in devices and connections via ICMP based on the network it discovers. It may draw in limited details initially until the rest of the details are set up, but IP-based devices are pulled in very quickly. 

In terms of time to set up and maintain Auvik, it's about the same as other tools. It's all about the underlying network configuration. It didn't take much time because I ensured the network was prepped for any potential security monitoring tools we put in place. I didn't have to go in on the back end and set anything up because it was all waiting to go.

The solution requires a little maintenance on the VM side. Performance-wise CPU and RAM maintenance can increase performance. Other than that, the tool essentially runs itself. 

I can't speak to the cost; I'm an engineer. Auvik has a subscription-based pricing option, and the other solution we evaluated had high upfront costs. 

We evaluated Orion and WhatsUp Gold and found that Auvik works much better for us because it allows us to have all our clients in a single plane of glass under our company. With the other products, we would have to set up separate instances at each site and manage them individually from onsite.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Auvik provides a single integrated platform, though that's not as important to us as cost, ease of use, and support, in which the solution excels. We're intelligent people who work with different platforms, as our clients don't have cookie-cutter set-ups at every location. If Auvik weren't a single integrated platform, that wouldn't be much of a hindrance for us.

We haven't used Auvik's automation capabilities.

Auvik's cloud-based solution works as well or better than on-prem network monitoring solutions. The cloud solution depends upon the internet connection at the opposite end but logging in remotely to manage on-prem tools faces the same challenge.  

It works as well, even better. But of course, your Cloud solution is dependent upon the internet connection at the opposite end, so your mileage may vary. But you're still limited by that with on-prem solutions as well, if you're logging in remotely to look at those tools. So it faces the same challenges as the on-prem solutions.

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.

We are using Auvik specifically for monitoring network devices. We are an IT company that's focused on network integration and monitoring for our customers. We use Auvik to monitor routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and other network devices.

If there is an alert, we can just click on it in the email, and it redirects us to the Auvik page where we can see what's going on with that device. That makes it quick to find what's going on in the network.

And the visibility into remote and distributed networks globally was one of the reasons we moved to Auvik. The cloud platform means our team can work from home and it takes seconds to access a customer's network to see what's happening. We don't have to deal with VPNs and go through something on-prem. That has saved a lot of time. You access Auvik and you are good to go. Everything is there.

It also helps keep device inventories up to date so that we can pull this information and have it ready. There is no need to engage someone to have them reassess the inventory or split inventory into categories. You already have all the categories and you can just export the information. For example, when we want to renew a support contract with a customer and we need to know their inventory, we can use Auvik to export it and we are good to go. It saves us 90 percent of the time it would otherwise take.

The first feature that I appreciate is the topology drawing in real time. If our NOC wants to troubleshoot, they can go to the topology map and see that this access point is connected to that switch via that specific port. And when something changes in the topology, it's dynamically updated.

The network mapping is such a great tool. We have some customers for which we manage access points and switches. The management platform for those products, like Meraki, shows you topologies on their cloud dashboard. But if you look at the topology in the Auvik, it is much better with colors. It shows Layer 1 and Layer 3 connectivities and provides you with a view that has a look and feel that is better than what the vendor itself provides. Its overall intuitiveness is excellent.

The backup feature is also important. Once we have access via SSH to devices, Auvik will detect if there are any changes and will back up the configurations.

And using the cloud ping feature, it will monitor WAN circuits. It sends a ping and alerts you if anything goes wrong with your WAN. It will also give you the speed and the round-trip time.

Comparing Auvik to SolarWinds and other platforms, it is pretty straightforward when it comes to monitoring. The people we recruit in our NOC learn how to use Auvik very fast. It's a core element for our NOC service. Before, we were using legacy vendors for NMS. When we moved to Auvik, things became more flexible and easier. We can onboard people easily when it comes to learning how to use Auvik to do monitoring for our customers.

It also provides one pane of glass. You can do the things you want to do in one place. Your NOC team can access and look at the alerts, check all the backup configurations, see the status of the devices, et cetera. It's one place to look at everything.

We would like them to make the alerting more customizable. We had a conversation about this yesterday. We want to be able to access more fields.

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

It's stable.

It is also scalable. We plan to increase our usage of the product.

We use it across multiple locations and we are at about 600 endpoints.

Their technical support is great overall.

But recently, we got a little bit frustrated. Two weeks ago, we were able to access the support chat via a small button on the bottom right side of the screen. Now, that button has gone away. I'm not sure if it is a limitation of my browser and I tried to find out about it on the internet. But it has become pretty difficult to access support right now, as long as there is no chat button available. Before, it was great. We need the support button to come back.

Positive

We tried other vendors, including SolarWinds, but you had to host those solutions in your data center and maintain them. Auvik is cloud-based, and it's a new way to think about monitoring. It gives us simplicity and enables a multi-tenant philosophy.

The cloud is a trend. That is what the world looks like now. Everything is cloud-based, making it easy to access, wherever you are. With on-prem solutions, you have to maintain your stuff, such as VPNs with your customers to collect information. Cloud-based stuff is great.

The initial setup to install a collector takes about 10 minutes. Within 10 to 20 minutes after that, you can have your topology built. Of course, you have to configure the devices to the SNMP, so it can grab the information. The whole process to get a rock-solid topology will take two hours or so. You have to engage the customer to do additional configuration on the devices. But if they have that configuration done ahead of time, it won't take more than one hour.

Most of the time, it's just me doing deployments.

As for maintenance, because it's cloud-based, Auvik maintains it on a regular basis. I notice every weekend that they have something to do, but it doesn't disturb us. We are not maintaining the solution.

For the first deployments, we had someone from Auvik who supported us. We learned in real time with someone who was an expert in the product. After that, we just replicated what he did and added more things as we went forward.

Our ROI is in saving a lot of time in terms of onboarding. When we want to engage a new customer, we can do that in about 10 minutes. With the legacy stuff, we would have to spin up a VPN and maintain it. Now, we just put in the Auvik collector and we are good to go. It starts scanning and collecting information.

The pricing of Auvik is good. If it could be less, that would be even better, but as long as they offer free devices, that is great.

We looked at LogicMonitor at the same time. But we had a salesperson from Auvik who demonstrated more features. In the end, we saw that the solutions are pretty similar, but we picked Auvik.

While I didn't check the price of LogicMonitor, Auvik is cloud-based and you have to pay a monthly subscription. But what you gain is that it will monitor servers and APs, et cetera, for free. It's a subscription and not a one-time fee like SolarWinds and other legacy platforms. For instance, we have some customers with 20 switches, two controllers in high-availability mode, and 200 APs. We get monitoring of those 200 APs without paying for it. We just pay for the switches and controllers.

I would recommend Auvik.

We use it for insight into an entire network, all the devices on it, and for monitoring their health. We also have it hooked into our ticketing system for automated ticket generation from any of the devices that we need to manage.

The benefit is the ability to monitor and react to issues on devices that we manage. I've existed in this organization for eight years and it has scaled up tremendously. That wouldn't have been possible without a tool like this. That has been the most powerful part, the ability to scale up an organization from managing a couple of hundred endpoints to tens of thousands of endpoints.

It also definitely clears out a lot of repetitive tasks, reducing them by between 20 and 30 percent. It helps us attend to issues much faster, scaling up the availability of our entire team by a lot. They're not spending time doing things that are manual and unnecessary anymore. Our team is 10 percent more available. And with Auvik, there has clearly been a reduction in our MTTR, in the 20 to 30 percent range.

Another advantage is the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. That's pretty important, although it depends on who we're talking about on the team. It primarily impacts the more senior network engineers. It's definitely helpful for them. So the importance of the visibility it provides, overall, is somewhere in the middle range.

It's helpful for delegating low-level tasks to junior staff. They don't have to have the education that would typically be necessary for understanding individual products. It does some of the heavy lifting for them and presents things in an easy-to-understand way for someone who is not necessarily as technically inclined as they would otherwise have to be. There are a lot of tasks that we wouldn't give to our junior techs if we didn't have a tool like Auvik.

And the fact that it keeps our device inventories up to date saves us time. That's a use case I didn't mention, but it's a huge piece of what we use Auvik for.

I like the user interface and the fact that it generates a map automatically of any network that you are trying to manage. That's pretty valuable, as is the ability to hook it into all the devices and keep an eye on their health.

It's a really useful tool for visualizing network topology mapping. When I first started using it, it definitely wasn't as powerful as it is now. There were some issues with it performance-wise and with how it mapped things, but now it's become very useful, with a very accurate visualization of what's occurring on a system or network.

It also has a single web console and it integrates with other tools. That's very important because it's pretty cumbersome when you have a bunch of consoles that you need to go to. Being able to narrow it down to as few consoles as possible is definitely paramount.

It's very intuitive. It does a good job of showing you individual nodes on the network and their relative positions to one another, with pertinent details on each node, all in one location. And it provides easy accessibility to drill down into each node and get more specifics on them.

There is some difficulty using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. If I were to rate it out of 10, I would say it's a seven or eight, on the "difficulty" scale, to set it up properly and in a way that's useful. It's not outside of a normal difficulty range for a tool like this, but there is definitely an amount of overhead required there.

The user interface could be tweaked in a few different ways to make it a little bit more intuitive when it comes to navigating through the menus. 

Also, getting remotely connected to managed devices could be a little bit smoother. Sometimes, it's a little bit cumbersome trying to do that. If they could streamline the facilitating of remote connections to network devices, that would be an improvement.

I've been using Auvik for about six years.

I've only had a few hiccups here and there. The stability is an eight or a nine out of 10. It has been pretty reliable.

It has really done great in scaling up according to our needs.

In the company that I'm with now, we have it deployed in up to a couple of thousand networks and to a lot of different devices. I don't know what the specific device count is because we've come to a point where we've handed that off to a specific automation team that is there to manage Auvik and a couple of our other tools. There is a lot in our Auvik system right now.

I've had contact with their technical support multiple times. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks, or no applications at all, which was something of a mess. It's definitely helpful to unify a lot of different tools in one spot. Switching to Auvik has saved us 15 percent of our time.

Because Auvik is ubiquitous, it's useful for a lot of different network devices. Before we had a tool like Auvik, I'm not even sure that a tool like this existed in the managed services industry. We would use either the vendor-supplied tools for managing specific vendor network devices or something muddled together out of Microsoft's software, like Excel or Access, to try to manage everything.

Overall, the setup is pretty straightforward. It's just time-consuming to get it set up to a point where it's maximally functional. It's not complex, though.

We're continuously rolling it out to clients as we pull new clients in and build out new networks. Once the Auvik code is implemented, the amount of time it takes before network mapping starts to populate depends completely on the network side. It has varied over the last six years that I've been using it, but it doesn't take longer than I would have expected.

I've seen value in the product, absolutely. I don't think that we could operate as a business on the level that we do without something like Auvik. It's done what we needed to do and it hasn't caused us any reason to start looking for any other solution to replace it.

When comparing network monitoring solutions, if there is concern about pricing you really need to assess where you're at in your company and decide how much value a platform like this would bring to you. Sometimes, it's not always apparent how much time you're actually spending on the types of tasks and functions that Auvik can provide. 

Check the knowledge base articles because they're very helpful, and don't be afraid to use the forums as well because the people are very responsive there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We pretty much had our eyes on Auvik.

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

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

We use it for monitoring network infrastructure and network servers.

Auvik monitors things that other tools don't monitor. It can monitor VMware, and Linux platforms. In addition, the automatic backup of network switches and changes to them is essential. It has positively affected the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. We can get into Auvik and see throughout the network. We can do discovery and see things that we can't see with other tools. And when the network is too stressed, we get notified. Out of all the tools out there, it's probably number two or number three among those we use. It's very critical for us.

The alerts go to our high-end guys because it's not monitoring desktops. It's notifying us of issues with equipment that only the engineers know how to operate, manage, and deal with. It's very handy for us and very important for us to prioritize which alerts are coming through to which people, so that the right people get them.

In terms of keeping device inventories up to date, it finds equipment that some of our customers never even tell us about. We have one customer with oodles of stuff but they had no idea what they had. They are a district utility and they have stuff everywhere. We know more about their network than they do, through Auvik.

The amount of time it saves us on setup management is significant. We used to have another tool that was good, but it was a nightmare to configure. Now, for every new customer, it probably saves us a minimum of 10 to 20 hours of work or more, depending on the size of the customer. On average, it's saving us about 10 hours.

It has also reduced our mean time to resolution because it's better at alerting us in the middle of the night when there is anything that looks more critical. It's quicker than other platforms. We see things before they happen, such as a hard drive failing inside of a RAID set, or a problem inside a VMware system before there is a bigger problem. We can be more proactive than we could be with the other tools that we have. I've seen some minor issue alerts from other tools, but a lot of time they can't see anything in a RAID set, but Auvik does.

Among the most valuable features are the 

• remote browser
• remote terminal
• remote tunneling.

Those features ease getting into our customer sites, especially ones that are a little more locked down. Instead of having to go through a VPN, log in to a system and do this or that to the platform, we can get to everything right through Auvik. It gives us immediate access to different things.

We have a single platform through Auvik, but it also integrates with all our RMM and management tools. Having a single integrated platform is extremely important. It does everything we need it to do within a single platform. Auvik doesn't do remote management monitoring, but it does everything else that our RMM cannot do and it's crucial. With it, we can see some pretty detailed information.

And while we haven't used Auvik extensively as an automation tool, we do use it to alert us and create tickets automatically. That saves us time.

When it comes to the management side, the navigation is a little bit difficult, going back and forth. It is a little bit cumbersome. The ease of movement is a little bit harder than it should be. If I go to one device and I look at an interface, I can't just go back to the device and that makes it a pain to navigate. If they could improve the navigation, that would be wonderful. It's a great tool but the interface is not great at times.

And Auvik is okay for helping visualize the network mapping and the topology for your organization, but it's not great.

Finally, reporting on alerts could be a lot easier.

We have been using Auvik for about three years.

The stability of Auvik is good. They do a lot of maintenance. They've had some issues over the years, but it is pretty stable. Out of 10, the stability is 9.5.

In terms of scalability, it does everything we need it to do. We have some pretty large environments and it does just fine.

It's a multi-tenant platform. We're a managed service provider. Our managed service customers range from a company that has about 400 or 500 devices to one that has over 1,000, and all the way down to customers that only have about 10.

I really haven't had a lot of interaction with their tech support. I've only had two or three questions and they answered them.

Positive

I used to use WhatsUp Gold when we were a much smaller company, but that product just did not scale with what we were doing. WhatsUp Gold was too difficult to use. I had to have VPNs for everybody and that didn't make any sense.

The initial setup of Auvik is pretty straightforward. We deploy it all the time now. We just onboarded another customer, the fifth in the last two months. We are able to use it very quickly after deployment, out-of-the-box; within hours. We only need two people involved in a setup.

If I compare the implementation time, alone, of our previous solution and Auvik, even for a small customer our old solution would take 10 to 15 hours. And if I had had to use the old platform for our largest customer, that would have taken me 80 to 100 hours. I only put in about five or six hours to get Auvik running for that customer.

We haven't had much training on it at all. We've had to discover a lot, but it works very well.

We deploy it on all our new customers and it is of tremendous value. I can see interfaces going up and down. I'm getting alerts on disconnects and that helps me troubleshoot spanning tree issues that are happening inside the network.

SNMP is critical because I can actually see inside VMware servers. With other platforms, that is very hard to find. I can see through a RAID set. The value is from the in-depth monitoring and the ability to see inside the hardware, rather than just if it is available or not. And in a Microsoft domain, it will tell me if there are any replication issues between domain controllers. It will tell me if there is a status issue. It's very handy.

The billing is excellent. The way they bill it, in most environments, it's not that expensive. The billing is very cost-effective.

I looked at a couple of other solutions. One of them was WhatsUp Gold, which we had been using. It's a great product, although it took forever to configure. Its navigation was great, but it took someone with high-end skills to understand how to do what needed to be done. 

Auvik makes it easy. It automatically finds things for you. I don't have to train someone for hundreds of hours to learn how to use it. The primary reason I wanted Auvik was SNMP. It discovers all the MIBs and pulls them. That's how it can monitor the things that other platforms don't. That's one of the features that make it a good product. I wanted it because we needed to see all the way down inside a device. For example, on a RAID set has a drive failed, or is there a problem with the NIC, or is there a problem with something inside the hardware? I didn't want to just know if it was available or not.

It's important to me that Auvik is cloud-based as opposed to an on-prem network monitoring solution. I have removed all my on-prem stuff, period, for security purposes. We're a security-focused company. Also, we're not that large, we're only 10 people, and we have enough work to do for our customers without having to maintain internal platforms. We just don't have time to do that. We had an on-prem solution for monitoring, but we went to Auvik in the cloud so that we don't have to maintain all that. It's one less thing we have to maintain.

My advice is to use this solution because it finds more detailed, granular information than other products, out-of-the-box.

We use the tool for network diagrams and troubleshooting, which has been helpful. One of the main issues we had before ANM was the lack of up-to-date network diagrams. With its dynamic function, we solved this problem. We also use it to troubleshoot network incidents such as APs going down and for automatic backups.

There are many things I like about the product. It's cloud-based and automatically refreshes the network container. We like the automatic backups and the comparison between backups. It's straightforward to set up, and it integrates with many protocols.

The tool provides an intuitive interface that's easy to use. The search box is particularly helpful—we can search for everything from MAC addresses to IP addresses to interface names, making it easy to find any device.

The network map and dashboard give us a real-time picture of our network. It's pretty easy to use these features to gain visibility, though we've had some minor issues with Meraki devices due to their lack of support for SSH and SNMP.

The solution has helped us automate our processes and integrates well with ConnectWise so that we can get alerts in our CRM and via email.

We noticed the full value of ANM after a few months, as we needed time to train and understand the system. It has helped our technicians due to its many capabilities and the data it collects. After about a month of training, we were able to share some of the senior team's workflows with junior team members.

ANM has helped us decrease our mean time to resolution by about 20 percent.

I'd like better integration with Meraki and a history feature for network diagrams. If a device fails on Saturday, we can't find it by Monday. A history or PDF export of diagrams would be great to see how devices should be connected.

I have been using the product for eight months. 

I rate the tool's stability as nine out of ten (it gets cloggy with large diagrams). 

We use the product on the cloud. Deployment was straightforward with the setup guide, initially taking about one month with a team of five people. Now, each new deployment takes about 15 minutes. We use it across many client enterprises and sites, with Windows, Mac, and Linux devices and multiple network brands. About ten people in our organization work with it. The cloud version needs no maintenance, but on-premises agents need checking.

The tool has saved us about 15 percent in return on investment.

The tool's pricing is reasonable. 

I recommend ANM for its updated network diagrams, ease of use and implementation, and high availability. Overall, I'd rate it nine out of ten.