Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We're an MSP, and we have deployed it to monitor the customer network and environment and make sure that the configurations are backed up and know when things were done.

It's easier to manage than what we used before, and licensing-wise, it's easier to understand what you're going to be paying for and not.

It has reduced repetitive low-priority tasks through automation, especially configuration backups. The time saved depends on the customer and how many configuration changes we make. It's difficult to measure it.

Previously, we didn't have visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally, but now we definitely do. This visibility is important. At this point in time, it's an invaluable piece of what we do. So, it's very important at this point in time.

Automated configuration backups and automated network diagrams are the most valuable.

The one feature we need is that when something goes down, we need a phone call, a text message, or something like that, not just an email alert. This is something they don't do. So, we have another service that does that for us. It would be nice to have that integrated into this, but at the moment, we have a way around it, which is with another partner of ours. It's not like we have to sign up to a new service for it, but it would definitely be nice if we can set up more detailed alerting schedules and things like that. However, we have found a way to make it work.

The automated network maps are really nice. Sometimes, I wish we could make the manual tweak to them because sometimes, it doesn't quite get what the network is like, but overall, it's doing a great job. It's a lot easier than doing it manually. Where it misses the mark is that we would want to make some manual tweaks, which is not possible, but the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is pretty good.

Auvik helps to keep device inventories up to date, but I just wish it would be easier to sync with our overall inventory software. At the moment, most things live in Auvik. We would like to think it should be possible, but we haven't been able to get that to work. So, there's still some improvement to get there, but overall, it has definitely been an improvement.

Syncing the assets that are in there through a third-party program definitely needs some improvements. There should be better synchronization of its assets to different asset management platforms. The alerting capabilities can definitely use improvements. We use third-party for that at the moment, and then the way they look for performance on network equipment is really heavy on heavily used devices, such as firewalls. It taxes certain equipment pretty heavily when it does performance monitoring. So, the SNMP calling that it does can be way improved.

I have been using this solution for about five years or so.

Its stability is very good.

Its scalability is good so far. We use it for a variety of different customers but not all of our customers. We have about 20 sub-customers in our portal at the moment, and they are across the US with multiple locations in some instances. So, it's deployed in a variety of different ways.

I have interacted with their technical support. I would rate them a seven out of ten. In the beginning, they were way better and closer to a nine. Lately, it's been less.

We were using LogicMonitor. At the time, LogicMonitor was overly complicated for what we needed it to do and also more expensive.

It was straightforward. We've deployed it at 20 different customers so far, and there was probably one instance where we needed to make some network changes for it to work. For most customers, we needed to add SNMP credentials and things like that, and generally, it just worked. When we get the correct credentials in place, after the collector is implemented, network mapping starts to populate immediately.

In terms of the time and cost to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solution, the previous one was also cloud-hosted. So, there was no maintenance cost there. So, it's the same, or it's virtually none because it's cloud-hosted.

In terms of maintenance, it's just set up and go. Auvik takes care of all the software updates, and you don't need to worry about anything. With an on-prem solution, you normally need to do the upgrades and everything yourself. However, some high-compliance customers can't give any data to the cloud providers. If we need to have something on-site, we can't use Auvik. That's the only issue we have, but for everything else, it's an advantage to have it in the cloud rather than to self-host.

We did it in-house. We are the integrator for other customers, and we've done more than 20 installations of it.

We have different people doing different deployments. It depends on the complexity of the network, how many searches we need to add SNMP entries to and gather credentials for, and things like that, but generally, it takes under an hour to set up the site and the collector.

We have definitely seen a time-to-value with this. I don't have the metrics, but I know it does what it needs to, and it saves time.

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR), but it's very difficult to know how much because previously, we didn't get alerted or knew of any issues going on. Now, we do, and now, we mainly get alerted before issues become issues. So, we can prevent them from ever cropping up, but it's very difficult to put a number on that.

The pricing is good, but I haven't looked at the pricing in a while. So, I don't know if it has changed or not. As far as I know, the pricing is still where it should be. I have no issues with it.

We didn't look at other solutions. It was recommended by a partner of ours. So, we looked at it. It did what it needed to do, and that's why we went with it.

If you're considering it, just install the trial, and it'll sell itself.

It's pretty easy once you get to know it. It's not that difficult. If you want to get into the advanced details, as with any software, it takes a little while to get used to all the advanced options, but in general, it's pretty easy to use. Its ease of use is important, but more important is that it works if something happens, which it does.

I am not sure about the effect its automation has had on our IT team's availability. It's difficult to say how busy they would be with or without it, but I would think it would have had a positive impact.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I use the monitoring on a daily basis. I receive the alerts. We have two monitoring software solutions and Auvik complements the other one. We use Auvik to cover the gaps in the other one. We get alerts from both sides.

Working at an MSP, I come across very different networks. No two are quite the same. Auvik makes it really easy for me to get a logical outlay of what switches are connected to what switches and what equipment is connected to what equipment. It takes a lot of the detective work out of the equation for me.

Without a doubt, it has affected the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. Having everyone in one portal, they click on their client and, as long as we have it configured properly and we're getting that accurate picture, it's absolutely incredible. That visibility is fantastic. We'll hop on a call and the other guy will also log in to Auvik. We can say, "Hey, search for this. Look at this path. The VLAN is everywhere except on this device. What are we going to do here?" It really helps us out with collaboration and brainstorming.

Auvik makes it much easier to trace connections and log in to a switch without having to jump through all those extra hoops. It makes logging into switches accessible for some people who may not be comfortable with that.

The network mapping, the logical layout, is the part that I love the most, showing what switch is connected to what switch. I couldn't live without it. That is the big selling point for me. If somebody asks me a question about a network, I log in to Auvik, 100 percent, to look at their network before I can make any decisions or answer any questions. The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is excellent. I don't know how I lived without this solution before.

Most people will also use Auvik for one of my favorite functions that it provides, the remote terminal. That's pretty much the preferred way as far as management goes. We still have people logging in to a service locally using SSH and getting into networking equipment. But personally, in the last year, I have really shifted over to Auvik-first management for my tasks.

In addition, we are all about consistency, and having one unified platform is very nice. Familiarity breeds efficiency. It's important to use a unified platform because you're going to know where things are at for all your clients. You're going to know what you're looking for and where your tools are. That's why I've been shifting to Auvik-first to administrate my network devices. I could be at any one of 150 clients in a day, remotely, and Auvik makes it such a breeze because they're all showing up in one platform.

I have a love-hate relationship with the network mapping. Navigating around the map on more complex networks is pretty painful if you're showing endpoints. I know there are filters to knock it down, but sometimes that's not enough. It handles like "early-90s Java."

For instance, I just pulled up one of the clients that I work with a lot. When I get a view of the entire network, it's highly complex. I see a lot of it. When I filter it down to just network items it's great. That sure helps simplify it. But actually trying to get around, for example, if I need to go to the right, I can't quite grab things and move them. It's just not super responsive. 

I would love to be able to use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out on the map, but instead, it scrolls the page, which it's fine. But sometimes it resizes the map too. I have a really high-power system and that map resizing sometimes even chugs my computer down.

In addition, I would love to be able to drag assets and place them where I want to, maybe on a session-by-session basis. Sometimes, if there are a bunch of devices to the left or the right of the core switch or stack or router, the connections blend together. I would love to be able to grab a device or a device group and drag it out of the way a little. It would still maintain the links between the icons, but the ability to place the icons where I want them, spread out a little bit, would be really cool.

I've been using Auvik for just over two years.

I have a very positive impression of its stability.

We had some kind of database error with accounts last year but that was resolved in a reasonable amount of time.  And I do see maintenance banners up for planned downtime, but I can only think of one or two times that I thought, "I really wish I had Auvik, but it's down right now." It's such a rarity so I'm not complaining. 

The stability is very good as far as I'm concerned.

Aside from making the map too big, the scalability is great.

We have it deployed in about 150 locations.

I haven't needed to contact customer support. It's intuitive enough that I've been able to get through it on my own.

I did not use another solution previously. I actually spent a decade saying, "Man, I really wish there was something out there like this." When I saw Auvik, my jaw dropped.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have installed the agent.

To my knowledge, there is no recurring maintenance. Occasionally I need to move an agent or restart an agent if it stops responding, or restart a server.

Part of the value of Auvik comes from being able to trace connections graphically and visually, rather than having to manually back-trace MAC tables. That alone saves enough time for me.

The only other thing I've ever heard of that is comparable to Auvik is something called The Dude. I looked it up once. I don't get intimidated by technology, but that was pretty intense and I never looked back. When somebody showed me Auvik, it blew my mind because it was pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

Install it on more than one client, make sure that you have your network scoped properly for scanning, and enjoy. Also, make sure you have your SNMP set up on all your devices. That's the hard part.

Within the last year, we made it a requirement for all of our clients to pay for an Auvik license. This is required software for us, going forward. That's a win.

Although I don't know anything about the pricing, I would definitely say look into Auvik. If the price is right, I understand why our organization has made it required, per client. If I was doing this on my own, Auvik would be a requirement for me as well.

In our organization, everybody uses it and everybody recommends it. Everybody says, "This is the way to go." Everybody hears about the efficiency, ease of use, and what's going to cause the least amount of stress. Everybody here likes it.

We use it for network monitoring and for configuration backups.

Auvik makes it much easier for techs to diagnose issues. And the automatic configuration backups are a game-changer. In addition, the ability it gives us to see more accurately what's going on inside our networks is very important to us.

It has also reduced our MTTR by about half.

The monitoring and management functions of Auvik are as easy as they can be for the functions they do. It's definitely the easiest product I've ever used. That ease of use is a nine or a 10 out of 10 when it comes to importance. If I have to hire somebody specifically to do those functions, it's very expensive to keep that person. If someone who has general skills can use it, it's much more affordable from a business standpoint.

It gives us a single integrated platform for networks and that ranks as a seven or eight out of 10 in importance.

And it's a tool we use every day for visibility into remote and distributed networks. That too is very important.

We also use it to keep device inventories up to date.

The network mapping is just okay when I consider what I would typically see in a network map. It doesn't fulfill what I would expect, but it does some other things: dynamic port information and VLAN. But that whole overview map in a single pane of glass can be pretty messy and a little bit of a performance hog on computers. The network mapping needs improvement in Auvik, as a whole.

I've been using Auvik for about three years.

It's very stable. I can't remember a single time when we've had an Auvik outage.

Other than the network map becoming a little bit of a performance hog as you get into bigger networks, it seems very scalable.

As an MSP, we provide IT for about 50 organizations, from healthcare to manufacturing to education. That means we have Auvik deployed with collectors at single sites and at multiple sites with multiple collectors. It covers a broad spectrum for us.

We weren't really doing Auvik-type functions on any kind of scale. We've used SolarWinds or PRTG, but we weren't really using anything, before Auvik, for all of our clients.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Once the Auvik code was implemented it took a couple of minutes for the network mapping to start to populate. It was very fast. We have about 50 clients, and the overall deployment took about 20 hours, when all was said and done.

There is no comparison between Auvik and previous solutions I've used when it comes to setup and maintenance. With other solutions, I would literally have to touch every single networking device to monitor them. With those solutions, it probably took at least five times as long to set up. For deployment, we quote three hours, and for ongoing maintenance, we don't even think about it. It just works.

We did a pre-sales call with Auvik for the basic training, but outside of that, we did not use other help.

Our time-to-value with Auvik was right away.

I would love to be able to get into the tier with the sys logging and the NetFlow/sFlow. That tier is a little bit expensive for us. If that could come down a little bit in price, we would be using that everywhere.

We looked at SolarWinds, but Auvik was really the only fit for our business model, since we are an MSP. I couldn't find anything else that met the needs of a multi-tenant environment the way Auvik does.

If a comparison is being done among network monitoring solutions and there are concerns about pricing, I would tell them to look at the amount of time it takes to set up and maintain other solutions, as opposed to Auvik. Also, having to look at a MIB or do an SNMP walk for our devices, functions that would require a high-level tech, are things you don't even have to think about in Auvik. You put in the device, you tell it what you want to monitor on, and it does it for you. It honestly saves money.

As a cloud-based solution, Auvik is reliable and easy to use. I wouldn't even consider an on-prem solution at this point.

I would recommend it to anyone who would ask me about it.

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.

The solution monitors my equipment. I can see everything that's online. It alerts me when things are offline, which is great. It also tells me if there's some firmware aspect to it, which I think is cool. That way, I know if my monitored equipment needs an update.

I like that I can see if the switches are online. I can get alerted when something is offline.

The interface is okay. I like the network map and dashboard overall. It gives me a real-time picture and visually represents my network so I can see what's going on.

I get pretty much full network visibility.

A little bit of time passed before we saw the benefits of Auvik. I first noticed its benefits when I was first alerted to something that was offline. At that point, I thought: "Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted it for."

Some parts of the interface are a little hard to navigate.

It's not the most intuitive dashboard. That said, it works. It's technical. If you know what you are doing, it's fine. 

There could be a button to skip two-factor authentication for 30 days or so.

I'd like the option to turn off the mask at the top. It takes up a large portion of the screen. 

I've used the solution for around a month so far. 

I've never had an issue with stability. 

The solution appears to be scalable, although I am not currently scaling. 

Technical support was okay. 

We previously handled the tasks Auvik covers manually.

I wasn't directly involved in the setup. There are not any maintenance requirements. 

The pricing generally makes sense. They are charging me based on the devices. 

I did look at a few other solutions before choosing Auvik.

I'm a customer and end-user. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We're an MSP, and we handle and monitor the network for many different organizations. So, we use Auvik for any client that has on-prem resources such as firewalls, switches, and servers. It's basically for any client that has a physical office.

We used it mostly for alerting and to have visibility over resources on a network. It's centralized oversight over what's going on.

The network map is really good. It gives us a good idea of the topology for new sites as we deploy the software. The ability to remotely connect the network devices is great. If we don't have direct access we can pretty much just do it from anywhere that we have an internet connection to. That's really helpful.

My team does the knowledge training. They have a university, and when we have new staff, they take the Auvik certification course. Otherwise, there is a lot of stuff to do in the solution and a lot of things to see. Without training, people will have to guess their way around it. Maybe they will see some basic features, but to actually leverage it to the fullest, you do need to take the training.

The dashboard and the network map give a real-time picture. It is really good so long as you have the credentials for everything. I don't really have any complaints. I think it's really helpful. It has been a lot of use for us in the past. Regarding things such as suggestions, it tells you where you have devices you do not have credentials for. That's something you can see if you go to the discovery settings. 

The benefits were realized pretty immediately. The benefits are very self-evident. The only thing you have to do to see the proper benefits is make sure you have a good setup. It's important to know how to deploy things, which credentials to add, etc. Otherwise, the topology will not be of much use. You will not get the configurations. However, if you have the proper knowledge of how to set this up, it's great.

We do not give our entry-level technicians access to Auvik most of the time. It's usually for tier-two technicians or our network engineers. However, it does help them with the Epic training. Before we are going to give entry-level permissions, we have them take training, and the training gives them a lot of information on the network on how to use the platform. 

Auvik helps decrease our mean time to resolution. What's good about Auvik is you can define thresholds where you can close alerts. So, if something goes down, you can see the condition. That definitely helps us take time out of the resolution process and lowers our oral ticket numbers.

In terms of the dashboard, maybe seeing on the map, for example, if you have an access point that's connected to switch one, and the access point you do not have credentials for, that could help us make management a bit easier. However, it's not terrible. It's just something to make it easier.

It has a monitoring feature. Besides just monitoring the network, you can tell Auvik to monitor a host name, like a domain name or an IP address on the cloud, and it just pings the IP address and gives you information. I feel like that's something that could potentially be improved a bit. For the service monitoring feature, we can check for port status or cloud ping checks. We can check against domains and against IP addresses in the cloud. That's a feature that has been of a lot of use to us. However, it is a little bit lacking in some features compared to other solutions that we have also used in the past. We used to use another solution, and we wanted to transition this service over to Auvik since Auvik does largely the same thing. However, as we were migrating, we noticed specific features were missing, and we could not add some of the monitoring back into Auvik since there were some technical limitations. For example, if Auvik has an IP address for the domain you want to monitor, and if the domain does not respond, it will take it as the services down, and it's going to trigger the alert at that point. It does not check when giving out a ping request. It checks by just making an HTTP request to the website. However, basically, some websites that we manage do not respond back to ping requests based on safety settings and so on. So, we have to do HTTP checks to check if the service is up. However, Auvik does not support that at the time. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

Mostly, it works well. We do have some sites that seem to stress the platform a bit. We might have been over the edge when it happened, and that's the only time I have seen performance issues. 

It's really easy to scale. Previously, and I'm not sure if this is true any longer, you could not turn a single site over to a multi-site and vice versa. In that case, you may need to delete your current site, or sites, and migrate things over. 

Technical support is really good. They are really quick. I have no complaints. 

Positive

I've also used Datto. However, Datto provides actual infrastructure, whereas Auvik is just monitoring. They aren't quite the same. 

Setting up the solution is not difficult. We just have to make sure we have credentials for everything on the network. However, that's something that comes from our clients. As long as we have the credentials, it's pretty quick to set up. We had everything set up in about two weeks. 

However, if someone is not tech-savvy, they will see many unfamiliar terms. If someone has knowledge of API integrations, they'll have an easier time.

We tend to need two people for each deployment. Someone will take care of provisioning and collecting, and someone will do the technical setup within the platform.

There isn't really any maintenance needed. There may be alert tuning. Auvik does come with a lot of alerts that are already pre-built in. Some we disable, some we modify, and some we just create from scratch. 

I do not handle the licensing aspect of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten with my biggest complaint being the documentation and knowledge base, which is difficult to navigate.

As an IT company, we rely on Auvik, a network monitoring tool, to support our many clients. We install an Auvik agent on their networks, which then provides real-time monitoring. This allows us to be alerted of any issues, like a downed server, so we can promptly investigate and resolve the problem.

The interface is straightforward.

After familiarizing myself with Auvik, I could see the many benefits it offered.

Auvik empowered our entry-level technicians to resolve more tickets independently. It complements our existing internal monitoring tool. While the existing tool might initially flag issues like a server outage, Auvik provides additional insights for our technicians, helping them verify the information and identify potential false positives. This allows them to tackle problems more effectively without needing to escalate to senior staff.

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

The most valuable feature is the alerting system. This ensures we're notified immediately of critical events, such as a server failure, allowing for a swift response and minimizing downtime.

I find the network map confusing and believe it could be improved by simplifying its layout or using clearer visuals.

The quality of technical support varies greatly. Some representatives are very helpful, while others are less so.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for three years.

There have been one or two instances where the Auvik website or portal seemed to be unavailable, but the actual appliances themselves seemed to be functioning normally. Overall, Auvik has been stable.

Auvik Network Management is scalable.

The technical support experience can be inconsistent. Sometimes we connect with fantastic technicians who solve our problems quickly. The customer service representatives are always friendly and supportive. However, occasionally we encounter technicians who suggest basic troubleshooting steps I've already attempted, like restarting or pinging. In these situations, I prefer immediate escalation. Thankfully, the escalation process through chat is usually swift, and the escalated representatives are very effective.

Neutral

While the initial deployment is straightforward, the overall deployment time will vary depending on our chosen option. On Windows machines, the process takes just five minutes, while Linux machines require approximately 20 minutes.

I start with a pre-configured Auvik collector packaged as an OVA file. I upload this file to VMware to deploy the collector. Once deployed, I SSH into the Linux machine and execute the necessary commands to update its firmware to the latest version. This completes the deployment process.

The implementation is completed in-house.

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

I recommend spending some time familiarizing yourself with the portal. Once you're inside, you'll find it to be quite intuitive.

I use it as a first line of information gathering. When properly configured, I am able to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot issues from the network's infrastructure level and go up to servers and other devices.

Auvik has helped to decrease my mean time to resolution. If configured correctly, it definitely takes 10 to 20 minutes off resolution. I am able to diagnose things at least 15 minutes faster than I would manually.

I like the feature that allows us to remote access and remote troubleshoot many of the devices, including terminal Windows.

When it tries to build the topology, it does it in a way that is usually incorrect. It cannot validate VLANs correctly, and it is a bit cumbersome. When we have a known topology, it makes it completely different. The network maps are not accurate.

It does not always give a real-time picture of your network. It all depends on how it was configured. I have seen proper configurations, and they look fine, and then there are other ones that are completely broken. For example, I have several clients with mixed equipment, but the topology map shows switches that are on top of the map, whereas firewalls are technically on top. It does not see them correctly. At times, it puts random switches not even connected to anything, even though we know they are physically connected in the topology.

If we are able to manually move devices on the topology, that would be great. It would be amazing if the network map could be manually redrawn. I have submitted this as a request previously.

I have been using Auvik for the last five years.

I have not seen any stability-related issues.

In my opinion, it would be a very scalable product.

I have not contacted them in more than four years. I only contacted them once very early on when I was asking about being able to move things.

To my knowledge, we did not have any solution that would be a comparative analysis of what Auvik provides. In recent months, I have come across a similar topology and diagnostic tool that is built into Fortinet's security appliance. It is a bit similar.

A similar networking map topology that I used to use was when we would build things in Visio and have them as interactive maps.

I was not involved in its deployment. 

In terms of maintenance, it does require maintenance. We have to update devices. When there are changes being made, we have to go back in and make sure that things are updated. Password maintenance needs to be done every so often, and our collectors need to be changed out every once in a while. We have some communication errors with them, so we have to do some troubleshooting with those. That is a bit of internal maintenance.

I was not the person who made the choice.

If you are a managed service provider, it is one of the best tools, and I believe it is worth the investment for senior engineers to do critical troubleshooting. It will take an application champion to make sure that it is configured properly, but it is very powerful for those who deal in the managed service provider workspace.

Auvik has not empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own because we do not allow our entry-level technicians access to Auvik.

It took me some time to learn the product and know exactly how it worked and how it was deployed. After I learned some of the nuances that were inside of Auvik, I was able to see remotes and things like that. It did take a few months of training to really understand it. A lot of it was self-paced. There was no sponsored training, so I had to learn on my own.

I would rate Auvik a solid seven out of ten.

Our use cases are around network monitoring. That was our biggest challenge.

The most important thing to me has been the benefits around visibility. If I don't have visibility then I can't report on things and the tool doesn't work.

And when it comes to reducing repetitive tasks through automation, it has absolutely done so, for example, through the backup features and functionality. Also, from an auditing point of view, it has greatly helped us because we now don't find ourselves in a situation where we have to figure out who did what and when. It sends out reports on a user basis, meaning we know when a user was logged in. Those are all very cool features and functionality.

With the reduction in repetitive tasks for my team, at different levels, time has been freed up. Another factor in saving time is definitely due to the improved fault finding we can do now. Because we have a network map, when something goes wrong, such as what couldn't communicate with which device, it saves us good chunks of time.

The network monitoring and backups of specific devices are really impressive. We've seen very good responses from our staff regarding the backup functionality. You can add a product, such as a switch and, once the product is added, it backs it up for you.

The ease of use of the monitoring and management functions depends on what level of engineer you are and how you perceive it, but to me, it's quite simple to use and user-friendly. The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is about eight out of 10. That aspect is actually quite good in the product. There are small tweaks and improvements that can be made, but overall, it is really good.

It also does change-tracking, which is a big aspect for us. If someone makes a change on a device, Auvik will report on it for us.

In addition, it helps keep the devices up-to-date. At a minimum, it gives us a monitoring feature on the versions of the devices. If it can't auto-update, the key here is visibility. As long as we have that visibility, there's a lot we can do with that info. The visibility saves us time.

And while it's not a single, integrated platform for everything, because I still use some of my other network tools to complete some other tasks, Auvik is a comprehensive platform.

I would like to see some improvements in some of the reporting functionality, meaning I'd like to be able to deep dive more into the reporting.

The reporting is still being scaled and built out and I would love to see some additional products being added to the stack. For example, Auvik covers certain types of firewalls, but I would like to see more enterprise stuff added to the stack. These aren't exact examples, but it may cover Sophos and FortiGate but not Palo Alto.

I have been using Auvik for about six months.

So far, I have found it to be quite stable. I haven't found the cloud provider to be offline and I haven't found that I was unable to log in to the cloud portal yet.

This is a quite easily scalable solution because it's a cloud platform. It's an easy rollout and the solution should be able to scale very simply. It shouldn't be difficult to scale out if we want more agents or more installs. It would be quite quick.

We have it deployed in a few different locations.

I haven't needed to contact their technical support yet.

We use different vendors' products and they have been troublesome or quite challenging. We did not have something that can do proper network monitoring around the devices themselves. We needed something that can scan the network, find the switches and devices, assign licensing, and then monitor them from there on out.

We're in the middle of transitioning, so we are still using the previous solution. It's a mix of SolarWinds and Darktrace. Those are two of the two bigger ones. This is a process, which means we won't jump to Auvik only and not use anything else, but we're finding it to be a great tool when integrated into our stack with the rest of the tools. We're definitely finding value in it.

Auvik is priced in the middle tier. We have customers using bottom-tier products and those who use what I wouldn't say are necessarily higher-tier products in terms of functionality, but more extensive products. For the way that it's deployed, where the pricing only affects certain devices—meaning there are some free devices, so that you don't pay for everything—it's quite nicely priced in the middle. It's not an overpriced product, but it's also not a very cheap product. It is in a good range of pricing.

If someone is concerned about pricing, in most cases the functionality makes a strong use case and it mostly trumps the pricing. Generally, functionality wins. If you give me a product that works really well and it's a little bit more expensive, I'll take it. It doesn't make sense to sacrifice functionality for pricing.

We didn't really evaluate other options. In our specific case, Auvik came recommended by one of my friends, so we started a trial and then used it from there. I wasn't necessarily looking for just this type of network tech. It was just a happy coincidence.

As for our team's visibility into remote and distributed networks globally, it has helped us somewhat. My team has started really integrating the product, but they've deployed it on a smaller scale at this point. It's not deployed on such a large scale yet.

Auvik, as a cloud-based solution, versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, is quite simple and intuitive to use. The cloud-based aspect is actually a very nice touch since some vendors require you to have an appliance onsite that they communicate with. It's very useful that it's a cloud-based application from an ease-of-deployment point of view. With no onsite appliance, there are fewer dependencies.

My advice would be to review and focus on the features and the functionality of the product. Don't necessarily, off the bat, just look at the pricing and say this is very expensive. With some customers, the first question is always, "What's the price?" without our having even said a word about the product. Take it for a test drive first, before you look at the pricing, so at least you know what you would be getting for that price.

We use it for network monitoring. We don't do a lot of systems monitoring with it. We predominantly use it for core switches, external network adapters, and other similar things but not for the endpoints or server hardware.

We are currently not using any of the automation functions.

It definitely assists with visibility into our remote and distributed networks. We don't necessarily use the Windows side of things, but we do have a couple of systems that are monitored. It is almost like a ping test or just a sanity check. From that perspective, it definitely helps. This visibility is 100% critical.

It helps keep device inventories up-to-date. It has saved us time because we have pretty much everything at a glance. It does allow us to prioritize what needs to be replaced or anything that would be necessitated by the device inventory, such as software updates or vulnerability patches. It definitely helps, especially with the end-of-life hardware. We're able to determine that and apply a device lifecycle to it.

In terms of helping our teams focus on high-value tasks and delegating low-level tasks to junior staff, in our network team, we do everything. There are all types of tasks that would be normally assigned to juniors. It definitely provides a lot more visibility and helps in delegating specific things. For example, when an interface is flapping or a port is shut down, it is a lot easier to delegate such a task. We're an MSP staff that doesn't necessarily deal with high-end network equipment. Turning a port back on is something most of us can do as long as we can log into a command prompt. Even the server admins can do some network tasks if need be. Within that, it does allow us to prioritize and state, "Okay, a senior network admin can figure out why this entire site is down," versus, "We need to update a switch."

Our mean time to resolution has reduced due to the alerting system.

We are seeing that the monitoring is very accurate. We are seeing that in terms of problems and solutions, there is a lot of functionality to it, such as APIs. So, you can dig down. You can dig deep into it. It does provide very useful metrics, and it has improved a large portion of our day-to-day operations.

The network monitoring portion of it has pretty sane defaults, and it is fairly good as a product. It is probably one of the better ones that I've used.

The visibility on the site itself is a bit of a problem. We do have the alerts panel, but there is no central monitoring. When we had requested how we would do this to place it up in the NOC and how we would view it and everything else, their answer was to use a third-party tool, such as Power BI. That was the response that we got. A front-end component to show the actual NOC operations at a glance is not present. That would be a major con in my opinion, especially for what we do as a data center. 

The actual adding of networks, systems, and everything like that is fairly easy, but the problem that I have is getting the metrics out. Specifically, if you go to the Auvik webpage, sign in, and go through the alerts and everything else, they don't offer any plasma display with a red light, green light, or stop light indicating this device is in an error state, down, etc. To get around this, we have to use their API. I had to code an entire interface to work around that lack of information. 

One of my major concerns or my major problems is the API hasn't always been super reliable. Sometimes things get broken. Sometimes it is down for a little bit. It doesn't seem to have the same reliability as their primary service, the actual web page itself. The API reliability is problematic when you apply a user account. I have a super admin account, and I have an API user that is a super admin as well. I create a new site as a super admin, and you'd expect everything to fall through, where the top level is the super admin and the subsites don't have access. We have network admins that create sites and DCOM sites and everything else all the time. When that happens, it breaks the alerts API and gives a 403, forbidden error, and that's across everything. If it can't access the top-level tenant, it just breaks the site. There are ways of counteracting that, and we're aware of the pitfalls there. 

We have had the API function in erratic ways where we do filtration based on various criteria, for example, if a ticket has been dismissed, if it is in maintenance, or if it is critical. We have filters for all the metrics. Sometimes, we had a couple of tickets where it doesn't acknowledge those filtrations or the filters, which causes a little bit of a problem, and we have to do a little bit of a sanity check within our code itself. It almost seems a little bit like they do focus on the front end and making it visible, but it seems like the API is almost a second-class citizen.

We've been using Auvik for about two years.

Because the API is what we use frequently, we've had various issues. It could use some work, but in the front-end portion of it, where I'm assuming most of the customers would be looking, we haven't had any downtime that hasn't been pre-planned and reported to us in advance.

Its scalability seems to be fairly good. We're not having any real problems. With the way we're doing things now, it seems to be fairly scalable, and I don't think we'll have any problems.

In terms of our environment, we have operations predominantly in New York. Specifically, there are a few in Manhattan. We have a few in Queens and Suffolk County. We do have one location that is in Singapore, which is one of the smaller operations that we have, but it is predominantly located in the New York, Long Island region.

They were very friendly. They were very good. Generally, if there was a problem, I was able to talk to an engineer on their side relatively quickly, which was a good thing. I was able to very easily prove the point that I had with the calls and everything else, and it worked flawlessly. After I was able to show them the output and everything else, they were able to resolve the problem. I believe they were able to resolve it after six hours or eight hours of having the call with them. That was a pretty good response time in my opinion.

I would definitely rate them a 9 out of 10. Getting a 10 is almost unheard of. All things considered, support is one of the better parts of Auvik in my opinion.

Positive

We have been using OpsRamp. We got Auvik because one of our larger customers used OpsRamp and then changed to Auvik. In our case, my boss said, "Well, why don't we use it too? They seem to be really enthused by it." However, that customer doesn't use it with the same use case. They monitored a lesser number of sites and locations. Their use case is slightly different and their monitoring is not the same, so it works for them, but it doesn't necessarily have the same impact on us. 

In terms of the consolidation of tools, we are still using multiple software types. Auvik is what we use exclusively to monitor network areas. We are currently using OpsRamp with which we are monitoring network hardware as well. We also used Kaseya, which was the worst software for monitoring anything. That was the reason why we immediately binned it as fast as we could, but we also have a couple of other different software. We are using an application manager. We do have Zabbix, and we monitor some things through that as well. That's mostly the ESXi and servers that are on-prem. We are a data center, but we also provide managed services as well. We have a lot of different systems within a lot of different operating systems and environments. Some are PCI. Some are non-PCI. So, we do use other software, and Auvik fulfills some of the same monitoring purposes but for different clients or different hardware.

In terms of time-saving by switching to Auvik, the OpsRamp software has some faults and after the actual interface that I wrote was deployed and started to be used by our NOC, there have been time savings. However, getting to that point took a little bit more frustration in setting up compared to some of the other products that we've used.

We spent substantially less time with Auvik than with our previous solution. The initial setup was relatively straightforward, but my experience level is closer to DevOps than a traditional Systems Administrator. Between my own level of experience and my network team, it was fairly easy to get it deployed.

We were able to deploy it, but then we found that for our monitoring needs, it was a little bit lackluster. I had to code the webpage.

In terms of maintenance, with regard to the API and the coding work, maintenance is required, but it is infrequent.

We did it by ourselves.

There were quite a few options that we looked at. It has been a while, but there was a large selection of software that we've tried, both on-prem and cloud-based. We did monitor or look at NinjaRMM and ScriptLogic. There was Nagios for the on-prem and Applications Manager from ManageEngine. We checked out Enable as well.

When comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus the on-prem network monitoring solutions, they serve different use cases, but the cloud-based Auvik has its advantages due to the fact that we don't have to have firewall ports opened. We can very easily monitor various devices and various client sites without having to be concerned about any leakages because we have the accumulator of the agent gateway and whatever the terminology that they use. It definitely has its pros and cons in the sense of firewall access, deployment speed, and monitoring aspects. We can apply a template across all different types of devices, and the scanning works perfectly in that sense.

My advice would be dependent on how many sites you are monitoring and what you are intending on monitoring. For network equipment, Auvik is very good. For hardware and software, such as Linux, Windows, ESXi, and other similar things, it is very poor in those regards. That would be the major thing. If you are intending on having one tool to rule them all, I would probably steer you toward that limitation because it is quite limited in the endpoint monitoring and server monitoring, but it very well exceeds in network monitoring.

In terms of providing a single integrated platform, the API access to it is good. It does provide that, but the actual OS and software side of things that are not network devices is a little bit lacking.

Overall, I would rate Auvik a 7 out of 10.