Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

Our primary use cases are for monitoring the network and backup for the switches and firewalls.

The daily backups monitoring and the notifications if something goes down have improved my organization.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution. It's easier to find the devices on the network and pull out the information. Of course, the SNMP is also good to get the logs. It helps in the network debugging or if we have to find any problems. 

The backup feature is really good. The monitoring feature is the main reason why we use Auvik.

Auvik is really helpful and straightforward. I like the free training as well. It's easy to use.

It's done a pretty good job when it comes to its network discovery capabilities. It's pretty accurate. Although, we have a few VPNs and maybe a bit more complicated setup. It's complicated to do it the right way, but it's fine. It's not a big issue. 

We tried the traffic insights feature. My director uses it to report issues about traffic things. It shows the network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive inline traffic decryption.

This feature to check the bandwidth is good because we have a high bandwidth development, so it's hard to check. If we saw high bandwidth usage, it is not an issue for us because it's part of the development.

We use automated out-of-the-box device configuration backups. Before Auvik we didn't have any solution and we haven't had any script or task to do this. And it was one of the selling points for us to have the backups and see the differences between the configurations. So it's not to save anything. It was one of the reasons why we subscribed to Auvik.

I would rate Auvik's time to value for setup time, automated network mapping, and documentation a ten out of ten. 

The cost savings we have realized to the solution versus its cost is an eight out of ten because we haven't saved a lot but it improved our system. 

It's missing the license checker feature. We are using Salesforce and the license is a really crucial part of the development, and we have to monitor it. Now, I have to write a script and then run it on a random Linux box and get a notification if it's expiring. It's a really specific feature. I'm not sure Auvik will develop it.

We used Nagios for monitoring. Since it's an open-source thing, you can easily extend it with plugins. We had the license-checker in Nagios and I miss it in Auvik. There might be a solution to check this license. I just haven't had time to check it.

I have been using Auvik for around a year. 

We haven't experienced any stability issues. 

The scalability is pretty good. We have two studios and two offices and it works perfectly.

We have 50 PCs on one side and 200 PCs on the other side. 

We have one or two users actively using it. 

It requires zero maintenance. Nagios was a continuous polishing and setting up of stuff. Auvik is totally different. Auvik just works out-of-the-box. Nagios needs parenting.

We had one ticket and they solved it. That was our experience with technical support. 

We previously used Nagios. I liked Nagios, but Auvik has much more features. It's an enterprise product instead of a normal one. We tried Auvik, we liked it, and we bought it.

The initial setup was straightforward. My director implemented it and we have two collectors in our two offices. So it was pretty easy. We only had issues with the authentication.

It took around a week. It took one night for him to install it and we were able to fine tune it the next week. We are still learning it.

We did the deployment ourselves. 

The licensing is really good. I felt the price was a bit expensive, but it wasn't my decision.

Auvik only charges for certain devices and not the endpoints. We like the way it's licensed. 

We didn't evaluate other solutions. Auvik wasn't my choice. We had Nagios and we didn't replace it but we started slowly using Auvik and phasing out Nagios.  

My advice would be not to forget to set up the external IP because it was also a good feature.

I would rate Auvik a ten out of ten. 

It is our primary monitoring tool for devices.

We have virtual machines running the Auvik application. The collectors are also installed on the virtual machines.

The benefit is that it is our primary monitoring tool. 

To some extent, Auvik helps us put out fires with its backup connectivity, before end users even know that there is a problem. If we can access devices faster, then it helps resolve issues before they are noticed.

Monitoring: It lets us know the state of our business and statuses.

Discovering by IP range is okay.

We have backup connectivity in case of some failures. So, it has been of some help. Our mean time to resolution has been decreased by half an hour.

Sometimes, it is easy to use. Sometimes, it is painful to add something and get some of the features running. For example, we had a problem adding interfaces to the monitoring. When some features are not yet deployed, sometimes we struggle with configuration problems, adjusting it in the proper way.

There have been some problems with the implementation of the monitoring. Because we can't monitor as we would like, we aren't introducing anything more to the platform at the moment.

It needs flexibility for the pooling of information. Because it is fully automated, it is pooling everything from the device from a given category. There is no way to exclude things that are not important or if you want to temporarily remove them to see statistics of other things. For example, we get about 100 MB from Auvik. We are unable to limit this. We would rather stop monitoring something, since some features will always give you alerts, because they shouldn't be monitored. However, it is impossible to exclude them, e.g., the internal interface. If somebody disconnects the device from the internal interface, we get an alert. So, this is something that is really painful for us. More flexibility would solve most of our issues.

We can only see the global picture, not the detailed one. This is something that we don't have in Auvik.

I have been using Auvik since I came to the company, which would be less than a year ago. I think it was deployed in our company about two years ago.

It is stable. We are well-informed about planned maintenance from Auvik.

It does not require much maintenance to keep Auvik running.

We need to install many instances in each network, which is kind of a problem. A collector needs to be installed for each network. This causes problems with the scalability, especially if you have a network divided by firewalls.

I am using Auvik mostly when there are alerts or something is wrong.

We are monitoring around 40 devices.

Auvik's support is pretty helpful and fast in their response. 

This was the first monitoring tool that we used.

I was only using some obsolete systems five to seven years ago. Auvik's setup is much easier than it used to be for those.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. The portal is pretty simple and self-explanatory. The process of deploying does not take long. Basic functionality takes about 40 minutes to set up. If you want more features, then it will take more time.

Auvik was first configured for the virtual environment. Then, we created instances for it.

Evaluate whether it is suitable for your purposes and network, in terms of scalability and flexibility, versus using other features, like disaster recovery or emergency login.

We haven't discovered a lot of devices with Auvik.

It is based on the identified networks. Though, it is not scanning all interfaces, e.g., if you don't have the appropriate subnet. You need to define the range by, e.g., IP devices, then it will scan that range and update the topology automatically. However, it is not an out-of-the-box automatic discovery.

It is worth having two instances on two different parts of the network to have more reliability on a network level.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of 10.

Our use case is to monitor and maintain not only our corporate headquarters, but all of our remote sites and embedded sites across our company.

It's a SaaS application.

It has definitely helped us to put out fires before people even know there is a problem. It helped us to discover a lot of network problems with one of our buildings so that we could have it rewired.

We're a pretty small team, there are four of us in IT. I'm the primary network person and then I have a backup. Auvik does help him and other members of the team, and our developer. We all wear multiple hats, but we have our specialties. It helps everybody on the team when I'm not able to get to something, and somebody has a network issue. It helps everyone else to diagnose the issue if I'm tied up working on something else.

The solution has also decreased our mean time to resolution by at least half. We're able to very quickly see what's going on. We can see the connections within the image it shows, but we can also deep-dive quickly through the TrafficInsights and the logging. Even if you quickly go ahead and make a decision to reboot something to restore service, you can still capture logging and things that would normally be on the device, so that you can quickly figure out what happened. That helps with root cause analysis for after the fact so that you can come up with plans to avoid the issue going forward. That's the kind of thing we didn't have before. Before we'd have to make a quick decision regarding, "Do we troubleshoot this to figure it out or do we go ahead and just reboot it?" Nine times out of 10, that'll probably resolve your issue.

It's a network monitoring system, so being able to see things like the hardware lifecycle, if our equipment is up to date, if connections are broken, or whether there are physical line breaks, is helpful. We're able to determine connectivity issues. We can monitor pretty much anything that is network-related.

It's fairly easy to use out-of-the-box.

We also use the TrafficInsights feature and it has been a huge help to us. Using it, we can see interface utilization, both WAN-facing and LAN-facing. We can see what kind of bandwidth we're using and what is using that bandwidth: what type of application, what host is using it, and how long it's been using it. And the historical data of TrafficInsights is great as well.

With TrafficInsights, we can obviously tell when our backups are running, because we run nightly backups and hourly backups. We can see the performance utilization of our backup server. And we can also tell, end-user-wise, what applications end-users are using and how long they're using them for. And while we don't necessarily know what they're doing, at the same time we kind of do know what they're doing. We know what websites they're going to, so we understand how they're utilizing the internet connection.

When it comes to identifying where we are experiencing performance issues using the TrafficInsights feature, I'm actually working on that right now, for the comptroller of our company. It's mainly about trying to get her to call me when it actually happens so I can log in and see it. This is the first time I've used it to diagnose an actual connection problem.

Auvik's network discovery capabilities are pretty fast. The biggest thing is that you have to commit to SNMP. You have to turn that on so that you can get the layer below. From a ping perspective, it does a great job of discovering devices on the network, once you have pointed it at the right entry point. You have to commit to a few protocols to open up the network so that it will get to the levels below the surface, where you're actually pulling information, data, logging, et cetera. If you really want to manage the network, you do have to open up a few protocols.

It also automatically updates network topology. It has a great map view of everything so that you can see all the connection points and the health of a connection. You can say whether it's a ping or if you have the right protocols set up so that you can pull in information. It's very easy to quickly see, from a graph, where you need to possibly address setup issues. The other thing that is great about the highlighting is when you have unknown devices on the network. They will come up and you can quickly filter for them in a very easy-to-use table. That way, you can tackle if they really are unknown devices or if somebody is trying to do something they shouldn't.

It's rare, but sometimes the actual application itself can be a little slow. That's because of the amount of data that it is pulling from remote networks. That has been my only complaint with it and it's really not even a complaint. But if the speed of the application were to improve, it would help a lot.

We've been using Auvik since December, so it's been about six months.

They do really well with the availability of the application. When they need to take maintenance windows, unless it's emergency maintenance, which I've only seen one time, they always have a backup. That means it's pretty much available all the time. We've never had a problem with it going down, ever.

It's pretty scalable. It's always easy to add on another visible device. Depending on how you decide to set up your network, you're going to pull in anything that isn't a piece of that main entry point. From a pricing standpoint, that part's good. 

Their technical support has been crazy good. A challenge for us, if we wanted to consider leaving the product, is just how good they are. Not only were they engaged from the beginning—even as easy as it was—but they guided us through and showed us different tools. They gave us multiple workshops. And even after those workshops we've had quarterly follow-up.

They really want you to use the product. It's not even a partnership issue. Rather, you can just tell they love what they do. It's definitely one of the better relationships I've come across in the last 20-something years of IT. That made the decision to go with them really easy for us. We felt really good about it after as well.

They're also very open to feedback and to looking at what that can lead to in terms of development and enhancing of their product. They've done so much reaching out to us. We have nothing but great things to say about them.

They definitely work with us. They don't just say, "Here, we sold you a product." They want us to get the most out of it, and that's what changes it to a partnership-type relationship.

We didn't have anything before Auvik, and it's helped out immensely.

There are a couple of tricky things to set up. You've got to know the equipment that you're running, but once you know that and you work alongside Auvik and use their Knowledge Base, it's extremely easy to set up. We had ours up and running in a day and we had it fine-tuned in a couple of months.

As a cloud-based solution, other than troubleshooting, there's barely any maintenance on our side. A lot of it is just the initial setup, such as getting a site running, and even that doesn't take that much time. You can have a site up and running and loaded in 30 minutes or less, if you know what you're doing. It's very straightforward, very easy to use, a lot of it is point-and-click. Once you've set up a few sites, you tend to know it like I know the back of my hand. It's super-easy for me to set stuff up.

We worked with an Auvik technical engineer. They had a deployment roadmap that we followed, and typically, every other week we were going through the different features and functions. We would set up a meeting to go over, for example, setting up SNMP and SSH login and turning on TrafficInsights. They helped us tune it to the way that we needed to use it.

The time-to-value ratio, for us, was day one. We had nothing before Auvik, so as soon as we got the product up and going, we were already seeing the networks through the discovery services. After a session of a few hours, we started to understand the SNMP and how to set things up and pull in a lot more of the logging and alerting, detailed information regarding the traffic. Within two to four hours, on top of the discovery stuff, we were off to the races. We quickly discovered versions and where we were from an asset-management perspective. We could see older equipment that we had, and we were able to quickly target a hardware refresh. The time-to-value was almost instant.

It's great for small businesses, but when you start reviewing the pricing model, depending on how many devices, and what sub-devices you decide to pull in, it can get tricky as far as the pricing goes. 

For us, as a mid-sized organization, it works great. There are some functions and features that you might get from a Meraki or from SolarWinds that, if you have a more robust networking team or a security team, might be useful, and Auvik might get passed over for an enterprise-grade solution. That said, Auvik is phenomenal for us. It's great for what we use it for. It gives us a very powerful tool at a very cost-effective price point for our size of an organization.

We have 20 to 25 billable devices. In terms of endpoints, we at least have 250 machines and there are a bunch of printers that we've got alerting on, and other miscellaneous devices that are connected to networks.

The challenge might be for a more robust network, where you start putting in a lot of billable devices. There's going to be a point where this solution would potentially be more expensive than some of the enterprise solutions, just because of the billing structure. Auvik could potentially price itself out of large organizations because of how it does billable devices and lose out to solutions that not only have more robust services but that price things out differently.

We have looked at a couple of open-source, network monitoring solutions, but they weren't as robust as this. NinjaRMM was one of the solutions we looked at. We pretty much just chose Auvik and moved forward with it. 

The strength of Auvik, and many of the tools at its price point, are the out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities. Where Auvik pulls ahead is when you set up SNMP and you're able to scan the layer details and information from all the devices underneath. That's when you're really going to start getting more of the robustness it offers, whether it's TrafficInsights or it's the asset management that comes from having a network monitoring tool. That's definitely where it comes out ahead. Ninja RMM, for example, is just giving you a high-level inventory of what it sees on the network. It probably wouldn't give you much more than a Lansweeper or the like.

My recommendation is that even if you have network experience, their product is vendor-neutral, so pay attention to the way that they do things. Even though it is specific to them, it's very easy to get used to the way that they have everything laid out.

Take advantage of the training sessions and of all the meetings. Go through the certification course that they have and pay attention to the Knowledge Base. Everything that they have done shows that they actually care about what they're doing and what they like doing. They are there to help. They will bend over backward to help you.

It does configuration backups and it takes them automatically. I also do those on the side as well, manually. In the event that something does happen, it's always better to have a backup. We've got backups for everything. We haven't come across any issues where we've had to use the configuration backups yet.

It does its job well. I would rate it at nine out of 10. I'm a little bit more network-driven, so a lot of the things it can do are fun, for me. I probably enjoy it more than anybody else on the team. 

You can definitely tell that this solution is younger than some others. It definitely knows its niche. It gave us everything we needed, to the point where I could rate it an 11 out of 10. But if I start to look at SolarWinds and some of the other names out there, some integration capability to do all the clicks within the service would probably be the next improvement that I would want. But if you ask for those, it may price itself out of where it's at now, which is a really great spot.

I don't see us leaving it for quite some time for sure.

We use it for visibility into remote sites. We use it to fix misconfigurations that come up, investigate network issues or network slowdowns, and alert us if devices go down.

In terms of deployment, it is pretty much all cloud-based. There is an agent that you put on a server for your site.

We have been able to see potential misconfigurations across the network where things like STP are not set up properly. 

It has helped us to deal with issues proactively. When disk space is low on endpoints or servers, we have set up alerts to preemptively reach out to people so that we can take care of it before it becomes a bigger issue. We are able to let users know that we need to upgrade the storage on servers or endpoints.

The automation of network mapping has allowed us more time to focus on things that we deem necessary. It has enabled our junior network specialist to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks.

I am sure it has decreased our mean time to resolution, but it is something that I need to reconfirm with our local system administrators. 

It automatically updates our network topology. It has also simplified our operations and saved the time of our staff members to a limited degree. Our structure is a little bit different from most companies, so I can't describe the full impact, but it has been helpful for the visibility that it provides into local networks.

The visibility that it provides is probably the most valuable feature because we need to know what our sites look like. Understanding what our sites look like and knowing about what kind of network gear or network equipment these sites are running is very important for us. Previously, we didn't have visibility into everything.

Its network discovery capabilities are excellent. It is able to automatically scan subnets as long as they're reachable from the host machine. After you have installed it, you can choose which subnets you want to scan to build your network. It will automatically build a topographic map of the network, which is good to understand the structure of each of these networks. It does this in a fairly quick response time and with ease of use and ease of access. 

Alerting is a great feature. We have been able to set up alerts for devices to preemptively reach out to users and let them know that we need to upgrade the storage on servers or endpoints. 

It is very easy to use and deploy. You can easily configure network monitoring on the sites.

They can definitely build more alerts. Firewalls can be more integrated to provide more information, and there can be better integration with Meraki. 

It also needs ports for stack switches. Getting into the Office 365 realm would also be a good thing for them.

I have been using Auvik for about eight months.

It is rock-solid in terms of stability. We have not had any downtime. It hasn't gone down on us. Maintenance windows are scheduled appropriately, and notifications are sent out in advance.

It is very scalable. It is currently being used in 15 to 20 different networks. Across global sites, we probably monitor more than 1,000 devices.

I haven't really had to use their technical support. We've just taken help from our onboarding success manager.

We needed something that was easy to deploy and gave us visibility. We also needed something that we could standardize across the sites.

It is certainly easy enough to deploy. Our strategy was to work with each site for a couple of hours to install the agents and have the credentials in place in Auvik. We repeated this for every company that we had, and it took us about two months to deploy it to more than 20 organizations. 

In its deployment, 10 to 15 system administrators were involved. Auvik has an onboarding specialist, and this specialist was the only person whose help we required. Their specialist was top-notch, professional, and caring, and our experience was great.

It is a cloud-based solution, so we don't have to do any maintenance. 

We have seen our return on investment in terms of visibility and standardizing of platforms. Auvik has enabled us to standardize our platforms. We have replaced all of our other local network monitors with a single platform. I don't know if it has really saved us in licensing costs. It is not cheap, but it has allowed us to consolidate all our other platforms.

Taking into account Auvik's setup time, automated network mapping, and documentation,
it has a pretty good time to value.

Its pricing is a little on the high end. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. 

It is more expensive than other solutions, but their per-device model is very fair. Anything other than the networking gear is monitored by Auvik at no charge.

We evaluated LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor has a much wider breadth in what it can do and monitor. It is also much more configurable than Auvik, but Auvik is easier to roll out in a quicker timeframe. Auvik also wins with the autodiscovery and mapping features.

It is definitely for larger networks, and the ease of deployment is where Auvik shines. 

It provides automated out-of-the-box device configuration backups, but we do not use this feature. We are also not using as many TrafficInsights features as we would like to use. We are planning to use more, but at this time, we do not utilize many TrafficInsights features.

I would rate Auvik an eight out of ten.

We use Auvik to monitor two different domains and to review any trouble that might come up. It's opened our eyes to some problems that we've had on the network and now we're working to fix those.

One of the things we noticed is that our wifi access points were throwing a bunch of errors. So we're in the process to replace those access points.

It is also very good at notifying you if the network goes down, and then it'll tell you if it's cleared or if it's come back up. 

Auvik started providing value right away. The APs immediately started sending alerts. It's really important that the wireless network works properly over at that location. Looking at the alerts, it's got big problems, and it's just because of old devices.

The alerts that it sends out are the most valuable aspect of this solution. The maps are okay. The interface is okay, but the alerts are what I really like.

Auvik is easy to use. The first thing you see when you open it up is a map of the United States or wherever you are, and it shows the locations of all of your network endpoints. For discovery, you set credentials and manage the credentials and it tells you when it needs a new credential. So you just click the "Manage Credentials" button and it takes you to the right spot. You enter in a new credential and then it starts looking closer at the device. It can give you all kinds of information from inside the device's log. We use it for CIS logs and we use it for just regular logging. The CIS log was something I was looking for in the other products, just so we have a place for the CIS logs to congregate so we can look them up.

The menu on the left-hand side is very straightforward and clear. If you want to see it, just log on to a certain endpoint, bring up that endpoint, click CIS log on the left-hand side, and you'll see the CIS log.

It's easy to navigate. Everything is intuitive and easily accessible.

The network discovery capability is very good. Last week we refreshed one of our locations, and while an employee was out there refreshing the location or replacing devices, I could sit and watch Auvik find the new device and start mapping it. It automatically updates our network topology.

There's only one other team member and he doesn't use it. So it's just me that uses it. And I use it to make sure that there are no loops in the network or the network is not configured wrong. Every once in a while, the map will do something funny and we'll have to try to figure out what it did. You are better off if you physically document the ports that things are plugged into and then put those into Auvik, which is not hard. You just click on the connection line and go ahead and edit it.

We never would have known that the access points were a problem until Auvik came along. The location that has the bad access points was running slow and we could not figure out why without Auvik. The network was basically configured wrong. Something was plugged in and created the loop. Within hours, we could have somebody go onsite to fix it.

We use the TrafficInsights feature a little. It shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive inline traffic decryption. The part that's important to me is the application breakdown. It breaks down the applications that are running and taking up bandwidth. It lists all the applications that are taking up bandwidth.

The map would be the first thing I would like to see improved because sometimes the maps get really odd-looking and the automated placement of things on the map, devices on the map is sometimes not right. In fact, I was just looking at the map and something got moved. I'm sure it didn't get moved, it's just that Auvik realized it was supposed to go somewhere else. So the map could be better if there was a little bit of manual manipulation that you could do.

Everything else is pretty simple and straightforward and easy to use.

I have been using Auvik for six months.

It's always been stable for me and available. They do have scheduled downtime, but that's usually in the middle of the night and it's usually pretty quick.

We have a small network. We do have two domains, which a lot of things don't work well with as far as network tools, but Auvik works great. It just picks out both networks and we go from there. 

We're monitoring 575 devices with Auvik. We've maxed out on our network. We might add other devices.

It requires zero maintenance from our side. 

I've used support once or twice and they were efficient, quick, and solved the problem. I don't remember what the problem was, but they were quick and efficient about it.

The initial setup was very easy. We use VMware, so we set up the connectors that we needed and Auvik just started working. It started going through the network and building maps at each location. It was very simple. The setup took a few hours to a day.

It's too soon to have seen ROI, but I'm sure we will.

The value is there. It's not that expensive per device and it's licensed per device. Unlike some of the other tools that I use, it's not really expensive. It's a good value for the price.

Out of those 575 devices, 49 of them are billable. The non-billable devices are workstations and printers.

Everything just worked. The important thing is to set up your devices properly so that there are passwords and ports that Auvik can use so that it can get in, get the configuration, and also flag any alerts.

I would rate Auvik an eight out of ten.