Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use it for monitoring clients' networks.

One way it has improved our organization is with respect to managing switches for clients. We didn't have a solution before that would back up our clients' switches. So if a switch failed, and we didn't have a safe manual backup somewhere, we were scrambling to figure out what was configured on that switch: Were there VLANs, was there some advanced configuration that we don't have now and that we have to rebuild? With Auvik, we just grab and restore the config file.

There are fewer steps for us to do as an organization. We set the tool up and it does all the work for us. It's taking a lot of that manual leg work out. It has recaptured some time that we can give back to other tasks. I wouldn't say it's a huge amount, but it's still a good chunk of time.

And it has been extremely useful when it comes to visibility into remote and distributed networks, especially managing devices. Being able to log in to a switch without having to log in to a client-server, since you can do that from Auvik, has been extremely helpful for our IT team.

And our MTTR has been reduced by at least 50 percent because, as a switch goes down, we get the alert without having our client call us. We have the alert and we know what's wrong, which is great.

I like the switch device configuration backups.

Also, the monitoring and management functions of Auvik are pretty straightforward. I haven't really found too many issues with them. The ease of use is pretty valuable for us.

It also integrates with our ticketing system. We use ConnectWise and having that integration is valuable for billing and for all-around general management. Having one product that can integrate with everything is valuable because we don't have to worry about building out APIs or custom maps to do that for us.

Overall, it's very intuitive and very easy to find help on how to configure things. Their knowledge base is very deep. There are no issues there.

There is room for improvement on the development side. As new devices and models come out from different manufacturers, they aren't always supported by Auvik right away. For example, Sophos switches came out within the past year and we only have CLI support right now for those, so obviously Sophos configs cannot be backed up at this time through Auvik. It's an issue of being more proactive before products are released. I would like to see the manufacturers working with Auvik in advance, before new products come out, to make sure they're supported.

I have been using Auvik for three or four years now.

The stability has been great. Obviously, there are planned outages but they warn you about them ahead of time. There has been no issue where we needed to get in there and it was down.

The scalability seems great. We're still a small business and if we had larger clients our experience might be different, but for what we have it has been great.

We have it deployed in multiple locations. Each client's site has a collector installed and they have one, or maybe two, offices.

Auvik's technical support is a seven out of 10.

Neutral

This is really the first product that we've had that does full network monitoring. We used ConnectWise for machine management, but its network capabilities were somewhat limited. That's one reason we chose Auvik. The dynamic map of the network it provides and the ease of troubleshooting were additional reasons. It helps in pinpointing where issues are. When a switch is down we get that alert from Auvik and it definitely saves a lot of time for our help desk.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's definitely gotten better, but I didn't have any issues setting it up for our organization or for clients. The experience has been the same.

Out-of-the-box, it worked just as it should. After the collector is implemented, within the day the network mapping starts to populate. It's pretty much instantaneous.

Setting up other products was a lot more involved. Another product we used was SolarWinds, but it was something of a bear to set up. It's not really straightforward, out-of-the-box like Auvik. With Auvik we definitely saved on having to research licensing and then install software somewhere. We don't have to do any of that. It's all hosted.

For the most part, maintenance is handled by Auvik. Obviously, if new devices are added to the network, they have to be configured to talk to Auvik. But other than that, you just set it up and it's good to go, unless you change the credentials. Overall, we just set it up and sit back and watch it.

We did it in-house. It was just my boss and me involved.

The pricing seems fairly competitive with what may be out there. We haven't looked around too much, but the pricing is very reasonable.

We were set on Auvik right away.

Make sure that the networks you're going to be managing with Auvik all have managed switches and that those switches or devices are supported by Auvik.

Auvik does a fairly good job of mapping network topology. It's about 90 percent of what we need. There are some inconsistencies with port mapping. For example, it will discover that this switch is connected to this switch in this port, but sometimes it's inaccurate. There's some work to be done there, but overall, it's been extremely useful for us.

Auvik helps keep device inventories up to date, although that's not generally a time-consuming task with our clients. As an MSP, we handle small to medium-sized businesses. But if we were to grow, that feature would definitely help more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been three years since I started using Auvik.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We used PRTG as our network monitoring stack and SolarWinds network configuration manager. SolarWinds has hacked a couple of years ago, so we have been left with PRTG but no configuration management. PRTG doesn't do network monitoring very well, but it's suitable for server monitoring. I had known about Auvik for quite some time and decided to give it a look. We tested it and got insights into our network we had never seen before. We have three disparate physical networks, which provide insight into how everything is interconnected.

We have 55 users spread out over all our locations. Our sales staff is remote, but we have a primary site with two physical networks and a disaster recovery site co-located with one physical network.

Auvik has made things more accessible, and we're much more agile in dealing with problems when they arise. It has also given us an extraordinary amount of visibility into the connections of the physical network. We've found many issues that we didn't know existed before.

We've probably saved around an hour each week using Auvik, but it varies. We're typically looking at the network stack to troubleshoot a problem, which doesn't happen that often. I usually log into Auvik when there are alerts unless something is misbehaving. However, I log on to Auvik at least once or twice a week to look at some of the net flow things or get a feel for what's going on in the network in general.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up to date, which has saved us time. We're a company in the financial sector, so we regularly go through compliance audits. Having a centralized location for configuration management is helpful because we don't need to spend time doing that manually throughout the year. The cloud solution enables us to have our configurations offsite in case of a disaster. That is a benefit. 

Network mapping is the most valuable feature. It's handy to see which devices are connected to what ports. The net flow stuff and traffic insights are also helpful. The network mapping is a little better than average. That's one area where PRTG falls short. It's tough to use. Auvik makes that a bit easier. 

Auvik's initial setup and discovery were effortless. Tuning the alerts takes a little bit more work. Ease of use is essential. Usually, there has been some alert, or we need a specific piece of information promptly. It must be easy for us to find that information.

The integrated platform is a nice-to-have, but it's not essential because we only have three sites: primary, guest, and DR. I only use Auvik for the primary site. For an MSP, the integrated single pane of glass would be a huge deal. 

I would relegate the network map to its area instead of being the focus of every page. The network map is in the front and center of the UI. I would rather have the option to look at it when I need it instead of having it on every single page. It's beautiful, but I don't need it on every page.

We've been using Auvik for about four months now.

I have found Auvik extremely stable. They do a lot of scheduled maintenance, but it's almost always on the weekends, so it doesn't impact us. 

Auvik looks incredibly scalable. We scaled it out to three sites without any problem.

I rate Auvik support seven out of 10. I want to give them an eight, but eight seems too generous. 7.5 is kind of where I want to be.

Neutral

We previously used PRTG and SolarWinds Network Configuration Monitor. SolarWinds got hacked, and their software was janky at best. It worked, but only because we didn't put a lot of load on it. We finally decided to find a solution that worked. We got along without it for about a year before realizing we needed a solution.

PRTG is an excellent server monitoring solution but a poor network monitoring solution. It does the job, but it's not good at it. Auvik is a fantastic network monitoring tool that does everything PRTG does, plus all the things that SolarWinds and CM did. It took the place of two different products. PRTG is usable, but it would take me 10 minutes to do something Auvik can do in a minute. Auvik is light years better in terms of usability and simplicity.

Setting up Auvik was surprisingly easy to do. The initial installation took a day or two, but it took a couple of weeks to start seeing the results I wanted.  The network map started to populate within 24 hours. It was so much easier than PRTG was and a lot faster.

I deployed it by myself. The involved tasks included setting up virtual machine collectors, modifying the firewall and ACL rules, setting up accounts, doing SSO, going through the training, and training my team.

I did the setup myself with a little bit of help from Auvik support.

It took a little time to get it up and running, but now that it's running, it hums along and does its job. I don't have hard data about our ROI, but we've seen value from Auvik. For example, say we had a bandwidth problem where traffic was slowing down on one of our guest sites. It would take me 15 to 20 minutes in PRTG to look at the net flows and figure out who was doing what. It takes me a minute or two in Auvik. That is a huge time saver.

I was under the impression that it was costly in a larger environment, but I was very wrong. It's pretty reasonable. The pricing is much better than I thought it was because it's based on network devices, not devices. That was a key thing that I did not know.

I like that it's flexible. If we have a device that we need to spin up for a month, we pay a little extra that month, and it goes back down. We don't have to renegotiate the contract or pay that amount forever.

We also considered Zabbix, but that seemed like a ton of work.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I've heard of Auvik for 10 years, but I always shied away from it because of the size and complexity of the networks I work with. I figured it would not be cost-effective because Auvik is a big name. However, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be when I looked at the quotes. The value for the money is high, so if you think you can't afford it, look into it anyway because you might be surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We used it for network monitoring and network health. We had it deployed at all of our sites. We are an MSP, and we've got about 30 different managed clients. All of them had an Auvik collector at each site to monitor the network for changes or infrastructure health. We have an RMM solution for remote monitoring and management of our workstations and servers, but that tool doesn't monitor network infrastructure. 

Its monitoring and management functions are very easy to use. With some of the other solutions, their built-in database of OID markers isn't great, and you need to manage all of your own MIBs. With a lot of competitors, if a device isn't in its catalog, we need to go and add it to the catalog ourselves, which is a big challenge, whereas Auvik has a phenomenal database behind it, and it is generic, which is another benefit of Auvik. It's not vendor dependent. So, whether you're using Cisco switches, Ubiquiti switches, NetGear switches, TP-Link devices, Hyper-V or VMware, FortiGate firewalls, or Barracuda firewalls, Auvik typically supports them. It has very broad support.

Its integrations are exceptional. The multitenancy in it is also phenomenal. It's very easy to jump from one client to another while also keeping those clients separate. So, if you have someone who is only managing a couple of sites, that's all they can see. They can't see everything else, but someone with a little bit more access can see all of the sites. Being an MSP, we have a lot of different sites that we're accessing. When we have a co-managed environment, a tech for client A can go in and see all the information relating to client A, but they won't be able to see anything for client B.

The time that it has saved is almost impossible to measure. For example, we had a client, and their firewall had failed. We picked up a new firewall. We were going to go set it up, but the last backup that we had on the client's server was from a year and a half prior. It was well out of date, and it was missing a lot of the recent changes. With Auvik, we were able to go in and download the latest backup and restore it instantly. It has saved all those hours that we would have spent troubleshooting or finding missing rules, as well as the management time of having a tech periodically go in and do all of those backups. Because the whole system is automated, it's very hard to measure how much time we saved, but it is a lot of time.

It is the best in class for visualizing the network mapping/topology of the organizations we were monitoring. It is extremely intuitive. One of the big things is everything is all color-coded. So, whether a connection is layer one or layer three, it is very easily highlighted with a blue line versus a gray line. If it is wired versus wireless, there is a solid line versus a dotted line. All of the device types have their own category associated with them. So, if you're looking for a firewall, you just look for the red dot, and you can pick that up pretty easily. If you're looking for a switch, you look for the orange dot. Finding devices on it is very intuitive.

They also had a great feature of being able to collapse and group some of the devices. If you had ten security cameras connected to one switch, rather than having ten little black dots on it, it was able to group them into one item saying security cameras, and you can click on it and expand. It's something that I didn't think about that much when I was using the product because it seemed normal and intuitive. Moving away to a different product that doesn't have the same mapping level or the same features has made the switch a little bit more difficult. You can still get there at the end of the day where you can find the devices, but it is just not as easy.

It was absolutely helpful in reducing repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. That goes back to things like backups. The fact that it would automatically go through and do the backups, and we didn't need to spend the time to go through and check that was phenomenal. The remote internet connection checks were very useful. ISPs can be very difficult to work with when you're trying to discuss service or packet loss or interruptions. Rather than telling the ISP " We're experiencing this issue," the reports coming out of Auvik gave us a great ability to go to the ISP and say, "Hey, here's some more data. We're dropping packets at such and such rate." Auvik gives you historical benchmarks and reports, and because we already have got the history of it, to troubleshoot, the ISP doesn't have to start gathering reports from that point.

If you have a client that has two locations and a data center, Auvik can group all of those collectors into one client, and you can have a larger view of all three locations and how they interact with each other in one overarching network map, whereas Domotz splits it into three separate locations. Domotz is great in the sense that you get one flat rate per site, but what it won't do is that it won't integrate those sites together. They would be three separate agents that need monitoring within Domotz.

The remote access feature was very useful. If a client's server was offline, we didn't need to VPN in or go to the site to turn on the servers. Auvik gave us the ability to turn on the server remotely without having to go anywhere. It saved us time on that side of things. Over the four years that we were working with it, on average, it has saved us about 150 hours.

Auvik has a phenomenal granular access model where you can even make your own custom role. If you have a co-op student and you want them to only have read access, that's easy to set up. If there is a more experienced person, but they're only allowed certain sites, it is very easy to restrict their access.

Auvik's SSO integration is one of the best I've ever seen. When we were first adopting SSO, Auvik was the first vendor we integrated it with because Auvik was able to get SSO set up where it's one per user or per tech. It's not a big bang migration, and you can have a trial with a couple of techs first, and if it works, roll it out to more.

We had integrated Auvik into ITGlue. When we're onboarding a new client, rather than having to manually add each device into ITGlue, after Auvik has scanned the network and picked up all the devices, we can import all the devices from there. From an accuracy standpoint, being able to import devices saved us from the manual entry and saved us from user errors, such as mistyping a map address or something else.

It definitely reduced the mean time to resolution. The spanning-tree notifications from it were helpful. We've had a couple of instances where a client found a cable that they thought was just loose, and they were being helpful by plugging it in somewhere, which created a loop on the switch. We got to know about it from Auvik. We knew which port it was plugged into and what the solution was to fix it instantly. It reduced our mean time to resolution to about a quarter of the time. We were able to fix things that would've taken an hour to resolve in 10-15 minutes.

Auvik is phenomenal for network monitoring as well as for other functionalities such as remote access or backups. A really cool feature that it has is that it takes a backup of all of the configurations automatically. Auvik periodically, most probably on a daily basis, logs into all the switches and firewalls that you have on-site to see if there is a change, and when there is a change, it does a new backup of the device. It logs changes for you. If you start experiencing some issues, you can go back to those logs to say, "Oh, there is a change made last week, Thursday," and with Auvik, you can just roll back to that snapshot nicely and quickly.

Its UI is really intuitive. It's really easy to get a hold of it. It's very easy for non-technical people to understand. One of our problems with some of the competitors is that they've got a fairly grayscale UI. It sounds very pedantic, but the color scheme of Auvik made identifying which devices were which and how they were connected to each other easy. It was a very useful feature that is underrated. 

Another feature that worked really well for us was the remote access tool. If we needed to log into one of the network devices, we didn't have to jump on a server, workstation, or local device, or connect through a VPN. Auvik was able to give us direct UI access to any device on the network.

It is amazing in keeping device inventories up-to-date. It mostly keeps them up to date as things change. There were a couple of hiccups where a device would get replaced and the mapping would break, and we'd have to go in and fix the mapping. It was with devices that Auvik couldn't fully discover or devices that would change frequently, such as cell phones or other devices on the network that are dynamic and change all the time. The integration would just show up with an IP address and a MAC address. There was no other information in them, which wasn't very helpful. They were the devices that Auvik wasn't able to discover fully. If they had full SNMP or SSH credentials and Auvik knew what the device was and it was matched correctly in Auvik, then Auvik could push it through.

It is not at all cheap. We migrated to Domotz because of its pricing.

We used it for about four years, and we just migrated away from it.

It was probably one of the best ever. I went to school with three other guys. When we graduated, three of them went to work for Auvik support. Full props to the support team. They are phenomenal. I would rate them an eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement. I do wish that they had more open-source pfSense support. There were a couple of things that I was hoping would come out as features but they didn't.

Positive

We didn't have a solution in place. Auvik was our initial solution, but now, we have migrated away from it to Domotz because of pricing. What really triggered it for us was that our firewall of choice is pfSense, which is open source. Auvik, by default, would categorize pfSense as a Linux server, which is essentially what it is. We would then manually categorize it as a firewall. Firewalls are on the list of billable devices for Auvik. However, we weren't being billed for them because Auvik was originally categorizing them as Linux servers. When we were onboarding the product, we mentioned this to our account manager, and we told him that none of our firewalls are being categorized as billable devices. The account manager at the time said that it was a bank error in our favor, and because they were not able to categorize it properly, they were not going to bill us for those devices.

We then costed out our offering with it and had that set with all of our clients. Recently, Auvik was able to fix that bank error, which essentially doubled all of our prices. This makes for a very hard conversation to go to clients and say that we need to double our prices to them because our vendor has doubled our prices. That was a challenge. 

I'm okay if you're going to double our prices, but the support for pfSense, for which they weren't billing us before, is fairly limited. With most of the firewalls, if you have site-to-site VPNs, they show up on the network map as a site-to-site VPN or remote access VPN. Auvik will monitor the usage on those to say, "You have 10 remote access connections, and everything is okay, or you're up to 50 people connecting remotely, and you're starting to get degraded service." All of these additional firewall monitoring features weren't available on pfSense, which was fine because they weren't billing us for it. Now that they wanted to start billing us for these devices, I had asked them if we were going to get support for all of these additional features. They said no because they are not looking to expand their pfSense development. That was frustrating. So, it basically came down to whether we double our costs and pass that onto all of our clients, or whether we look for an alternative, such as Domotz, that doesn't have as many features and is not as pretty in a sense, but it halves our cost. So, we ended up halving our costs instead of doubling them.

As part of onboarding, we got talking with some of the Domotz dev team, and all of the features that were missing have been added as feature requests. We're working with their engineering team to implement some of the features that are not quite there yet.

It was significantly easier than onboarding Domotz. Virtually, every alert or trigger that we could have wanted was built in by default. We didn't have to set up custom alerts, custom triggers, or their base alerting standards. In fact, if anything, it was too much. We had to turn off some of the alerts that were misfiring or not a hundred percent accurate, but there was nothing that we wanted that we couldn't get out of the box.

Its setup was easier. Everything was a lot easier. Even onboarding of new devices was easier. Auvik would identify them a lot easier. Our current solution is a lot more finicky and has more manual elements to it. It's definitely something that Auvik was better at.

Its time-to-value is instant. Before we even onboarded the product, we could see the value in it just from the demo.

Auvik is definitely one of the more expensive platforms. It is not cheap at all. If cost is an issue, Auvik isn't on the table at all, but they do have a fantastic solution for the cost. If budget isn't a concern, they are probably the market leader.

We migrated away from it to a competitor called Domotz because of pricing. Auvik bills per what they call a billable device, which is a firewall, a switch, and a controller. All of those count as billable devices. Domotz, as an alternative, bills per site. It's a flat fee for the whole site. So, whether you've got 3 switches or 10 switches, it's the same cost.

Auvik's premium product has a couple of other features with regard to NetFlow and some of the traffic analysis on that side. They've also got Syslog now in their premium product. However, we found their premium product to be fairly expensive. The whole product is very expensive, even for their standard offering. So, to bump up to premium, it's a lot more expensive. We trialed it for a bit. It was very useful but not worth the extra cost.

In terms of comparing Auvik’s cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, it is a tricky balance because while the Auvik database and the backend are all cloud-based, you still have an on-premise collector doing some of the management for you. The management of it is cloud-based, but there is an on-premise component to it. There are some alternatives, such as PRTG or Zabbix. They're all on-premise alternatives, but they are very much a pain to manage, particularly when you have multiple sites and multiple clients. Having the backend cloud-based is very useful. However, that's a feature that they share with Domotz. Domotz is cloud-based in the same way.

Overall, I'd give Auvik a seven out of ten. Tech-wise, it's a ten, but its pricing is a very big barrier to adoption.

We use Auvik to discover devices on the network, to get a good layout of the network, and to have the solution back up the configuration of certain network devices. We have it deployed to each individual client so that we can map out each of their networks. When a device breaks, we get an alert from Auvik, and then we deal with it. We have the alerts set up for high-value tasks or high-importance devices, such as a network switch going down. We use something else for remote management, but Auvik does all the other work.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform for our organization which is super helpful.

Before Auvik, our network was a little bit of a mess. Sometimes we would use an application, and other times we wouldn't use anything. We wouldn't know anything about the network. As a result, it was all over the board.

The solution gave us the ability to see the network's layout, which gave us a better understanding of how it worked. Auvik can help identify where a device is plugged in and how it is accessing the network. This can help troubleshoot any issues with devices not working properly.

Auvik's mapping is great. It is one of the better-looking mappings that I have seen. Having the mapping available visually is great. It is super helpful for the techs to be able to pop open Auvik and see where everything is plugged in.

Auvik has affected our team's visibility into our remote and distribution networks globally in a positive way, making the network easier to manage.

It helps keep our device inventories up to date. When a device breaks, we get an alert from Auvik, and then we deal with it. We have the alerts set up for high-value tasks or high-importance devices, such as a network switch going down. We don't use Auvik for low-priority tasks at all.

I love that Auvik can automatically back up the configuration of switches and firewalls.

It's not difficult to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik, but it's not entirely intuitive either. Once we get the hang of it, it's simple enough.

We have other solutions that keep our inventory up to date, therefore using Auvik to keep inventory up to date for us is redundant. However, I see how other people would use the solution because it scans the network constantly and keeps the inventory up to date. Auvik can save time. 

Auvik requires almost zero maintenance.

I would recommend fixing the visual layout of the screen. I dislike not being able to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. To zoom in and out, we have to use the plus and minus buttons on the side of the screen. I also recommend not having the device constantly refresh while we're looking at it. At times, we'll be trying to figure out where things are and devices will suddenly start moving back and forth. Sometimes we want the information to pause so we can check the layout.

I wish there was a way to reduce the cost somehow.

I have been using Auvik for a few years.

Auvik is very reliable. I've seen the solution break a couple of times, but it's rare.

The scalability is great. It can handle small networks and humongous networks.

I had a question that was answered by technical support quickly.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very simple, we installed the agent and let it scan out of the box.

It takes under ten minutes for Auvik to start network mapping once the collector is implemented.

The implementation was completed in-house using just me.

Auvik helped speed up network troubleshooting. And having the layout can help us figure out where devices are when somebody's unsure, remotely. The solution definitely improved our time.

Depending on the situation we occasionally see a reduction in our MTTR. If there's a network issue, Auvik can help with troubleshooting, significantly reducing our time.

Auvik is expensive but worth the cost for a network management solution.

It can get expensive quickly if we monitor a lot of devices, which is unfortunate because we have a lot of devices to monitor.

Auvik is definitely the leader in the visual layout field. We looked at SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, but it didn't have the feature set or reliability that Auvik offers.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Auvik is deployed across multiple locations. We're an MSP, and we have multiple clients, each with separate networks. We installed an Auvik agent for each of those clients.

Before using Auvik we must have all the credentials in our hands. It makes the deployment easier.

I am a network specialist. I use Auvik for troubleshooting where something may have gone offline. 

We utilize it for learning. We utilize it to do various levels of monitoring in terms of whether things are up, if a port is flapping, or if there is a configuration error. We also utilize it to gather data about things on various networks that we administer. As we have thousands of endpoints, it helps greatly with quick insights and with things that otherwise would take a lot of manual digging.

We are an MSP, and my focus is networking. By implementing Auvik Network Management, we wanted to gain a good stance on insight into the network. We also use it for troubleshooting, but it was not a problem to be solved to begin with.

I have a networking background, so I found Auvik Network Management to be a great product right from the start.

Auvik Network Management has been extremely helpful for entry-level technicians, especially those with no networking background.

Auvik Network Management has definitely reduced the mean time to resolution. Things that we would have had to dig manually are presented in an easy-to-digest and accessible format. We can access the information from the cloud from anywhere we are.

The visibility that it provides depends on how you manage it. If you implement it perfectly, you will have 100% visibility. If you understand the benefits and limitations of the various probes and SNMP that they use, it works well. It is exactly as good as your implementation.

Auvik Network Management does not allow us to spend less time on the setup, but it allows us to spend less time on the maintenance of the solution and issue resolution.

It is pretty responsive to whether things are up or down.

The conventions that they use for the various menus are not super intuitive. They make sense after you realize how things are laid out, but I have to do a lot of digging to find the things that I am looking for.

The map itself is a little clunky in terms of zooming in, zooming out, and moving around because you have to use the manual on-screen buttons as opposed to being able to click and drag. I know that it is just a front-end graphic implementation, but it is slightly clunky to move around the map. However, all the information is there and presented in a very succinct fashion. It would be nice to be able to move around the map a little better. There should be more convenience from the drag, scroll, and zoom standpoints. 

I have been using Auvik Network Management for half a year.

It is very stable, but the interface is somewhat slow.

We have a number of small to large deployments, so its scalability is excellent.

The support guys are absolutely phenomenal, but they are highly technical, and they also expect other people to be so. We are an MSP, so we move fast. If I call support, it is because I am looking for a quick answer. It is a good thing that they teach you how to fix it yourself or where the resources are, but sometimes, we are looking for quick answers rather than being educated.

They are extremely quick at responding. They are very good at that.

Positive

There is a tool called NetsTools Pro. It is a device, and it performs some similar functions. I have used SolarWinds products. I have used too many tools for network monitoring.

Auvik puts a lot of the features that were present in these other tools into one great package.

It is deployed on the cloud, and there are appliances present in all of our customer sites.

Its deployment was easy for me because I have a networking background. For non-technical people, it is easier than many solutions.

In terms of maintenance, it requires monitoring in terms of making sure that the credentials stay updated for the network probes. If nothing changes, it does not require much maintenance.

We did it all in-house. Per-client, one person can handle the deployment.

I believe we have a special arrangement with them because we, as an MSP, take care of some of their technical services.

To implement Auvik effectively, I would advise comprehending some of the fundamentals of network monitoring that is vendor agnostic. Have a basic knowledge of SNMP and how ICMP works. You should be able to pass traffic through various network firewalls and junctions, and you should understand the limitations and advantages of any network in order to implement Auvik effectively.

Overall, I would rate Auvik Network Management a nine out of ten.