Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We are on MSP with multiple clients. We set up a site for each client, and that way we can review and verify all their network equipment: firewalls, switches, routers, even servers, and VMware ESXi. We also get alerts and notifications when everything is disconnected so that we can quickly find the reason and make sure clients are not affected.

Auvik has really improved our time of response when a client is down, or there is a problem with a firewall server. Before, we didn't know when a client was down, or it was really difficult to know. We pretty much had to wait for the client to tell us, "Hey, we are down, what's happening?" One or two hours could pass while we worked on finding out what was going on. But now, if anything happens, we get the alert and we get everything resolved. It has helped us to make efficient use of our time and to act more quickly.

It is also very useful because one of the low-level tasks is monitoring. Because everything is up to date, high-level managers and employees can focus on more important things.

There are a number of features I really like. One is the graphical map where you can literally see all the connections: where they come from with respect to the firewall, when they go to the switches, and how the network is set up.

That network visualization is really cool. I've been working here for a year now, and the first time I saw it I said, "Whoa, this is so cool." Sometimes, when you start working with a client, you don't have a visual representation of anything. Your boss tells you, "Okay, they have several switches and firewalls," and you have to draw that in your mind, and it can be inaccurate. With Auvik, the map is accurate. It is great and always updating. That's definitely one of the best features of Auvik.

Another feature that I really like is the fact that it's very easy to remote into the firewalls, switches, and ESXi, to manage the appliances. It's also really easy to use the monitoring and management functions. Everything is shown very well. You can immediately see the options for the appliance, including the documentation and the remote management. It's really easy to use.

That ease of use is extremely important to us. It is one of the cornerstones of our operations, in addition to our tickets which are on another platform. With Auvik, we monitor the heart of every client's operations. It's really important for us that the Auvik is working well and accurately, and that we don't get any false alerts, because that would make us waste money and time finding out what's happening. So far, it has been great and a very important part of our operations.

And I really like the alerts. They are very accurate and fast. The moment that anything is down, we can act right away.

I don't know if it has integrations with ticketing systems so that alerts would get to the ticketing system right away. That would be a good feature to add.

I've been using Auvik for about eight months. I use Auvik every day.

The stability is good.

The scalability is great too. It's really easy to add new infrastructure, new appliances, and they will show up because the collector is already installed.

I've only used their support once, and it was fine. It's okay but not perfect because I would prefer that they have longer operating hours. That's an area for them to improve on because sometimes, on the weekend, we have problems and technical difficulties and we cannot reach support. If we could have extended support on the weekends during normal hours, and even a bit more extended, that would be great.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward because the tutorial is very good. It gives you several options and it guides you. And their knowledge base, if you have any kind of problem, is pretty comprehensive. You can get it to work, even if, like me, you are not an experienced technician. I have implemented Auvik for five clients now, and it's all good.

Depending on the size of the client, it takes 10 minutes to 15 for the network to start populating. For a midsize client, it might take 30 minutes to have it completely set up, but even that is an extreme amount of time. Generally, it's even better, about 10 to 15 minutes.

The deployment can be done by one person, no problem. It could be a junior technician. They just need to install the collector, set up the correct services and ports, set up the credentials for the appliances, and that's about it, as an overview. The technician needs the appropriate permissions and credentials for the appliances.

Almost all of our clients have a firewall connected to a modem with one or two switches, most of the time Cisco, connected to those firewalls. Then everything else is connected to switches, including servers, printers, computers, and workstations. The switch will have VLANs so that we can segment the networks and do a proper installation, but that's pretty much it. And on the servers there will often be VMware ESXi that we monitor with Auvik.

There hasn't been any maintenance, as far as I know. We have never had to manually update the collector.

The time-to-value is right away. When you set up Auvik with your very first client you see its value with the graphical interface, the ease of remoting in, and the alerts.

Try all the features, investigate it and be curious about everything that Auvik can offer. I've been using it for several months, but I don't think I have used all the features. If you test it, my advice would be to try all the options.

I use Auvik to monitor, check, and access all network licenses for different companies, including firewalls, servers, and other devices. The Auvik collector is deployed on the servers and in the management station. The agent collects all the information in the network and sends it to Auvik. Auvik's network map will display all of the devices. If a device is offline, it won't show, but the collector will automatically add it to the Auvik platform when it comes online.

I had never used software like Auvik. In the past, I would manually input the credentials and IP address of a single device from my machine and access the device, which took a lot of time. A task that previously took 40-45 minutes can be completed in less than five minutes with Auvik. It reduces the time needed to check a device for a single company, so we can act quickly before a disaster happens.

Auvik enabled me to automate a lot of repetitive tasks, saving me about an hour each day. It also improved our overall visibility by helping us to visualize the entire network topology and it made troubleshooting much easier because we can see what is happening with a device or throughout the entire network. When we receive an alert, we can look at the network topology to see if the issue is isolated to one device or if it's affecting other components. This gives us a better understanding of the problem's overall impact. 

The solution has also freed our team members up to do other tasks because they no longer need to check all the devices manually. We can do other tasks while Auvik is running in the background and monitoring the situation for us. Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date. When the inventory is added to Auvik, it keeps a register of all the information. It will notify us if we need to update or change something. 

What I like most about Auvik is that I can access all devices from a single location, and I don't need to input or remember all the information of the device like the IP address or the credentials.

Auvik sends lots of alerts if something is happening with a certain device. For example, if a device is offline, it will send you an email to say you need to check that. It will notify you if Auvik sees something irregular, like a process using excessive CPU or memory. Configuring it is somewhat difficult, but the monitoring is simple. It's essential because we would need to manually research if something is happening with a device, and that takes a long time.

It's fairly simple to see all the devices in the topology. The only difficult part is to add the devices themselves Auvik won't discover devices automatically. We need to add them manually and input the credentials. After that, it's effortless to examine and check all the devices and troubleshoot a situation by only looking at the topology.

The network visualization is highly intuitive because you can select all the devices from the top to see the firewall, switches, and endpoint devices, like all the computers and servers. You can see all the connections between all those devices. It is handy for a network engineer to see all the connections and pick a device to see its information.

Onboarding devices could be easier. When you first add a device to the Auvik platform, you need to add each one by hand. It would be nice if they could automate the process where we only need to run a script. 

I have been using Auvik for nearly a year.

Auvik is fairly stable. We rarely have any issues with the platform or installing the collectors on the devices. 

We can apply Auvik to everything, and I don't see any limit for it to keep growing. You can implement it in any company on any network, and it will give you all the information about your devices.

I rate Auvik support a nine out of ten. We once had an issue installing the collector on a server. It was on a virtual machine, but Auvik's support was helpful in that case. They responded quickly and were kind. 

Positive

I wasn't present for the initial setup, but I have deployed Auvik on other sites that we need to integrate. It was a little complex in the beginning because I was unfamiliar with the platform. My coworkers had to explain how this works, including how to integrate a device and check all the logs. Once I learned how to do that, it was pretty straightforward because it only involves a few steps. The network map starts to populate within 10 minutes. 

In terms of maintenance, Auvik is lightweight on our side because the vendor handles all of the upgrades. When there is scheduled maintenance, we usually see a message at the top of the Auvik platform saying that there will be an interruption of service. 

I rate Auvik a nine out of ten. The only difficult part about this solution is the installation because it's something new. Everything goes smoothly after the first step.

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.

Our use cases would be mapping our network automatically, monitoring events to get stats and trends, spotting any impending issues before they get noticed by our users so we can address them, and doing device reconfiguration. 

Auvik automatically updates network topology. Our network team members in our operations all dig it. It is just something that makes finding devices easy, e.g., if you don't necessarily remember where it is, the IP, and so on. Especially if something needs to be reconfigured, it makes it really easy to go to the LAN or network in question, find the device, remotely get into it, and then make whatever necessary changes.

The goal is to have Auvik help us put out fires before people or end users even know that there is a problem. That hasn't really happened that much, other than power outages where we can get somebody en route, which makes us look like we know what we are doing.

It is kind of a toss up between its nice interface and ease of deployment. 

It is pretty easy to use for the type of product that it is and what its use case is. Anyone who is going to use such a thing generally should have a fair bit of knowledge about networking, devices, etc. 

Auvik is excellent when it comes to its network discovery capabilities. It has good stats. We can look at our network and visually see what is going on, if there are any issues, and just the entire topography of how it is laid out. It generates the network map automatically, so that is not something we have to go do. It just lets you see things, maybe not necessarily at a glance, but close to it. 

We were able to trim down and get a decent signal-to-noise ratio on notifications and events, because these devices generate a ton of telemetry. Otherwise, it's like things are always crying, "Wolf!" That has been a problem, not just in this niche, but other categories as well. If you get too much stuff that isn't anything to look at, then you will quit looking at it.

The automation of the network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. They can see if it is something as simple as a power issue in a wing of a building. This lets them pick the low hanging fruit. Then, if a configuration needs a more skilled person, they can easily escalate it.

There are a couple things that you need to do, and then Auvik provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. It backs up the configurations, and that has been awesome, which makes it possible and practical. Otherwise, it is really difficult because we would then have to go from device to device, get it to spit out its config, copy it to the clipboard, paste it to a file, and organize it all. That is all now automatic, which is great.

Generally, once stuff gets configured, it is fine. Previously, it was a matter of remembering to get the copy of the config and save it someplace. Depending upon the workload, sometimes that got put on the back burner. Now, because of this solution's automatic, out-of-the-box device configurations, I don't worry about it.

I would like firmware/software updates for hardware, for at least switches and routers. I already have the feature request in, and it is on their list of things to try and do. Cisco stuff has been notoriously and historically kind of a pain to do, and that is what we use primarily. So, that would be a wonderful thing to get, as it is a device-by-device process. It would be nice to be able to get through that at least in a less fiddly way. It is a pretty manual process now.

We have been using it for a little less than a year.

It is very stable. We have had one very minor incident with logins. They had that resolved in 15 minutes to half an hour, tops.

There is almost no maintenance required from our staff. Compared with other solutions that I have used, the level of maintenance affecting my operations is much better with Auvik. I feel like I can trust it a little more than some of the things that I configured myself. I just never had the time to polish those other solutions out the way that they really needed to be done.

I haven't run into any issues with it. I suspect it could handle multiples of more devices than we have in our network. It doesn't seem to break a sweat. Hopefully, they have enough scalability on their end that it won't impact us unless other customer stuff impacts us.

The technical support has been great.

We have used different open source things, like Nagios, but they were just so configuration heavy. We basically got rid of them. We didn't have anything in a while prior to getting this solution, but now we have Auvik. I do kind of miss having that early warning system, but I just didn't have the time to configure anything, because that is a very non-trivial thing for a lot of those systems. Having sufficient time to be able to spend on it, that was really the problem. This alleviated that completely.

I happened to run across an ad somewhere, and it's like, "Hey, I want to look at that. If this solution is half as good as it claims to be, this might be for us," and if it was at a reasonable cost.

The deployment was very simple. The network discovery accuracy was great. Other systems like this that I have worked with required a lot of configuration. This did not take much effort at all. The initial deployment was quick. We had something kind of up and running in an hour, if that long.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution. Luckily, we have a pretty stable network; we don't have a lot of issues. However, it can be trivial to just get to a device. For example, if we have to change a port setting or something on a switch from a printer to a phone or VLAN assignments, it is now quick and easy. Assuming everything goes well once you get to the device, it probably cuts the, "What was that device IP?" thing down by 80%.

We have saved more in time and efficiency than any hard monetary savings.

It took us just a few days to get a return on value from the whole implementation.

The pricing is by device. We have 75 devices, which is a little more than we really need. With school and volume discounts, it is still a little over $16,000 annually. Our WiFi access points are not being billed, but all our switches and routers are. 

Usually, I'm cheap. We are a school so I have to be cheap. Therefore, when there is an open source solution, I am usually reluctant to look at commercial things. Now, with a little more leadership support as well as technology becoming more mission-critical than ever before, it is part of the deliverable to produce an educated student. So, they are willing to invest more. It wasn't crazy expensive, but in the past, it would've been a hard sell. 

In addition to Auvik, I also looked at SolarWinds and HPE OneView, which was breathtakingly expensive. We mostly went with Auvik because of its ease of use for non-technical people. The ease of its configuration and deployment was big. Those were huge factors. We have added so much technology of all sorts in the last year or two that mental bandwidth has become an issue. For example, how much time can I even hope to spend on a given project, which might suffer greatly from mental interruptions.

This solution has stopped me from looking at other stuff. 

I don't want to really add any more complexity to our environment, but if we do, it'll get picked up and mapped automatically. So, once we get the device online and configured, it will just show up.

Auvik has been really handy. I really can't say enough good things about it. I have just been really impressed with the quality of the product, support, and training. It just works well.

I see a lot of value in Auvik. I was really happy with it very early on. I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10. I can't say enough good things about this solution.

We use it for monitoring our entire network. We head off a lot of problems with some early alerting on either storage or high utilization, thus we can get in front of problems before anybody notices. We have the solution tied into our help desk system so the alerts open up help desk tickets, then the guys look at it from there. We use it for troubleshooting devices that are not reachable. We also use it for backing up our firewalls and logging into all of our network equipment.

It has cut down on some of our major issues. We are very reliant on our printers, printing title documents, etc. The early alerting on those printers, i.e., when they are having a problem, has been enormous. For example, if somebody has a closing going on, we can avoid them having issues with printers.

The solution helps us put out fires before people or end users even know there is a problem.

The solution automatically updates network topology. The network topology has been great, not only just for troubleshooting things, but also for training. I can show newer or not-so-experienced guys what a network looks like from the top down. Also, we have used the network diagrams for our audits, where we just kind of print it out and hand it to them. It satisfies all of those requirements.

The automation of network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. We have our map up on a board in the office.

The alerting is the most important feature. 

Once it is set up, it is very easy to use.

Its network discovery capabilities are awesome.

TrafficInsights has given us better visibility. In the past, the TrafficInsights feature has helped show us where our system is experiencing performance issues. We have had high firewall utilization reported, and it appeared as, "These are the traffic insights that you are asking about." We had some high firewall usage issues. We were able to take it down to a single device that was copying files that it shouldn't have been at the time. We were able to find that using the TrafficInsight dashboard.

A room for improvement would be integration with our help desk system.

At my company, we have been using Auvik for a year. Personally, I have been using it for three years.

Stability has been great.

The maintenance requirement is just adding new devices and occasionally configuring a new appliance that it doesn't recognize, such as giving it a name. There is a lot less maintenance with this solution compared to other solutions that I have used.

Its scalability is good. There are no issues with it. We have Auvik loaded on everything.

There are four of us who work with it. I pretty much handle the maintenance of the solution. They tell me what needs to be done, then we kind of do it together. They are mostly just in Auvik looking at the alerts, etc.

The technical support has been fantastic. We used them a lot in the beginning. Recently, we have not used them as much. We use them now for adding a new site, which was a billing question. The technical support has been able to quickly answer everything that we have sent to them.

It was a straight-up replacement for PRTG. We switched to Auvik for the ability to do the network mapping as well as the ease of using the network mapping. Switching solutions didn't save us money on licensing, though. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took three months from the beginning to have it running the way it is right now.

The setup time for this solution is similar to other solutions that I have used or evaluated.

It took some assistance from Auvik's support desk, but it was easy to set up.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution for the issues that it alerts us on.

Auvik provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. We didn't have to do anything. It was all out-of-the-box. The automation of the backups saves us an hour a device. We were backing up once a month previously, and that took about half an hour to an hour per device. We have about 30 devices. So, it has saved us approximately 15 hours a month because we don't have to do this manually anymore. It is saving us about $18,000 to $20,000 a year.

Easily, within the first few months, you will start getting your money back. It has saved us a lot more than it cost us.

The pricing is in line with everybody else, but you get so much more. 

Auvik is billed by network device. They bill our firewalls and networks. However, there are devices that are not subject to billing in our environment, such as PCs, phones, and printers.

We did look at other solutions. We looked at PRTG's newer solution and HPE's native solution. We went with Auvik because of the network mapping and its ease of use. I also have experience using it from a previous job.

When you are stuck, I would recommend using Auvik support or their professional services, which are very good. It makes life so much easier.

Auvik TrafficInsights shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, but this is not critical for us.

In the network monitoring world, the solution is 10 out of 10. It is the best.

I use it on a daily basis to monitor the portion of my network that is backbone.

I have cloud access, but the collectors are on-prem.

It allows me to see a lot of problems before customers do. By the time they're calling me to say, "Hey, I've got an issue", I can usually tell them I have already seen it and I'm already working on it. There are many times that I'll get information on the screen or I'll see something change and know about an issue even before I get a ticket or a phone call. The most recent one was that I had a site go down on a weekend. Because we're a Monday-through-Friday company, I came in early on Monday morning and, by the time others showed up, I was pretty close to having everything resolved. They called me to say, "Hey, this isn't working," and I said, "Yep, I know. I've already been working on it and it will be up shortly."

It frees up some of my time for higher-value tasks. The first thing I do when I come in, every day, is pull up Auvik. In that single pane, I can see what my network status is and whether any site is down or if it's showing me there are issues. If not, then I can move on to whatever else I need to accomplish for that day.

Another benefit is that it automatically updates network topology. When I change out parts of the network or upgrade to a new device, once I've got it set up with SNMP, it automatically reconfigures what I see on the screen, including where everything is connected. I don't have to do anything to make that happen. That saves me a lot of time.

And when it comes to the backbone, it has decreased the mean time to resolution in a significant way. And because it provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration for backups, for almost everything I have, it saves me time, a good 10 hours a month, and on the order of a couple of thousand dollars a month.

The most useful features are that it allows me to see and monitor my entire network solution in one place. I can see if everything is up or down and whether I have any issues. That single-pane aspect is helpful.

In addition, so far I have found it to be super-easy to use. Since the setup and getting everything running, it has been really easy to use. Setting up collectors for the network discovery capabilities was super-easy as well. Once we did that, it pretty much took care of itself.

And the TrafficInsights feature not only shows me network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, but it gives me which device is using the most traffic. It ranks devices by which are using the most CPU, memory, storage, and it keeps those up to date, non-stop. Most of the time I just have the main window open and it literally shows me everything that's important. TrafficInsights will also show me when a certain percentage of capacity for a particular device or network has been hit. That has helped me a few times, resulting in an upgrade of a few services for network connectivity because we were using more data than would actually flow. It has helped improve our network performance. I have 11 sites, overall, and after analysis based on Auvik, I increased the bandwidth for connectivity to the outside world for two of our sites because they were using more traffic than we were able to put through.

So far, I haven't had an issue with it. But I could see where they may need to add some more integration pieces with different vendors. For example, API keys aren't available for certain vendors. While everything that I have works with Auvik and gets monitored by it, there are a few network items I have that I would like to see deeper integration with, but the lack of that type of integration doesn't stop me from doing what I do.

I have been using Auvik for about nine months. Technically, I've been using it longer than that, but I've been using my implementation for about nine months. Previously, I was using it through an MSP and when we dropped the MSP I purchased an implementation for our company directly.

So far, I've had no issues with the stability. It just works.

I would assume it scales pretty easily. While I have 11 locations, none of them are massively huge. The number of devices I'm looking at and monitoring is probably pretty small compared to most businesses, but it seems to scale pretty well when I do add things.

From the occasions I have used their technical support, I would rate it very highly.

We had quite a few other tools that we were using or trying to use, and Auvik replaced them. By not using those other tools it is saving us $10,000.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward for me, but I had used Auvik before quite a bit through my MSP. But even if I had never used it before, with their help, it would have been pretty simple. The ease of implementation, network scanning, and setup were all super-easy.

Our deployment took a couple of days. I can't even compare the setup time for Auvik with the solution we had, which was NetSupport Manager, because I never did get the other system running. It just wouldn't work. The implementation was very convoluted and buggy. It never worked even close to the way I expected it to and I just ended up dumping it before I could get it running. The time savings associated with the setup of Auvik probably saved me over $10,000.

And when it comes to maintenance, it doesn't take up any of my time. Since the initial setup of the collectors, I haven't had to do anything. All my equipment is done and monitored. If I add a piece, I obviously have to set it up to get hit up by Auvik. Other than that, I don't have to maintain anything other than do the normal maintenance for my servers, which is where the collectors sit.

I only used Auvik to help with the setup.

The time-to-value, for me, was almost immediate. Once we started implementation, I was able to start seeing stuff even on day one. And by the time we had it fully implemented, I was already seeing value out of it.

And if I compare the cost savings we have realized by using the solution versus its costs, we're on the positive side.

The pricing is pretty reasonable for what we get. It's billed by certain, core network devices that it monitors, but I'm not billed for all the devices it monitors. For example, wireless access points and small things like that, throughout the network, are not billed. They mainly charge for firewalls, routers, and switches.

I haven't seen any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I researched other solutions, but because I had already used Auvik and I liked what they had. That research was more, "Hey, what's out there?" but I was not really interested beyond that.

What sets Auvik apart is the ease of use. Once it's set up, it gives you that single pane. That's the first thing I look at when I come in the morning and it tells me whether I'm good or not.

Go for it. It's a really good solution. 

We're in the healthcare industry and in our organization we have what we call a "backup machine" to be used in emergency scenarios. Should there be a brownout or internet service provider disruptions or any major catastrophe, we can move digital charting to paper charting for a certain duration of time. We have the Auvik probe installed on those backup machines, and it sends feedback back to the main Auvik dashboard where we monitor such things as ISP latency, devices on the network, and certain network elements like switches and access points.

We also have a probe sitting in one of the servers in the data center and it performs a similar function, helping us review our network infrastructure within the data center and to see where potential bottlenecks are, at what times of day, and to analyze trends.

We use it for basic troubleshooting as well because you can see everything on the network within a particular facility. At sites that don't have Cisco Meraki within the building, we use Auvik to isolate which ports' devices are connected to and for general troubleshooting. If, for example, an uplink port on one of the switches goes out, we can see, "Oh, that was port 26. Please switch it to port 25." We can duplicate configurations from one port to the next port and make sure that the facility is up and online.

It's been a very useful tool for us.

We can automate alerting systems based on certain criteria. For example, if a switch is undergoing high CPU usage or access points show high CPU or memory usage, we'll get the alerts for those and address them accordingly.

Auvik also sends us a text message whenever one of the internet circuits goes down, as we have a main fibre circuit at every building and a coaxial backup. That helps us ease the burden in switching over the necessary connections or the tunnels back to our centralized data center.

In addition, the network discovery capabilities are very insightful, coming from our previous situation where we had absolutely nothing. They have made us aware of certain switches within certain parts of the building that we may not have known existed. They have also helped because in our industry we're built by acquisitions. Oftentimes, we find an acquisition has an IDF and MDF in a particular building. With Auvik installed, we might find there are two more switches around that building. Sometimes these switches can be in the ceiling, but even being able to isolate what port they're connected to, disconnecting them, and finding where these items are has been extraordinarily helpful to us.

The solution has ultimately improved the response time of our help desk team when troubleshooting issues. It has also helped to identify older equipment when doing a refresh. We've been able to find 100-meg switches and old Cisco switches that are in places that we didn't anticipate they would be. We have also been able to isolate key pieces of the infrastructure within a building, pieces that needed to be replaced to provide a more friendly user experience.

Another benefit is that the automation of network mapping enables our level-one network specialists to resolve issues directly, and frees up senior-level team members for more important tasks. Our level-ones have read-only access, but that allows them to see the different topologies, see where things are connected, and then help facilitate a solution, either remotely or with the help of onsite personnel. It's kind of like having Cisco Meraki insight without actually having Cisco Meraki. While we only use Cisco Meraki gear at our HQ location, which provides us a high level of insight within one portal, Cisco Meraki is fairly expensive and it's not something that we can afford to put into every building. Auvik provides us with all the features that Cisco Meraki might have to offer within one pane of glass. 

The solution also automatically updates network topology, although it requires SNMP to be enabled on a particular network device. So when we're provisioning things that are going out, we have to pre-program that information into the switch and make sure everything is compatible. But once it's in place, it provides us the same level of insight that the previous network device did.

Also, in the cases where we've used it for resolving issues, it has reduced our MTTR. We're using it more as an insight tool. We don't have a lot of network-related issues within the environment, but in the instances that we have used it for resolution, it has helped us resolve the issues a lot quicker, on the order of 40 percent quicker.

It helps us to put out fires before end-users even know there is a problem, especially when it comes to internet service provider latency on a particular circuit. It alerts us to high bandwidth usage or increased latency and allows us to flip the connections from fibre to coax in anticipation, and then dispatch a fiber technician to resolve the issue on the primary line. All that can be done without any user noticing an impact at the facility level.

We use Auvik's TrafficInsights feature in the data center, but not the facility level. TrafficInsights is really the most beneficial within the data center because that's where high bandwidth is going and that's where it's most important to know exactly what's going on at all times. It shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, and with the projects that we currently have on our plate, that's incredibly important. We're currently transitioning data centers right now, and being able to isolate what traffic is going where and what's taking up the most bandwidth helps us put in certain traffic shaping rules. If something were to potentially impact at the facility level, we can get ahead of the curve and make the appropriate changes as necessary.

TrafficInsights also helps show where our system is experiencing performance issues, because we're using fibre optics within the data center as the backbone for everything. Whenever we're moving virtual machines, it helps isolate which ports are experiencing the most usage. We correlate the ports that are used to the host machines themselves and determine what virtual machines are reliant on the host that's using the most bandwidth, and we then see what services are impacted from there. TrafficInsights enables us to prepare ourselves to minimize end-user performance impact. We make changes based on what we see through TrafficInsights. It's a useful feature for doing exactly that. It allows us to maintain a steady level of performance within the data center.

There are also the automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups which have saved me quite a few times. The ability to back up a configuration from a firewall and have it housed in one central location where we can get the backup config and restore it to a new device, should a firewall or a switch blow out, decreases our restore time significantly. We don't have to figure out which rules, traffic shaping, or port-forwarding were on the switch, or what was on the firewall. We confidently know that the backup being pulled from Auvik is the most recent one.

Typically, before we had Auvik, when a firewall went out, it would take us a full day or a day and a half to turn around another firewall, to make sure it would be plug-and-play. With Auvik, that time has been reduced to a few hours. That's what it takes to procure the actual equipment and get it sent out, because we just pull the backup, restore it, and send the equipment out. No one from our networking team is then working, via tickets, to discover what was on the device previously. It's all in one place. If it's local, we have the building up and running within two hours of equipment configuration.

It's hard to say how much the device configuration backup saves us because every scenario is different. But if we're paying someone $45 an hour, instead of 12 hours of their time we're only using four hours of their time.

The alerting feature has been a very key piece for us, especially in the data center because we manage it ourselves. It gives us special insights into how certain projects and migrations are impacting the center of our operations, out in the field. Within the data center, we have an RDS farm that all the users from the facility connect to. Whenever something may be slow, we can look at the alerting and it helps us troubleshoot whether the issue is at the facility level or at an infrastructure level.

Also, the audit logs it provides are very detailed and can be tailored to our needs within the organization for things like management audit logs and user activity. The TrafficInsights have been really helpful.

The deployment of the probe onto a particular device could be improved. That usually requires one of our level-two people to step in from the help desk team. It would be much better if it were a click-and-go deployment. What I would like to see in particular is the ability to download an MSI builder for a probe for a particular building. We would simply double-click and install it onto the machine and have it work. Having to roll through with the entire API key is a little time-consuming.

I have been using Auvik for about two years now.

We've never had issues with it until recently when we started to see a lot more maintenance come up because the dashboard might be unavailable. But its uptime is about 99 percent.

Scalability is dependent on cost because they charge by network elements. In some of the nursing homes we handle, it's very cost-effective because they only have three switches, a firewall, and about 20 access points. But in larger facilities that have three or four IDFs, it becomes a little bit more costly because you have the additional switches and access points.

Since we don't have a lot of networking issues within the building itself, Auvik is being used as a general guidance tool, and to help the level-one help desk technicians troubleshoot a couple of things a little bit quicker, figure out where items are attached, and help the onsite maintenance director swap a cable or something of that manner. Our use of Auvik will be expanded based on acquisitions. If we bring on a new nursing home, we'll configure all the equipment into our network ahead of time and it will be plug-and-go. We'll just pay for the additional licensing for the network devices.

The first couple of times that I tried to get in contact with the tech support, they were very responsive. With every third-party vendor, wait-times can vary, but the tech support has always been good. I have recently noticed a little bit of a slower response time.

One thing that would be nice would be for them to reach out to us once in a while to check in and see how things are going, rather than only being reactive. A little bit more of a proactive approach would help. Outside of that, I haven't had any issues with their support or their customer team.

Overall, I would rate their tech support at nine out of 10.

We used to use OpenNMS for WAN connectivity purposes but with Auvik we were able to replace that. As far as backups go, we used to use an in-house-built solution for automating an SSH protocol into the firewalls and doing manual backups from there. But that took time to maintain. Auvik has consolidated those two things in one place. And the additional features of network insights for an entire facility is something that we didn't previously have. Auvik is saving us $3,000 to $4,000 per year in licensing costs.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. From start to finish, it took us about five days to have the entire environment up and running. We're a fairly small team. For organizations that have more dedicated team members, such as a NOC team and a server team, it would probably be a lot faster. But we were all filling in for those roles.

Our implementation strategy was simply to make sure that we had the different sites built out within the Auvik collector, entering in the IP information for each site, and then installing the probe facility by facility.

There was a time where it was a little confusing to get set up, but Auvik really helped to bridge that gap in knowledge by providing training to our end-users, meaning me or someone on our help desk team. They gave us more in-depth information and helped us to really understand the product features and to ensure that we were using everything to the best of its capabilities within our circumstances.

We have 10 users of Auvik: three system administrators, two level-two help desk technicians, and about five level-one help desk technicians. As a cloud-based solution, once it's deployed, unless we're making certain IP schema changes, it doesn't require much maintenance at all from our staff. On occasion, a backup machine needs to be replaced and we have to reinstall the probe. But outside of that, it's really click-and-go. The Auvik probe will pick up on a new subnet too. It's all available within the dashboard itself. You can literally turn off the old subnet and turn on the new one and begin scanning those elements just like they were before.

We did it on our own.

We've seen ROI in terms of the time that Auvik has saved us in the instances where we've had configurations that needed to be cloned, for example. I don't want to say the product is stale, rather it's insightful. You get from it as much as you want to get out of it. For us, the insights, manageability, and troubleshooting go a long way because we're saving man-hours.

When it comes to time-to-value, the setup time is fairly easy and the network discovery is very helpful. 

Because we had nothing previously, it's a very valuable tool. Having everything in one place, enabling our teams to react faster, decreasing the time to resolution, as well as identifying weak places within the infrastructure—it's hard to put a value on all that it gives us.

It has saved us a considerable amount of money, given that everything had to be done manually before, such as FaceTiming with a member of the facility and trying to get a physical view of a particular issue. Just having a central pane of glass that easily identifies various pieces of information goes a long way. We're saving tech time which can ultimately then be better spent supporting the organization and end-users. As far as infrastructure planning and rip-and-replace go for certain network technologies, it's provided much better insight and we can plan for which network switches actually have to be replaced. There are cost savings there because if we've got gig switches here and we're only looking to replace 100-meg switches, we can really drill down and know what we need ahead of time, going into a particular building, when we redo some infrastructure.

The solution is billed per network device, so there are devices that are not subject to billing in your environment, such as dumb switches because they have no higher reporting protocols. If you do have those, Auvik won't report on them in the same way. It won't give you port-based or traffic-based analyses.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We initially looked at SolarWinds and, thankfully, we didn't go with that product. Its setup time and configuration were pretty extensive and we never fully finished it after putting about 10 days' worth of time into it. As much as I'd like to say some good things about SolarWinds, it really wasn't for us because of the lack of communication and support that I got from them in helping to set things up. Ultimately, we steered away from that product.

The biggest pro for Auvik is its ease of deployment. It was as easy as I've personally seen a setup of this type of solution to be. It has an abundance of features and functionality. The only con is that the install is a little bit more tech-intensive as far as time goes.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Auvik is that every organization should have something like this. From our perspective, it isn't very expensive, although in smaller organizations it might be considered more of a luxury. But every luxury has its benefits. All the aspects it helps us with make it phenomenal. It's definitely a "need," not a "want."

I would advise making sure you have a very good, thorough count of the SNMP-enabled devices you have within your network. Also, be cognizant of whether you have any non-managed switches because you can't really get visibility into them. 

Also, make sure that you have full control over your network elements within the environment. We had a couple of switches that we had to factory-reset to get back into them, because there were lost credentials. Assuming that your infrastructure and your documentation are good, you really shouldn't run into any terrible issues. If you're sound on documentation, credential handling, and credential guarding, this tool will be very easy for you to implement. And if your infrastructure is pretty sound and everything is consolidated, this will be a phenomenal tool.

I used to work at a managed service provider, and we needed a network topology mapping solution and discovered Auvik. So, we tried it out, and then we used Auvik until that MSP was bought out. I left the MSP world and became a network engineer at Greater Nevada Credit Union, where I'm now.

We pretty much use it for topology mapping. We use it for mapping out the network and then monitoring the availability of the network infrastructure devices. There is also alerting whenever there are problems. So, we basically use it for monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting. We also use it for configuration management and automated backup.

It is a managed solution, so they handle all of the platform upgrades and all that stuff. We have got whichever version they have got.

It alerts us whenever there are problems, such as a site is down, an individual device is offline, or there are performance issues. So, it provides alerting and assists in troubleshooting when there is not a site-wide or a network-wide issue.

When they started it, Auvik was intended to be an MSP-focused tool. So, you set up different networks in Auvik as if they are distinct entities or different companies. I've deployed Auvik such that it treats all of our different locations as different networks, even though everything is basically tied together in one big wide area network. The net effect here is that network discovery is so effective it discovers all of the same subnets over and over again across all different networks that I have configured in Auvik. It normally wouldn't be a problem in an MSP world because those networks are not connected to one another. It is kind of an annoyance for me, but it really just kind of highlights how effective it is. Its discovery mechanism is very effective. I haven't had too many scenarios where Auvik didn't discover a particular subnet. It mostly just boils down to whether or not we've configured the network correctly so that something isn't just like a hidden Easter egg. 

Prior to Auvik, we weren't tracking any kind of KPIs relative to the network, performance, uptime, etc. There wasn't even the ability to do that because there just wasn't a solution in place. Now that we've implemented this platform, it has given us the ability to do so after our IT organization reaches that maturity level. The ability is there, and the data is there, but we're not there yet. So, it has given us the ability to track those kinds of KPIs. Beyond that, given that we are a 100% Cisco network, it very simply tracks contract status, support status, and all that stuff. I can very easily run a report and confirm the software and the firmware version that all of the devices are running to make everything consistent and get all of our switches and routers on the standard software version. We're approaching that templatized network look. It is one of the things that I could have done manually. I could physically log in to every device and figure out what they're on and then go through the upgrade process. Now, it's a little bit more simplified because I can just run one report and see that everything is on different versions. I can then standardize the version across the board.

It automatically updates our network topology. There are certain things that we have to do as dictated by the NCUA. We are a credit union, and the NCUA is the federal regulatory body that oversees our operations. When we get audited every six months or so, the NCUA basically has a long list of things that they check. They'll say, "Are you performing configuration backups of your network devices?" I would say that we do, and they would ask me to show it to them. For that, all I got to do is bring up Auvik and say, "Here's the device. Our entire network is managed by this platform, and here is an example of a configuration backup for a particular switch. Here is every configuration that has changed since the platform was implemented." Directly above that pane in the browser window is the topology. One of the other things that they ask about is if we have network topology diagrams to which I say that we have but not in the traditional sense. Once upon a time, most folks just manually maintained Visio diagrams of how the network was physically and logically connected, but you just can't rely on those because of the network changes. In a network of this size, probably not a single day passes when I don't make a configuration change. The help desk folks also go and deploy a new workstation regularly, and Auvik automatically discovers those new devices and automatically updates the maps. So, it is a living document at that point, which makes it useful because it is always accurate. I don't have to manually go in and add a new device. 

It has decreased our meantime to resolution primarily because I'm notified of problems much quicker. Previously, if there was a problem, a user would call the help desk to look into it. If the help desk wasn't really sure about what's going on, they escalated it to the network guy. I then looked into it and said, "Oh, I see." Now, instead of that, I'm getting a notification from the tool at the same time a user notices a problem, and then I start looking into it. By the time the help desk hits me up, I'm like, "Yeah, this should be good now." So, in that capacity, it has definitely improved the meantime to resolution. It has probably cut our resolution times in half.

It helps us to put out fires before people/end users even know there is a problem. There have been some scenarios where it has alerted on things, and there was no perceived impact by the end-users. If there was a failed power supply in a switch that maybe had redundant power supplies, we would get a notification that one of those power supplies has died. We can then proactively replace that failed device before the spare tire blows out, and the network goes down.

We're a credit union, and we've got an online banking website, ATMs, ITMs, etc. We have another department that handles all of those member or customer-facing technologies. Previously, if there was a network outage somewhere, it used to be that they were basically unaware of it until they started getting reports that members are calling in and saying that the e-branch is down, and they can't log in to the e-branch. That team does not use Auvik, but I have included them in the outage alerting. So, they get an email when a branch goes down, or there are problems. They don't get notifications for high broadcast traffic, but when there are obvious problems, they get a notification. For example, when a site goes down, we know that the ITMs aren't going to be working, and they're going to get notified at some point by members, but Auvik would have already sent them an alert saying that the XYZ branch is down. So, they can already anticipate that there are going to be ITM issues because the whole site is offline.

It provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. These are just compulsory administrative tasks for the stuff you rarely need, but if you ever need it and you didn't have it, you're in a big problem. It does the automated backup, and it does it so reliably that I've never manually managed configuration. If I was doing that manually, it would probably take five minutes per device to do a configuration backup. Across a hundred devices, it would be 500 minutes a month. So, it saves me a fair amount of time. It also saves me needing to employ somebody to do a very repetitive task. This is what technology does. It replaces dumb functions so that humans can go and do things that are not so easily automated. The device configuration part also saves money, but the only reason that it saved money was that it was something that we weren't doing before Auvik. We were not spending money to backup configurations because we were not really backing up configurations. So, it didn't really replace anything. It just implemented something that needed to be done but wasn't being done.

It enabled us to consolidate or replace other tools. We got rid of the managed service provider and saved approximately 100K a year, and it replaced SolarWinds and Uptime. Uptime was another platform similar to Auvik, but it was nowhere near as feature-rich. We're paying around 17K a year for Auvik, and SolarWinds and Uptime combined were probably in the neighborhood of 25K a year. So, it has saved around 8K a year.

It is useful for configuration management and automated backup. It is one of my favorite features because it is low-hanging fruit, and it is easy to accomplish, but on a network where we've got infrastructure devices in hundreds, it is an arduous task to keep on top of. Auvik does it all automatically, so that's probably one of my favorites because it is important, and it just does it automatically. I don't even have to think about it.

It is incredibly easy to use. That was one of the things that helped motivate. We were basically told that we couldn't use SolarWinds anymore, and we had to adopt something new. I already knew Auvik, but considering that I'm the only network engineer here, the simplicity of the platform was important so that the rest of the IT team could use it to find information. It was important to have an interface that was intuitive and the information that was accessible and usable by folks who weren't networking nerds.

Given that you can deploy it so quickly and so easily, its time to value is very quick. I can start getting meaningful information out of it almost immediately.

Sometimes, we get requests for exporting a map of the network. I can export a map, but it exports it as a PDF, which is basically just like a drawing. There is no context. When you're looking at the map, you can hover over things and you can drill in devices and see all kinds of information, but when you export it to a PDF, it is just like a flat image. It is a picture of it, and if you don't know what you're looking at, it doesn't necessarily make any sense. This may be something that has already improved. The exportability piece was one thing that was kind of like a gripe, but it is not all that important. If NCUA wanted to see proof that we have network topology diagrams, I can just show them the tool. Worst case scenario, I can give them read-only access to log into our Auvik tenant, and then they can see for themselves all of that stuff.

Currently, with Auvik's support, I'm troubleshooting some of the information gathered on Cisco devices through SNMP V3. Auvik is not able to pull some of the important information that it uses to draw the map, which is kind of shocking because it is Auvik. So, it is their platform, and it is monitoring Cisco devices, which are obviously very prevalent in the world. Auvik is having a hard time gathering such important information over SNMP V3, which is a networking standard, and on super popular device brand and model. They're actively working with me on that piece. It seems that network device management using SNMP V3 could use a little tuning.

I probably started to use it in 2016 or 2017. 

It is very stable. There were occasions where I got a notification that Auvik failed to pull a device for its configuration information to see if there was a change, and then, it'll magically resolve itself after 15 or 20 minutes. So, there were some instances that made me wonder why that happened, but, generally, it has been very stable. I don't know if I've ever seen an Auvik outage.

It is super simple to scale. To add a site, we deploy all of the equipment. After the equipment is deployed, I deploy a collector at that new site, and we're off and running.

The only folks that use the platform are in the IT department, but we've also got another department in the technology wing of the organization. This department handles all of those member or customer-facing technologies, such as online banking website, ATMs, ITMs, etc. They do not use Auvik, but I have included them in the outage alerting. So, they get an email when a branch goes down or there are problems. The cybersecurity team also uses it a little bit, and we also have our systems engineers, who actually manage the server infrastructure. There are probably about 15 users across those different roles.

It is being used everywhere across the entire network. There is nowhere to really increase its usage. As things change, they may warrant increasing its usage. There are probably some opportunities to increase the use with TrafficInsights and things like that. 

Aside from the ticket that I'm working on right now, I didn't have to reach out to them too much. So, the jury is still out, and we'll see how they do on this. They haven't given up and are still looking into it. So, for now, I would give them a solid eight out of 10.

When I joined this organization, they didn't have much for monitoring the network, but they had already purchased SolarWinds licensing. When the SolarWinds breach happened, we got a kind of edict from the NCUA to discontinue any relationships that we might have with SolarWinds. So, I said, "Okay, not a problem. I know Auvik." We adopted Auvik, and we've been using Auvik since then.

Its initial setup was very easy. The configurations were already in place on our network devices to allow management over SNMP. All it took was to deploy the tool and then give it the necessary information to begin the network discovery. After that, it just started populating information. So, it was very easy.

Auvik doesn't use anything in terms of how it interacts with the network. It doesn't use any proprietary stuff that you really have to learn. It uses the same protocols that everything else uses. So, there wasn't any complicated platform-specific stuff that we needed to get in place to make it work. Deploying the tool is as simple as installing software or spinning up a virtual machine. It took us about a day. It was very quick.

Its setup was much quicker than other solutions because you don't have to set up the front-end. All you got to do is deploy little collectors. You don't have to set up the interface you interact with or set that server up. That's usually the part that is a real pain because you have to spin up your own servers, and you got to install the software and give it enough resources. The interface is clunky and slow, and you've got to tune the virtual machine. That's obviously applicable to any hosted service, but that was definitely a contributing factor to the speed and the ease of deploying it. It was like everything is there, and you just got to start plugging your information into it and let the collectors discover and plug it in for you.

In terms of the implementation strategy, with Auvik or network monitoring tools, we, sort of, have two different approaches. The first approach is that we can deploy it so that one collector or one group of collectors monitors the entire network, and we have one map that shows the entire network. Prior to working at GNCU, I was working at a managed service provider, and GNCU was one of our customers. I had done a lot of project work for GNCU, but they were not a managed customer. So, we didn't deploy our toolset on their network, and therefore, we didn't have any visibility. However, in order to do some of the project work that I was planning for them, I needed that kind of information. I needed topology, and I needed to know subnets and things like that. So, we temporarily deployed Auvik back then into GNCU's network. We just deployed the collector, and let it discover the entire network. We gave it about a day to go and do all that discovery and draw the whole map out. After that, I kind of realized it was clunky because the map was so big. It was detailing the network that spans around 30 different locations. 

Another approach is to break each site down into its own network instead of doing one big network map. This is the approach that we followed when we implemented it at GNCU back in December. In this approach, each site is its own customer, which made the map for each site much smaller. It also made it much easier to navigate and see the things that we wanted to do. So, in the end, this was the approach that we ended up using. It is nice that you have that option instead of having just one way.

In terms of maintenance, it is like a platform. We don't maintain anything there. The only thing that we do is that when we make changes to the network or deploy a new device, we need to go in and make sure that Auvik discovers the new device, and it is able to log in, make a backup of the configurations, and start pulling it over SNMP. The platform itself requires zero maintenance.

In terms of the impact of this level of maintenance on our operations as compared to other solutions I've used in the past, with SolarWinds, when a new version came out, we had set it in a way to kind of automate it to an extent. When an update was available, we would upload it manually, apply it, and make sure that everything was working. It wasn't overly arduous. There were patches, modest updates, and stuff like that. For full version upgrades, a lot of times, it was easier to just deploy a new server, install the new version, and then get it set up. We don't have to do that now. It is almost like a thing that you used to do back in the day before SaaS solutions.

We implemented it ourselves.

We have not done an ROI. I also cannot quantify exactly how much it has saved because I don't remember exactly what we were paying for SolarWinds, but it is similar to what we were paying for SolarWinds. When we were using SolarWinds, after we had got it deployed and configured the way that we wanted, we probably wouldn't have ever gone back to Auvik, despite me knowing it and liking Auvik. That's because we had already made the investment in that platform, but then the breach happened, and we had no choice. So, there wasn't a meaningful saving in switching from SolarWinds to Auvik. 

Prior to me coming on board, GNCU had kind of outsourced the network part to two different organizations. One of those organizations just did the monitoring and management piece. They were charging us about 100K a year for that managed service. By implementing Auvik, we basically duplicated what they were doing, which has a very measurable impact. I didn't have access to their platform, so I needed something that I could use to monitor and manage the network. So, by getting rid of that managed service provider, we saved approximately 100K a year.

Their licensing model is basically per managed device. You pay X amount per managed device, and managed devices are limited to switches, routers, firewalls, and wireless LAN controllers. So, the only things that we pay for are our switches, routers, firewalls, and wireless LAN controllers, but there are orders of magnitude more devices that Auvik manages that we don't pay for. It also manages servers, workstations, and phones. Auvik will gather KPIs from anything that is connected to the network if it can be managed via a standard like SNMP or WMI. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Auvik doesn't nickel-and-dime. SolarWinds nickel-and-dime you to death. Everything has a different license, and you needed that license for every device, no matter what it was, down to even the interface level. It was ridiculous. Auvik does it monthly. So, it is per device and per month with the option to pay annually at some percent savings, which is what we do. We pay annually right now. It is something like 17K dollars a year.

Auvik might have even been a little bit more expensive than SolarWinds, but that was only because we had not added some of the things that Auvik did to the SolarWinds licensing. So, eventually, the SolarWinds product probably would've been a little bit more expensive if it was like an apple to apple comparison in terms of features.

I had checked ThousandEyes. I had also checked Cisco DNA Center, which was more costly, and the network was just not there yet. Some of our devices don't support management via Cisco DNA Center. So, we were not there yet. Someday, I'd like to be able to get there, but for what we needed, Auvik was just the easiest answer.

I would advise others to check it out. It doesn't hurt. They give you a two-week free trial. You can kind of just say that you want to try this, and then, you try it. There is no haggling back and forth with sales. They give you access to the platform for two weeks. For us, I had done the trial just to get it implemented, and then, they extended the trial for us free of charge for another two weeks so that we could get all the approvals in place to adopt the platforms and start paying for it. They make it super easy, so try it out.

The automation of network mapping has enabled junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks, but it is not because of the tool. It is because of the proficiency level of our team. We don't have junior network staff. There is just me. Our help desk folks are our junior staff, and it is just not in their wheelhouse yet. It goes back to that organizational operational maturity. We've got like the help desk that helps the end-users, and then we've got the engineers who deploy and are kind of like that highest escalation point. It kind of goes from zero to 60. They check something out there, and the help desk will get a ticket saying that it must be a network thing. It just comes right over to me. I'll try to use those opportunities as a teaching opportunity to show, "Hey, log in to Auvik, and then you can see here that the device is online. We've got some other monitoring tools that we use as well for workstations in virtual infrastructure to see that it is not a network issue, and here's how you can dig through Auvik to see it." It increases the proficiency level of our staff. The tools kind of assist with that change and with them improving. A network engineer can tell the help desk guy until he is blue in the face about how things work, but when you have something to kind of visualize, you can look at metrics and performance indicators. It, kind of, helps in providing a little bit of context to the topics that I'm talking about, and then, they can, kind of, use those things. So, the proficiency definitely is improving, and the tool helps with that.

We have not used the TrafficInsights feature. We have a cybersecurity team, and they have a tool called Darktrace, which is TrafficInsights on steroids. It has got some AI or machine learning built into the platform, and it does some really gee-whiz stuff. Because of the presence of that tool, I haven't gone into configuring TrafficInsights yet. It is on my list of things to do because it is just convenient to have all of your data that you might want to access available in one window, as opposed to having to log into another device and learn how to use another device or another tool. So, eventually, I'll get around to that TrafficInsights so that the information is available.

If there is anything that Auvik has taught me, which is also one of my general rules of thumb, is that when something is not working as expected, it is not necessarily a problem related to that thing. For example, if it is a problem that I'm having with Auvik, usually it is not indicative of a problem with Auvik. Similarly, it is not necessarily a problem on the network that is impacting users. It tends to point to something not being configured correctly on the network. It kind of highlights our own mistakes.

For an advanced network operations center, Auvik is very easy to use and super easy to deploy. It is intuitive, and its features are very useful to an extent. When it comes to a more advanced network team, there are things that Auvik doesn't do. Doing those things would make it awesome, but they would just make the platform more complex and probably less easy to use. So, for the fundamentals, Auvik does a fantastic job. Once you go beyond the fundamentals, Auvik still does a pretty good job, but there are some things that I would not be surprised that the platform will never do. That's because it is not intended to be Cisco DNA Center. It is intended to be a broad platform that supports everything to a degree. 

For an unsophisticated or a very small network team, I would give it a nine out of 10 because of ease of use. A managed service provider is a good example because the folks who consume the product are not network specialists. They primarily used it for backup, mapping, KPIs, and assisting in troubleshooting. For mid-range organizations, it is a solid nine. For advanced networking teams, it is probably a five because it is not going to give you all the information that you want. It is not going to do all of the things that you might want it to do, but the things that it does, it does very well.