Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

I run an engineering team with a dynamic cloud-based environment. I was interested in tools that can help me understand what we have deployed. 
There are about five people administrating it. In terms of the number of locations, it's hard to say. We're a distributed remote team, but we have multiple cloud environments. We don't have locations in the physical sense of the word anymore.

One of our core objectives is to understand the services and systems deployed in the cloud. It's not always obvious. I'm hopeful that Auvik will help.

Having a single platform is somewhat important. It's also essential to integrate Auvik with other solutions. However, I don't think there's a situation where one tool can be the single integrated platform within a space. I checked out the API and the integrations around that. It all looks good, but I didn't use it that much. I did some basic integrations, but I don't think having a single integrated portal product is everything. The right amount of features are integrated into Auvik, but it doesn't need to have everything integrated, and nothing ever will be fully integrated.

We use various tools, including our homebrewed management scripts, some monitoring tools, and cloud portals. They aren't all applications per se, but we have various overlapping tools. Switching to Auvik would save us some time, but some key hangups prevent us from proceeding with it. 

The automatic discovery would help us avoid repeated configuration steps. The automated device inventory feature is potentially valuable. Employees are expensive, and we want them focused on high-value tasks. 

Visibility is crucial. Auvik has alerts that help us be proactive by telling us when something is behaving abnormally. 

The automatic discovery feature is the most valuable, but I've got some issues. The monitoring and management functions are effortless. It couldn't be more straightforward. We use lots of tools, and they need to be as simple as possible. Auvik has an advantage there because I certainly would pick it over something else. However, we often find ourselves using functions that aren't so easy to use because we need them, and they're the only option available.

The network visualization was intuitive enough, but it's hard to say because the network I was testing had a reasonably flat structure. It was good for what I was doing, but I don't know how that scales.

We use a service called Tailscale, a peer-to-peer private networking tool. My biggest issue with Auvik was getting it to scan devices across the Tailscale network. I suspect it's not supported there. That would be a valuable extension for us.

I haven't used Auvik for long. I did a demo for about a day where I set up the features and played with the interface extensively.

Auvik is highly stable.

I haven't stretched Auvik's capabilities, but it's been fine.

I rate Auvik support a six out of ten. They were very responsive, but I didn't feel that the answer was quite accurate.

Neutral

We had a mixture of cloud consoles and self-management scripts. I saw Auvik advertised and thought the automatic discovery sounded handy, so I took a free trial.

I run the engineering team, so I wouldn't do the deployment, but I manage the people who would. It's pretty straightforward, and I implemented Auvik out of the box. It takes very little time to deploy. I could see devices within an hour. I spent most of the day playing with configurations, adding SNMP credentials, and exploring. I could get something running in half an hour to an hour. Auvik was much quicker to set up than some other tools. 

I'm concerned about the price. It seems quite expensive.

I rate Auvik a seven out of ten. Currently, it doesn't work for us because of the limitation on Tailscale. If it weren't for that, I would give it a perfect ten. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet our needs, so I can't score it too high.

The setup was smooth, and you can tell they've put a lot of thought into helping people with that. I'm curious why all the devices have API keys next to them when I know some devices don't have APIs. It wasn't clear what that meant. Maybe the way the APIs work could use a little bit of polish.

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.