We needed SNMP monitoring for several clients and network devices. Auvik is for availability monitoring of network devices, like switches and routers. We also use it for monitoring CPU and a few other functions, but it's mainly just for the availability of our high-priority clients that require 24/7 alerts.
Our entire company uses Auvik, and it's deployed to customers willing to pay for it or customers of a certain size. The environments vary. Some of our clients are in education, government, and the private sector. Some clients have one massive site, but it's also used in companies with multiple branches around Australia. They range in size from 20 network devices to 2,000. We deploy it to any client who will buy it. Otherwise, we can't guarantee that we can monitor the network. Nearly 75 percent of our large customers have adopted it. Internally, about 90 staff members have access to Auvik.
Auvik has enabled us to stay competitive with similarly sized managed service providers by allowing us to sell the latest products and services. Some customers have asked for Auvik by name, so it's great to be able to offer that.
It has centralized and standardized our monitoring, making it much easier to deploy. Because of the cloud-based nature of the solution, we're more confident that we can receive alerts for critical network infrastructure 24/7 without constantly checking that systems are running. We're monitoring about 800 different points, so we need to have the ability to manage all our customers from one portal. The deployment method is consistent too, which is also vital.
Some of our customers had their own systems when they started doing business with us. SolarWinds was heavily used, but they weren't integrated into one management console before Auvik. It's hard to measure, but it reduced the time we spend on monitoring tasks by about 50 percent. It cuts down on network monitoring, setup, and adding devices. Overall, it has reduced that time by at least half.
Auvik reduces a lot of repetitive, low-priority tasks. We can filter out alerts we don't want to see or customers who don't require 24/7 monitoring. It has made management much more straightforward. We have one team who manages the whole environment and people who receive the alerts at the end of that process and take action on the issue. It has dramatically reduced the workload of our 24/7 NOC team that manages network monitoring. It's almost like a set-and-forget solution where you have to do very little work once it's deployed.
I work remotely, so Auvik has been a game-changer. When combined with, say, a photograph of a rack, that network diagram makes it feel like we're there, and we have a much better understanding of how everything is laid out. It has helped us and integrates perfectly with our ticketing system; the alerting itself is just fantastic. Auvik has revolutionized how we do business because we can achieve much more remotely than before. In the past, we had to do site visits more often. It has dramatically reduced our on-site requirements.
Visibility is everything. We need to see what's up and down. It's critical for our business. It reduced the amount of time employees have to spend on tasks, so it allowed them to focus on other areas to improve the business or the customer's environment. It's made a considerable improvement in our availability.
Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date automatically, and the reporting is excellent. You can rely on Auvik as your asset management tool for the network. It can grab serial numbers, IP addresses, model numbers, and firmware. Auvik functions as an asset management tool for any equipment that can be managed by an SNMP.
Instead of doing a physical audit and collating multiple systems from various clients or one client across numerous sites, it's an instant automatic system that provides a device inventory 24/7. You don't need to gather all the data and create a report. You click a button, and it's there. Auvik has reduced our asset management tasks by at least 70 percent. It might be closer to 90 percent. Auvik has sped up our resolution time by reducing the time it takes for the ticket to get into the system and delivering all the details the engineer needs to resolve it. It has decreased the resolution time by at least 50 percent.
Auvik's cloud-based solution and past on-prem solutions we've used are almost incomparable. After you put the credentials into Auvik, it practically does the job for you. You're only dealing with a few network nodes, whereas you would have to consider VLAN, various network subnets, and several other factors when deploying an on-premise solution. You also required a server to run it and a server to do the reporting, so you save a lot of money from not having to deploy all those physical components.
Auvik seamlessly integrates with our ticketing system ConnectWise, which provides a basic alert via email. I also like how it automatically draws the network map and how you can easily filter by the alerts. If you click on the type of alert, it'll show you all the other alerts of that same type.
I love the visualization. It makes it so much easier to feel like you're there on-site. Everything is remote these days, and I'm 100 percent remote, so I'm never on-site at the national clients. It's nice to see everything; I like how you can drill down. For example, if a switch or a router is down, you can see what other items are going to be affected. They change color to tell you if they're up or down, so I spend a lot of my time inside the map and searching for items.
I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for ease of monitoring and management. The interface is highly intuitive. I've seen a few other network mapping tools, and they never seem to work out well. It's miles ahead of its competitors.
I want to be able to customize the layout more in terms of showing the alert timeframes. For example, I would like to customize it to show all the alerts in the last three hours, six hours, etc. You should be able to customize it so that it shows you the most critical information. We don't need to see CPU usage. We only want to see the up and down time. It would be nice to filter out many of those metrics we don't use.
We have been using Auvik for about 12 months.
Auvik's availability is as close to a hundred percent as you can get. I don't think I've seen an outage in 12 months.
Auvik is highly scalable. Our clients vary in size, ranging from small to medium-sized companies.
I rate Auvik support 10 out of 10. I rarely contact support, but they're excellent when I need them.
SolarWinds is another solution we've used. Switching to Auvik was about centralizing everything into one cloud-based tool. It wasn't a cost issue. Instead, it was more about getting a cloud-based solution. We try to use only cloud-based tools to work anywhere without a bunch of tools installed on a particular device.
I wasn't involved in the deployment. The network operations center is responsible for Auvik. I'm not on that team. I'm on the proactive team who receives the alerts.
As far as I know, Auvik requires practically no maintenance. The NOC team cross-references a customer's infrastructure with Auvik's reporting, and they periodically extract a report on devices that are uptime or devices that are used. I'm not involved with any daily maintenance apart from using it to investigate network issues.
The return is almost immeasurable. The most significant benefit is probably the reduction in the time it takes to deploy for a new customer versus installing another product or trying to use a customer's existing solution. One engineer dedicated to monitoring in a month is 160 hours, so you could probably say it's equivalent to saving the cost of one full-time engineer per month.
You get what you pay for, and it's worth paying a little bit more for quality, a robust feature set, and high availability.
I rate Auvik 10 out of 10. Once you compare it to other products you've used in the past, it's an easy decision. If you want to simplify, centralize, and automate your monitoring alerts, Auvik is definitely worth the investment.