Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

I'm one of the biggest Auvik fans out there. I have used it personally, and I have brought it to every single company since 2015 as a product offering or for the internal use case. I currently own a firm, and I am yet to talk with Auvik. When the time comes, I will absolutely be doing its implementation for my company, and I will be offering Auvik to my customers.

I did its implementation for a company in the November of the last year. NetFlow was one of the biggest use cases, and it was for monitoring the type of traffic inside the network. We were also able to do a lot of Syslogging, and with one pane of glass, we were able to remote into the various routers and switches that we had.

It was deployed via Windows services and not as a virtual box inside VMware, which is probably better. We also had a cloud collection point, which was also a failover in our Chicago environment. I was deployed for five different sites along with the NetFlow application.

Auvik provided one of our clients the ability to see the network in its entirety. We were seamlessly able to implement an encryption deployment because we could see the whole network from a bird's eye view. It was internally implemented, so it didn't really help us in terms of performance, but it improved the productivity of the project on which we were working.

In terms of whether the automation of network mapping enabled junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks, as an IT Manager, it has allowed me to delegate tasks. What was nice was that a lot of people were annoyed that Auvik just didn't combine everything, and everything was slow when Auvik did combine the whole map. When we broke it out the way Auvik told us to, which was by the site, it allowed me to actually assign a small networking team of two or three personnel essentially to that specific location. Everybody knew what exact equipment they were responsible for, and then it just trickled down to all of the other systems and processes. This made the communication more effective. We could hand off jobs and shifts at almost a seamless rate. When it came to documentation and password inside of Auvik, I knew and felt that they were secure. It has definitely decreased our mean time to resolution. It improved our overall productivity by at least 20%.

Its TrafficInsights feature shows the network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption. Most of the time, I'm able to get a pretty detailed kind of report or visionary on it. This feature is extremely important. From a managerial standpoint, we wanted to know what people were doing. The pandemic was huge for a lot of work for home people, and we wanted to know what our employees were doing on their computers at home. While they were connected to the VPN, Auvik provided us the ability to see whether they were watching Netflix and things like that, or what other type of bandwidth they were taking up. It was very amazing. We were canning people over it, and we were utilizing it to kind of take a temperature of our culture.

The TrafficInsights feature is helpful in showing where your system is experiencing performance issues. When we have a network problem, I'm able to see where and what's causing it. Back in October, we had some sort of network storm on our layer 3 in Chicago, and we were able to pinpoint different types of traffic going on. It was nothing, and packets were coming back at zero bits and different bits, and it was just noise. We were able to figure out that there was a loop somewhere. We had to physically go down and examine it, but without it, we probably would have chased our tails around or spent a lot more money than we did to resolve the issue.

The TrafficInsights feature has helped in improving our network performance. It improved our understanding of the network and what was going on. It helped us utilize other tools that were in place to block traffic, allow different traffic, or redirect different traffic.

It provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. I had to go in and do some configuration myself, but it was very simple. It automatically pulled the configuration from the device, and I could download it from Auvik. It probably saved me a couple of hours a week. At $100 or $200 an hour, it could save you a couple of thousand bucks a year.

It has definitely enabled us to consolidate and integrate other tools. Auvik integrates really well with other tools such as Lucidchart and different PSAs such as ConnectWise. With that, I can just utilize more functions inside these solutions. I don't necessarily have to have my Lucidchart. It integrates well where I don't have to add any more products. It is kind of that last missing link theme. It takes away from having to purchase a Visio chart, individually go and pull network reports, or have a product at each site that does that. It has this overarching big brother side. Not having to spend on these tools has probably saved us $10,000 to $20,000 annually in licensing costs. These are the software that you got to get rid of, and they are probably about $10,000 per piece.

NetFlow is probably one of the most valuable features. Since starting with Auvik, and seeing how far it has come, NetFlow has been one of the most valuable features. This feature is important because as a network administrator, you always want to examine what type of traffic is going on. You can limit users from watching Netflix on a route, or you can also pinpoint malicious activity going on in the network. So, I really do find Auvik to be a utility, not only from a network standpoint but also from a security standpoint. It provides a very good security feature in a way even though it is not branded like that.

Towards the actual Auvik side or the networking side, one of the most valuable features is its capability to quickly go out, discover, and have the intelligence to either utilize known usernames and passwords (when it comes to SNMP) or ask for the proper credentials. If they weren't provided, then it provides information about how to go retrieve them. When you examine the whole workflow or compare it to SolarWinds Orion, which got hacked, Auvik blows it out of the water because of this feature. This feature is important because when you're monitoring multiple locations and managing multiple employees, it is important to have that piece fit inside of that business continuity. I like to involve those things in security and business continuity when I am selling, deploying, or implementing it, thus making it the culture behind the product.

Its network discovery capabilities are very impressive. The discovery piece is amazing. I don't know if they have an AI or some type of advanced intelligence inside of their program that helps with the discovery piece. I haven't seen anything that discovers products that well and is able to label them, tag them, and pull as much information about them. I don't know what drives that engine, but I'm just absolutely blown away by it. It is cool.

Its ease of use is great. I was very pleased with how the junior employees, and even a couple of senior employees who had not worked with the product, were able to jump in, learn quickly, and work through the interface.

Some of the automation pieces for discovery still need a little bit more improvement. I wouldn't mind seeing some more security features as that's the world we're driving into. I know Auvik probably wants to try to keep itself separate because that's its brand, but even if they brought on board another brand that was able to plug into them, it would benefit us. It would lower some more network security costs if as a company, they are a one-stop shop. They have already got the network piece going. If they improved in that area and focused a lot on that, they would gain me as a customer, and they would probably gain a lot of others.

I have been using Auvik since 2015. 

I've been pretty impressed with its stability. I've been with Auvik for such a long time, and they've improved over the years. That's why I have nothing bad to say about them. Its stability in 2015 was great, but now with the redundancy and this cloud thing that they've got going, it is even more impressive.

They've improved it in that area a lot. It is scalable now.

In the previous job, we only paid for 20 billable endpoints, but we had more than 100 endpoints. We had three users. My title there was a senior systems architect, and then I had a network engineer under me. Above me was my boss who was the Chief Information Officer. 

If I had to rate its usage on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being eight hours a day and one being twice a week, they would probably fall in the five range. They probably use it four out of five days and for an hour or an hour and a half a day.

Currently, I don't have it as an offering in my own company. We are brand new, and I just opened this firm this year in February. As we get the ground and the ball rolling, we will be an Auvik customer within the next six months for sure.

Their technical support is the best. You can talk to an Auvik support technician about something Cisco-related. They don't have to, but they are very knowledgeable in that technology, which is so impressive. 

I'm glad, and I'm sure that Auvik hires nothing but educated people, which is probably why it's just that much better of an experience. I can talk to them, and they know what I'm talking about. A lot of the things that we talk about are complex things related to the Cisco technology, FortiGate, etc.

In the previous job, we had a third-party firm called Transcendent, and they resold SolarWinds Orion, but it was not good. I replaced it shortly with Auvik after Orion was hacked, and then we integrated their team into the product. We had it all on-prem, but we utilized this hybrid thing that Auvik had. If our on-prem collector went down, we weren't completely blind. We had redundancy built into it.

It makes me so much happier to be an Auvik customer and a champion of the product. I'm really glad that Auvik hasn't been touched like SolarWinds Orion. It gives me the confidence to keep utilizing and selling their products.

Auvik automatically updates the network topology at an interval of approximately 60 seconds, and you can also go in there and forcefully update it. We, however, never really relied on that technology. You could click on a spot, and it was a 50:50 shot if we had to move in and relabel it, which was better than SolarWinds where you get a 10% chance of getting it right. So, you're doing 90% of the configuration in SolarWinds versus having to do 40 to 50% in Auvik. That's why Auvik is better.

It was pretty complex. When you are setting up Auvik, you can set up the collector, which is straightforward. However, when you are trying to set up your router and switches, you have to have at least an associate-level degree in Cisco networking, for example, to understand the commands and the things that you need to do to prepare your router or firewall to work or integrate into the Auvik system. You need somebody who knows networking. When it comes to finding those people, they're expensive. It is probably cheaper to go through Auvik's offering at that point. If you have them on staff, utilize them. So, it is complicated, but it is no fault of their own. Auvik was easy, but they can't really control Cisco or the other people who have their technology.

The deployment probably took about two weeks. In terms of comparing the setup time of Auvik with other solutions, Auvik allowed me to do it from one location and in my chair. For other locations, I probably would have had to travel at least twice with a SolarWinds solution. I would have had to deploy it on physical hardware at that location and then use my Cisco DMVPN to make everything toss, which isn't really all that cool or modern. So, Auvik saves me traveling time and money, and I am able to do it from one location. Such cost savings probably translate to $10,000.

Our implementation strategy was to start with our home office, which was our data center here in Milwaukee, and then to set up a redundant site in Chicago. We discovered there, and then we went by the office and deployed it office by office through discovery. We didn't move to the next office till every piece of equipment was accounted for, labeled, and documented.

I have not used any third-party integrator. I did it myself. I also did all the maintenance, which included server maintenance, different updates, patches, backups, etc.

They weren't like that, but I can tell you that they've made it.

The cost for all the devices that we were billed at in my last job was about $2500 annually. It wasn't much.

It has the most reasonable pricing as compared to any product out there. I can't complain. It is amazing. It allows me to bundle inside the package what I charge customers per user per month. I don't charge them per device anymore. That's not how we do things in the industry. It is per user per month. The way Auvik is charging us allows me to do it. For example, if they charge $250 for a certain number of seats, I'm just going to write the costs onto per user per month. I have a few leftover licenses to use, which allows me to go out and make some more sales and give some freebies at some shows. So, it makes me very flexible. I am very happy with it.

It is billed by network devices. You could choose which billable device you want. What is really nice is that if you don't want one switch to be billable and the other one to be billable, you can do that. You just won't have the features that the billable switch has, which isn't horrible. Sometimes, you don't need that. What I'm really happy about is that Auvik doesn't force things on you and doesn't say, "You have to have all of this," and that's a great business model.

Sometimes, you can get overages if you go over your agreement per device, but they don't try to nickel-and-dime you on it. They're very reasonable, and it is easy to go in and look and see. They harp on it too. They ask you to go in and check and make sure you have what you want because you have this many licenses.

They didn't evaluate any other product.

To anybody utilizing it internally, I would advise going through Auvik directly. You'll pay a little bit more, but you'll have the support as an IT staff unless you want to come through a company like me. Auvik has just recently opened up their company to accept companies that want to utilize it internally. As a consultant with the landscape that I'm looking at right now, I advise Auvik to keep pricing in the same way.

I would advise taking your time and doing your implementation right the first time. You're going to gain more knowledge about your network, and the people coming after you are going to be able to support your network that much easier. 

Its ease of use is great, but I firmly believe that if you don't have experience in networking, you're going to fail. If you don't take the time or pay the money to sit down with Auvik and have them teach you to utilize the tool, you're doing yourself a disservice because of what and how inexpensive it is to get the tool and how valuable it is to have their time to teach you how to utilize the tool. They have an implementation team that will walk you through it. You have to pay for this service separately. I utilized this service once, and I've been able to implement it myself. I would highly recommend that somebody without experience should pay for this service at least once in their career.

It doesn't really help us put out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. That could be because of the customers that I've had. However, Auvik does allow me to pinpoint the problem right away. I may get the alert two minutes later than my customer alerted me, but I'm able to get a fast resolution in place right away. It is easy. So, that's what I'm very happy about.

As a seller of Auvik, the cost-savings that it provides allow me to be more mobile. I don't have to hire as many employees because I can have them sitting in a chair watching a dashboard, which saves cost. If I'm a customer myself, I don't really see cost savings, and it is just another tool for my IT guys to be successful. So, it doesn't really save costs, but at the same time, it has a positive impact on the network.

As a consultant, Auvik has shown me the habits of end-users or IT staff. For example, Auvik has been able to pick up on rogue, small six-port switches that get plugged in somewhere under somebody's desk. I am also able to see the weird things that get plugged in or turned on in the network. I am also able to have conversations, but it is just weird to see how that technology or software translates to the behavior of these people. It is kind of neat.

Its time to value is what it is. There is a cost to everything, and there is really no value when it comes to implementation. Especially with how I am going to have it implemented in my environment, I have to ask somebody with a reasonable amount of knowledge, and he is going to cost me $80,000 to $100,000 a year to go out and implement. It is just a cost, and there is really no way around it.

I would rate Auvik a 10 out of 10.

I do internal IT for a company and I use Auvik for most of my daily tasks as they relate to firewalls, switches, and routing.

The automation of network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and helps to free up senior-level team members to perform more involved tasks. It can be a key tool in environments where somebody who doesn't have a strong network skillset can go in and see, "Is it good, is it not?" and be able to make a decision on whether it needs to be escalated to me or not.

It also automatically updates network topology. One of the things that I really enjoy doing, when I first get into a new environment with it, is to watch it rebuild the map as it learns in real time. I can see its process and for me, as a very technical guy, that is one of the most entertaining things to watch, as it learns and updates the changes in a network in real time. It saves time maintaining network topology since the tool actually does it automatically. I have a high level of confidence that the information is correct, and it is immediately available. Just last week, I got a call from one of our internal auditors who needed to provide some information. He said, "Yeah, this usually takes a few weeks. Can you provide firmware information and serial numbers?" During our phone call, I was able to get into Auvik, pull the list, get it sent over to him and say, "Here you go. We're done."

Auvik has also decreased our mean time to resolution. Being able to go in and look at what's not broken, very quickly, and get that confirmed, means that I can look at what I actually need to fix. It eliminates a whole bunch of other problems and a whole bunch of checking. It has reduced our MTTR by up to 80 percent in some cases.

And because we've got it triggering PagerDuty alerts, if something problematic really fires off, I will know about it and be in the tool looking at what's going. I can say, "Hey, this is a problem we need to alert," or, "This isn't a problem and we just need to be aware," very quickly.

Another benefit is the TrafficInsights feature which shows network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, and it does it very well. That is a very nice-to-have in my current role because we don't have issues with our network bandwidth. But in other environments that I've been in, where there were issues with bandwidth, it is a very well-put-together tool allowing me to find the answer and say, "This is what our problem is." It enables me to tell the business that we either need to spend more money on bandwidth, or we need to deprioritize a certain type of traffic. It gives that information in a format in which I can give it to somebody who is less technical than me. I can show them the graph and say, "This is what's going on and why."

TrafficInsights helps to show you where your system is experiencing performance issues around capacity and what is the busiest traffic. It can help improve network performance by letting me know exactly what's going on. It lets me see whether it is an application misbehaving, a lack of bandwidth, an upgrade that we need to make, or a configuration. It gives me these choices so that I know for real what's going on. In some cases, people "feel" that something is going on, but this gives me the facts to know what's going on. I would estimate TrafficInsights has improved our network performance by 50 percent.

In multiple environments I've been in, we've been able to eliminate other tools and use Auvik as our single network management solution. In those environments, I've had up to five tools that I have been able to decommission by using Auvik. In that environment where there were so many tools in place, replacing them probably saved $100,000 a year.

Some of the key features that I get out of it are that it is a well-rounded monitoring solution, so I know when something fails—whether it's a device or a service on the device. But it also performs backup, in inventory, of some of the key things to control and manage the network.

And one of the best things about Auvik, and it's why it's one of my go-to products, are the remote access capabilities. Without a VPN and without any other way in, I'm able to get in and work on and troubleshoot my devices through the remote access console. It has multiple options for that and has been very useful and a huge time-saver. That's one of the killer features. It's one of my must-haves and that's why I like it so much.

In addition, for products in this category, Auvik's ease of use is one of the best. It's really built for people like me. I'm heavy into the parts of IT that are not server-related, including routing, switching, firewalls, et cetera, and it is organized for somebody like me. It is the network engineer's toolset. It gives me what I need upfront in a way that I understand well. Auvik speaks my language.

When it comes to its network discovery capabilities, It is the best that can happen. I've used it in multiple environments, and as long as I've got the right starter information, it can go find information in an hour that would otherwise take a person weeks. It's very good and very quick. I've been able to benchmark it against competitive tools and it is way more useful, giving me information that I actually need and can use.

The automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backup capability is one of the key features for me in Auvik. To manage a network, one of my key requirements is to be able to rebuild that network if something catastrophic happens. Having up-to-date backups is a must, and this is a tool that I count on to get that right, and it has always performed as I expect. I am able to very quickly and easily audit that the backups happen and I know that they're there. I can also restore to a previous point with very little hassle, if anything goes wrong. Compared to other backup solutions, it saves me 80 percent in terms of my time.

The logging features could be a little bit better polished, although that aspect is relatively new. It comes in as raw data, with different formats for different vendors. It's not immediately clear to people what's going on with some of that and you have to read through the codes. Some of the higher-end logging solutions, like Splunk, which is very expensive, can parse through it and correlate items better. Improvement to the logging features would be a value-add, but I'm still very happy that it exists.

There are a few edge cases where I have found support for devices to be a little bit lacking. I'm migrating away from Check Point right now and Auvik and Check Point do not get along at all, so it was very troublesome to get those put in place.

Another issue that I know is already in progress, but that will be very nice, is full integration with PagerDuty. I'm using email connectors right now that have a little bit of a lag, so once the APIs are in place between Auvik and PagerDuty, it will give me better alerting when something breaks. I know that's on the roadmap because I've talked to them about it.

Between two different companies, I've been using Auvik for about three years.

The availability is 99 percent. They do have maintenance windows where it's not available. I've been happy with their communication on the maintenance windows and they pick the times very well when it's not going to be available. I realize that everyone needs maintenance, but it works out very well.

I've used this for everything from companies that are in a single building up to a company that had offices in 20 time zones with almost 100 offices, some of them with 1,000 users, and it was able to scale up to that. I've never had worries about how big this can go.

Their technical support is fair to good. There have been a few times where I've had to escalate to somebody higher, when I thought the lower-level person should have understood it, but I've always ended up with a good answer.

The initial setup is straightforward and, as far as the product category is concerned, it's the most straightforward. I've used this in an MSP environment and I've done deployments into close to 30 companies with Auvik and it is, by far, the fastest way to do it for a fresh deployment.

We can get the initial install going in a few hours and we can be confident in the data in a week or two. Comparing that to other tools, it would be an initial deployment of a week or two and two months until we're confident with our data. It has probably reduced the time spent on setup by 90 percent. And when dealing with an MSP, it cuts down a client onboarding by at least a month, which lets revenue start coming in earlier.

The implementation strategy depends on the size of the environment that we're going into, but we usually put in collectors at key locations and first let them do their discovery and see what's out there. Then we'll tune them down so that the collectors are monitoring from the right locations. But we like to get as much data in as possible, initially, and then tune downward.

As a cloud-based solution, it requires just about no maintenance and that's one of the other benefits of Auvik. With other solutions, we have spent more time updating and babysitting the servers and fixing our tools, instead of fixing our environment. That's a major plus.

When I was first evaluating it and we were going through pricing models, I was able to make the case that, for a team of five, this would be better than adding a person to the team when it comes to getting work done.

When I was new in this environment, I was trying to get a lot of stuff together. I brought Auvik as a solution to my supervisor and said, "This is what we used at my last company," and he was familiar with my last company. He viewed them as very good at what they do. I suggested we take a look at Auvik. As soon as he got the pricing during the first sales call around Auvik, he said, "Sold. Well worth that money." They didn't even have to finish the presentation. He saw what was being offered and he also based his decision on the fact that I'd used it before. The cost easily made it worth it in his mind for what it would provide to us.

The pricing is fair for the value and time saved that you get out of it. The larger you go, the more sense it makes per device, because as you hit different pricing tiers, it becomes much more affordable per device.

Auvik is billed by network device. They've got a very clear-cut definition of what is a device and what isn't a device, and that's very convenient. Anything like a server, or a phone, or an access point, is not billed but they are still captured for data, which is very useful. Auvik is very upfront that the solution is not a good server monitoring platform, but it's a fair server monitoring platform and that comes along for free with everything else. My server guys have another system they use for monitoring servers, but they find being able to look at Auvik as well has been a huge value-add.

I have used LogicMonitor, PRTG, the N-central suite, the ManageEngine suite, and the SolarWinds products.

In terms of the differences between those solutions and Auvik, I would summarize them this way: Auvik is a tool built for the network guys, primarily, whereas a lot of other tools are built for the server guys first and then add in network. It's a tool really built for what I care about and it values my time. I'm able to get it put in fast, I'm able to use it fast, and my information is fast. It lets me do more with less.

Definitely go through the proof of concept testing. The results speak for themselves. It's a fully rounded product and everyone I know who has used it has been happy with it.

When you're first deploying it, understand how you need to set up your locations. Otherwise, you're going to end up redoing work. If you're in a larger environment, you need a little bit of knowledge about where things are to be able to put stuff in the right places. If you're small, you can just drop it in and be super-happy with what it gives to you.

Overall, compared to everything else out there, it's a solid 10 out of 10. I haven't found anything that gives me what I need better.

We primarily use Auvik for network discovery, visibility, management, and minor monitoring.

The solution's alerts led me to discover network aspects I wasn't aware of.

The SNMP discovery features are impressive; few products are as robust in their abilities, and it discovered objects I didn't think it would.

Auvik's management and monitoring functions are straightforward to use, though I'm tech-savvy, and this ease of use is important.  

The product increased visibility into our remote and distributed networks, and that's paramount to us.   

Auvik is a helpful tool for keeping device inventories up-to-date, which helps with delegation if the organization has the staff. 

Auvik keeping device inventories up-to-date saves time, as it's much more advantageous than having to do a facility tour in person, manually checking all the devices and adding them to s spreadsheet, for example. We do that for auditing purposes, but the solution makes keeping devices up-to-date much more manageable.  

The trial could be longer, especially for attracting small and medium-sized businesses like us.

The pricing model could also be improved, as the unlimited selection isn't unlimited. The billing work on the build devices and components, and I've tried to set up the solution in a few different configurations, resulting in multiple build devices each time. Therefore, I question the cost-effectiveness for a business of our size.

We've been using the solution for over a week on a trial basis. 

The solution seems stable, though I haven't been using it for long enough to fully evaluate that. 

Auvik seems scalable, and the initial deployment was straightforward. I can see how it would be difficult in a complex environment with multiple locations.

I have never had to contact tech support thus far.

We didn't previously use a different third-party solution; we use what we built in-house or what's available as part of our equipment.

The initial setup was very straightforward; it took me less than an hour to deploy Auvik on our network. 

Compared to other solutions, Auvik is much faster to set up; it was almost immediately available for use following deployment.

For small businesses with many devices, the tool is potentially unaffordable. Auvik Networks Inc. is competing with other companies offering very expensive products. Still, there's a gap in the market and potentially a lot of lost revenue for smaller customers, especially those with complex IT environments.

Auvik would be worth the money if we continued past the free trial if we were a bigger enterprise. From a value perspective, automation and related features could be very valuable.

There are a few solutions on my list to evaluate, but I still need to get around to them.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. 

I haven't had long enough to evaluate Auvik for its automation capabilities or to determine if there has been a reduction in our meantime to resolution. 

We use it for alerts, to a degree, but we mostly use it for networking, monitoring, and triage.

Originally, what really was good about this particular solution was its ability to give us an alert, should something be down, based on simple networking such as pinging. There are a lot of other solutions out there now, but Auvik was, originally, the main source of our networking alerts and it automatically gave us tickets so that we could triage issues.

In a specific service situation where we have a failure, Auvik can save us a lot of time because it can remotely give us a picture of where the communications have stopped in an environment. It gives us the opportunity to put the eyes of a more senior team member on it, someone who is more experienced in networking, to assist somebody who is onsite to determine where the problem is likely to be occurring so that they can solve it much quicker. Many hours are saved for a higher-tier technician because they don't have to be physically onsite. They can use this utility to assist somebody who is there and helps reduce our MTTR.

Another benefit is the reduction in time spent doing repetitive or low-priority tasks, thanks to the automation. By also alerting us when an issue has self-resolved, it saves us the time of triaging an issue when it's not necessary to investigate it. It's helped us be more proactive, and at the same time, has given us an overview of things that have self-resolved.

The visibility we get is vital to my team. Any type of clarity, communication—even background monitoring—are all important. There are a lot of other tools, including SIEM and monitoring tools for networking, that are more advanced and have a better outlook on what's going on. But all the communication, information, and metrics are important for us to get a better picture, even when we're looking back to try to figure out client stability and hardware needs.

And Auvik has probably had an effect on our IT team's availability by helping us know about a client's problem and enabling a proactive approach to resolving it. If, for example, something is going up and down, up and down, we will get an indication of that via the alert system and the way it notifies our ticketing system, giving us trends. That gives us the opportunity to be proactive because we can resolve a problem before it becomes a complete outage.

When you have the alerting set up properly and you have the integration set up properly with a ticketing system, the end result is that, if you have a service desk triage team to determine who gets assigned a ticket based on the criticality of the situation, everything works together. The alerts notify us by creating a ticket. A ticket is then triaged by my service desk team, and they send it to a responding team. Human interaction is necessary in our design, but it does help that Auvik has a lot of automation in it.

Port mapping is probably the most vital purpose that I use it for. My team has a lot of different needs and they will use it for monitoring server performance issues and the like. But the most important functionality for me, over the years, has been port mapping when I'm trying to figure out where a network has stopped responding.

And as an MSP, we have an overall client management portal through Auvik, so we can get to everything from one spot. That's important when we are looking at solutions for clients, giving us some sort of unified reporting and access to clientele.

It's also pretty good when it comes to visualizing network topology if you take the time to manually make sure the access to individual hardware is configured. On an automated level, it helps to some degree, even for sites that are not fully configured or maintained. It's pretty helpful. And from an experienced-networking-engineer standpoint, the intuitiveness of the visibility is pretty good. From what I've seen from my entry-level technicians, their first response is that it's a bit confusing. But I don't think this is really an entry-level program.

It requires a lot of hands-on maintenance when it comes to cleanup. That's probably the biggest problem I've had because I don't have a dedicated resource to manually clean up stale records. I have a customer where it shows 4,000 devices because of the duplication of devices that I have to clean up.

I have recently found that the way that they bill, based on what they detect and what you're managing, is not self-cleaning. It requires that somebody intervene to resolve that. I'm a little challenged with the cleanup of devices for a client and the need to manually maintain it. A lot of manual cleanup is necessary.

We have been using Auvik for over five years.

I don't think I've had any outages with Auvik. I have to give it a 10 out of 10 for stability.

It has the ability to scale, but with the number of billable and managed products in mind, and the fact that it takes so much manual cleanup to get it properly situated for a larger client, I would knock the scalability down to about a seven out of 10. We have to manually figure out the billable devices and manually clean up configurations all the time, making it less scalable.

We deploy it to any client that has advanced networking. If they have multiple sites, that's where the design is most effective: larger clients that have multiple sites, even a dozen sites. We utilize it for networking that has switched stacks or multiple locations.

The communication with their technical support has been pretty solid. They usually respond quickly.

Positive

When it comes down to it, sometimes we require direct access to networks. We used other utilities like N-able products. Other types of programs like that would be useful. Otherwise, you're doing port scanning, either from the switches themselves or from third-party utilities on individual sites, from whatever server or access you have to the site. It's much better in that respect.

Prior to N-able, we used basic utilities, launched individually at customer locations, such as Nmap and Wireshark, where we were looking for network activity and details. All of them were manual applications that were installed and run at the time of need, instead of automated reporting.

I don't know why we moved to Auvik specifically, but we review products regularly. We probably had a presentation by the vendor and then there was agreement that it was the best way to move forward. But we utilize it at the same time that we use many other products for network monitoring.

If Auvik is properly manually managed by my team, there is value from it. If it's just left to run and not manually configured, monitored, or adjusted, then we don't see value from it.

From a client perspective, pricing is always an issue. Nobody wants to pay more than necessary. You need to be aware of the number of billable managed products, because they will greatly increase the cost of Auvik, based on your clientele and what you're managing.

I don't think pricing and licensing are communicated well by the Auvik team, as far as billable products go, until you get the bill. Once you get the bill and you realize you're being monitored for a bunch of things you didn't necessarily want to manage or control, you then have to take the time to manually reduce those managed products so that they're not part of your cost. It's clunky and not quite what I had hoped for.

Overall, I think it's been much better than other utilities I've used previously as far as giving me an overview of switch stacks, switch connectivity, and access to networking.

Maintenance is very manual. It's not the agents that require installation updates, it's the general interface. The configurations, or the inventory, have to be cleaned up manually and that's a lot of work.

My advice would be to keep an eye on billable products, most importantly, and be prepared to assign a resource who is dedicated to cleanup and configuration.

We're an MSP, and we support small to medium businesses from end to end, including printers, servers, and networks. We use Auvik to manage our clients' infrastructure. Our customers include companies running factories and hotels.

The ability to manage access points provided by Auvik is a big one for us; it's much easier to track down cable breaks and the specific switch where the lost connection to the access point is. We serve hotels with over 300 access points, so this functionality is essential.

The solution helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, especially regarding tickets. Ticket logging is now automatic, which helps us immensely. A hotel guest is no longer left without a connection for an hour and then complains to the duty manager, who logs a call with us manually. We can see an issue immediately, and start resolving it, which has saved our business a significant amount of time.    

Auvik positively affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and globally distributed networks because we can see all our different devices from a centralized view. It's much simpler and easier to have all our network components visible from one place. This visibility is 100% critical; our customers pay us and expect us to have visibility over the network.  

Auvik reduced our mean time to resolution and significantly reduced the number of issues we face, so we rarely need to resolve anything.   

The solution also helps our projects team implement new technologies into the environment and manage all the teething issues. 

The network mapping is an excellent feature, as each device is represented by a different shape or object, which is great for helping us, our staff in training, and our customers understand how the network is structured. Seeing the bigger picture helps immensely, as we provide remote support; we're not boots on the ground.

The solution provides detailed device information, including serial numbers, lifecycles, and differentiation between devices, which is another excellent feature.

The monitoring and management functions work fine, and we have no issues with them; it integrates well with our remote system. Auvik sends alerts and creates tickets in our ticketing system, which is fantastic for us because we see an alert come in and pop onto Auvik to start our investigation. The ease of use is essential, the easier, the better. We have a lot of customers, and each one wants to feel like they've received five-star treatment. The quicker we can resolve an issue, the better our customers feel, and the easier it becomes for us to get paid.  

Auvik is fantastic for helping to visualize our organization's network mapping/topology; we've used different monitoring solutions, but nothing can give us a network diagram like Auvik. Previously, we made network diagrams manually, a time-consuming, painstaking process. As soon as we had to add or swap out a switch, we would have to edit the diagram. We used Microsoft Project for that and had to pay for the functionality. It was so much effort for minimal reward. With Auvik, we put in little effort and get a lot of rewards. The network visualization is intuitive enough overall.   

It helps keep our device inventories up-to-date; it features a collector that gathers detailed information about the network, which makes management easier. We can see what's online, decommissioned, or coming onto the network when it's not supposed to. This functionality saves us a significant amount of time.   

I want the network map to be faster and more responsive. 

I've been using the solution for almost a year. 

The tool is stable enough for now. Once a lot of items are on the network map, it can get sluggish, but other than that, it's pretty stable.

The solution is scalable, and we have many customers there. As far as I know, we can add as much as we want.

I never had to contact Auvik's technical support. The solution has excellent documentation, so I can always go in there and better my knowledge.

We previously used multiple solutions, including N-central and PRTG Network Monitor. We switched because Auvik allows us to have more devices, different devices, the ability to differentiate between them, and detailed information that the other products could not provide.

I wasn't involved in the deployment, but in terms of maintenance, the solution requires some upkeep. When devices come and go, we have to remove them manually, but it's still straightforward to see what's going on on a network level rather than having to be there in person.

I don't know how much the solution costs, but the fact that we've moved almost all of our customers over to it means it must be worth the value. Our platforms are costly, but we switched to Auvik, so the company must see it as cost-effective.

I rate Auvik nine out of ten. 

The solution does not provide a single integrated platform simply because we use many different platforms. Auvik is outstanding because it provides the most information and has the most capable feature set. Still, we have many requirements within our business that Auvik alone cannot cater to.

The cloud is the future when comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions. On-prem can be nice, as it can be a little faster, but we have to be in the cloud now. Having one place to go, one platform, is too valuable, and it's much better.  

I advise those evaluating the solution to play around and use it before implementing it. I recommend the platform.

We use Auvik as a network scanning tool so that we can detect devices that are connected to our office network. We can get information from those devices and track them down. It's a network monitoring and scanning tool, so we can detect rogue devices and network traffic as well. It's essential to see what's on our network.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform from a network monitoring perspective. Having a single integrated platform is important for our organization because we obviously don't want to check multiple systems.

It's deployed in a single location with multiple networks for different departments. There are 200 endpoints in our organization.

Credential management is the most valuable feature. It's helpful to have everything in one essential place. The traffic flow is also a valuable feature. I haven't been able to use it yet, but it's been demonstrated to me and looks very good.

It's easy to use the monitoring and management functions.

The user interface could be less cluttered. There's a lot going on, which is good because there's obviously a lot of information displayed. Sometimes I feel a little bit claustrophobic with the user interface. It can be confusing at times because there's so much going on. Once you know how to use it and navigate, it is easy to use.

I've used Auvik for two weeks.

From what I have seen, it's stable.

It scales very well, from what I can tell.

The setup is really easy. We implemented Auvik out of the box. It took 15 minutes to install the virtual appliance. We were able to start scanning, and it took 20 minutes to start retrieving information.

Auvik requires maintenance. The network appliance needs to be updated. Obviously, the credentials need to be updated whenever they change. It's a small amount of maintenance. We don't have to worry about it too much because it's cloud-based. The updates are simple, so it's really easy to maintain. You just log in, click a button, and it will update.

We looked at Lansweeper. I'm still in the process of evaluating other solutions.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten.

Auvik's cloud-based solution is easier to use compared to the on-premises network monitoring solutions. We don't have to maintain anything, which is nice.

My advice is to deploy Auvik wherever you can to get as much data as possible.

We use it for our small and medium businesses, specifically for data collection. We also use it for network mapping.

It's super helpful in the sense that you can look at the network and it shows you a graphical representation, so you know exactly how things are connected. It helps us stay more organized and more up-to-speed on what is in our clients' networks.

It helps keep device inventories up to date. The amount of data you get from it, whether it's network maps or the overall client information, helps you to solve tickets. We have two tiers for our tickets and we have a NOC team that assists us as well. That is how we run the business and the simpler tickets can be handled by the junior engineers.

Also, its ability to visualize network mapping and topology works extremely well. It's very comparable to SolarWinds, which is what I used in a previous position.

The whole troubleshooting process is made easier, and automation is part of that troubleshooting. And its automation has made us more available because it's enabling us to cut down on the time that it takes to resolve a help desk ticket.

We have absolutely seen a decrease in MTTR, thanks to the amount of data and the network maps. If an engineer is looking at a particular client location, they're able to ascertain, fairly quickly, where devices are located and how everything is connected. It just makes the whole troubleshooting process much simpler.

The data collection, as a whole, is valuable. 

The reports seem to be really comprehensive as well. There's a lot of information in terms of the make and model of a specific piece of hardware, IP address, subnets that a device is located on, and network map. It's a single, integrated platform and that is very important because the more tools that you can build into one product suite, the easier it is for your engineering staff to learn it.

It's extremely simple to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. Anybody with just a general IT background would be able to use it without a problem. This aspect of the solution is extremely important. As we're training new people, it's nice to have tools that are simple to use yet powerful enough to give you insight into your client's network. It would be a great tool for delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because there are so many built-in features and you get so much information out of Auvik.

Nothing really stands out in terms of a lack. If you want to be nit-picky, I don't know that there are any remote tools for directly connecting to workstations through Auvik. If there is, I have not used them, so adding a remote tool would be helpful.

I started with my current company about three months ago and that's how long I've had experience in Auvik.

It's extremely stable. I haven't had any issues at all. It seems rock-solid.

We have it deployed across at least 30 clients' systems, so it's definitely a scalable solution.

I have not had to call technical support yet because the product is fairly simple and straightforward.

The ROI would be high. Although I don't handle any of the billing our company receives, from a technical aspect, there is a lot of value from Auvik. I couldn't tell you how long it took to implement because I wasn't around for that, but the usefulness that I get out of Auvik is obvious.

I don't know what we pay for Auvik. But whatever the price is, it's worth it because we're getting a lot of value from it for that price.

In terms of technical insight, if you're looking for good insight into your client's environment, Auvik is a great solution.

Auvik has definitely impressed me. It seems like it's very lightweight, yet it gives you a lot of features.

Auvik gives us better insights into network device performance, so we can proactively catch issues before they become serious problems. Auvik also makes us more efficient by providing automated network maps and allowing us to automate low-priority tasks like configuration backups for firewalls and switches. That's a big one. We used to have to do that manually.

The solution's ease of use is essential because our company is split up into different operating groups. We have an IT and network team. This tool allows people who aren't necessarily familiar with firewalls and other IT solutions to get more information at a glance. You don't need to know the ins and outs of a Cisco ASA to figure out what's happening. It also has historical graphs and other features that are helpful for troubleshooting. 

Our customers are distributed and remote, and Auvik helps our onsite engineers support them effectively. It improves our IT support's overall availability because we can detect problems earlier. It's easier to fix something before it's broken completely. 

Auvik's automated network mapping has been helpful because we no longer need to do it manually. It can also monitor router switches, switch stacks, firewalls, and controllers. Auvik has a few other features that are nice to have, like the ESXI monitoring. The ability to monitor printer status, toner level, and aspects like that is also helpful. It fits our need for SNMP monitoring and then some.

I love Auvik's tools for visualizing the network mapping topology. Network visualization is relatively intuitive. It can get cumbersome on a larger network, but it lets you filter the map. If you aren't using any filters and have 1,000 devices, the network is just a bunch of tiny dots that you can't see. At that point, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, so you have to use the filters and zoom in. In my opinion, it's functioning as designed.

I don't like how Auvik handles their multi-site and site terminology compared to other tools. The sites are customers, and the multi-sites are generally partner accounts, but it could also be a customer account with multiple sites underneath it. Their documentation isn't clear on what to use in which scenario. It's up to your best judgment.

Other RMM tools like ConnectWise Automate have customers and sites. Auvik refers to customer accounts as the "multi-site," and the sites underneath are their actual sites unless you have a reason not to set it up that way. Then you can have all the sites under one site. It's confusing. 

I also think Auvik's integration with ConnectWise Manage could use some additional features for excluding certain configuration types. We have that turned off because it's overriding configurations when we don't want it to. I believe the ability to exclude those configuration types is on Auvik's roadmap. 

We've been using Auvik for about a year.

I don't need to contact support often, so that's a good performance indicator. I haven't had to troubleshoot it since the initial deployments. Usually, it's something like a particular device that doesn't have something enabled. 

Auvik is suitable for most MSP use cases depending on the size and maturity of the MSP. It's an excellent fit for the average MSP. I manage 60 environments with 412 devices. The device coverage varies. 

I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I can't complain. They were able to fix my issues whenever I had them. I never had any long-standing tickets. 

In the past, we were primarily a ConnectWise shop. Automate does network mapping and SNMP monitoring, but it leaves a lot to be desired and requires a lot of manual configuration. 

We started looking into tools like Auvik and LogicMonitor. Ultimately, we went with Auvik because we felt like it was a good fit. The price was right, and it had all the features that we needed. We weren't using ConnectWise Automate's probe functionality often because there was too much setup involved. I would say it's more akin to us coming from nothing to something.

Auvik is relatively easy to use and deploy. If you're doing it as a Windows service, you can deploy the collector in under five minutes, but setting it up on a virtual machine might take around an hour. After you set it up, you need to configure it to scan the different subnets. 

You have to supply credentials and set the devices up to be monitored. It's reasonably straightforward. If we're deploying it for a net-new customer, we can usually get it done in an afternoon, depending on the customer size. Everything works out of the box, but we needed to set up integration with tools like Manage, ITGlue, and Opsgenie.

It's somewhat hard to estimate the onboarding time because we did it for us first as the MSP, then we onboarded many customers within the first month. It depends on the size of the customer, but it took about six hours.

There's a lot of work to do in the beginning. You have to fine-tune the alerts, which are slightly noisy when you first set it up. That part took a couple of months. We were starting from a blank slate because it was a new solution. We left the default settings and then adjusted them as we went along. It was a little bit of work spread out over a couple of months as we figured out what we did and didn't need.

After that, we didn't need to do much to maintain the tool. You have to check every time you add a new device to ensure it can be scanned. However, if configured correctly, the device will show up automatically when it scans again. 

We just did the onboarding through Auvik.

I don't have metrics about the return on investment, but Auvik's SaaS model saves us the cost and hassle of maintaining the infrastructure to host the solution. Auvik's team handles the security, so we're not paying somebody to manage it. 

That's the big advantage over an on-prem solution because then you have to dedicate resources to management. We only need to manage the configuration of the SaaS solution. We started to see value from the solution as soon as we deployed it because it met an immediate need. We were searching for a solution to proactively monitor networks. Auvik satisfied that need and more.

Auvik is worth every penny. I thought it was fairly priced compared to tools like LogicMonitor, which are a lot more expensive. It's reasonably priced for the market.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. Before deploying Auvik, you should check to ensure it integrates with all your current solutions, including your RMM, documentation tools, and PSA. That's crucial because it's automating inventory and configuration updates. It integrates with ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, ITGlue, Opsgenie, and Meraki, but I'm unsure which solutions are incompatible.