Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

As an MSP, we monitor all of our clients with Auvik, specifically to monitor their network devices and connectivity, and to generate tickets. We also use it to back up configs for network devices, and it's where we get warranty information since we deal with life cycle management.

We can even push changes to devices through the terminal. Anytime there's a disaster, it's the first thing that we'll go to, to see what may be down or what may be inoperable. It's a really quick way of seeing what may be broken in a network. That's really handy. It's our network monitoring management go-to.

The configuration management has been a godsend. Every time something goes down, we don't have to worry about how it was configured. We're also getting alerts a lot faster. We have an RMM platform that's monitoring things, but it's a little slower to give us alerts and to give us data. Auvik is a lot faster and that's been really valuable. Both the configuration management and alerts are aspects of automation that result in less manual, repetitive effort.

If we're not wasting time checking configs and pushing documentation or mapping devices in a topology, that's time that we get back to do other things. The whole time I've worked here, we've had Auvik, so I don't really know this world without Auvik. But at my last MSP, those things took up a considerable amount of time, five to seven hours a week for me, at least, and probably the same for others. So it would be a considerable amount of time savings.

It also builds topologies automatically, so we don't have to go through Visio and hand-sketch something for every client. That would take a tremendous amount of time. Auvik does that for us and keeps it up to date every day.

And for what it does, Auvik gives us a single, integrated platform. Auvik is our source of truth for all network devices. We don't have anything else that overlaps with it. The amount of time it saves us is incalculable. If we were having to do this on different tools, or if we were having to manage things manually, it would take up a significant amount of our time. Not that managing things with Auvik doesn't take up a lot of time already, but it would take a lot more.

It is unified, automated and it's pretty concise. You don't have to dig around a lot to get to what you need, and that's really important. I was listening to one of the TruMethods guys and he was just talking about how many clicks it takes to get from your question to your answer. Auvik has a pretty concise depth to it.

Also, because we can drill into any one of our clients or any one site and get a very quick overview of what's going on, our team has good visibility into our networks. When a disaster happens, that visibility is crucial because it gives us a fast response time and faster mediation, which our clients love. Day-to-day, it can be important or not, but certainly, when everything's on fire, Auvik can be a real lifesaver.

We have virtual CIOs on our team who work with our clients and the fact that Auvik keeps device inventories up to date is invaluable for them. They can pull up warranty information and start plotting life cycle changes and let the client know, "Hey, we've got to replace all these devices over the next number of years." Having that data in a nice easy report saves a tremendous amount of time. And all of that information gets put into IT Glue, so we can easily search it or run reports from there on it.

As a result, we can communicate better with our clients. You don't want to just go to your client and say, "Hey, we need $50,000 so we can upgrade your equipment." What you want to do is say, "Hey, look at this report. Look at how old your stuff is. This is our plan for the next four quarters and how we're going to spend $50,000." That is gold. And delegating tasks to junior technicians is usually around procurement and projects to replace that equipment. That also wouldn't happen without that reporting.

In addition, having the device inventories up to date definitely saves us time. We don't have to wonder if something is still onsite or in the environment. It has a green check beside it so we know Auvik is checking in and we know it's online.

Another benefit is that it has helped us in reducing our resolution time by something like 15 percent.

The configuration management is the most valuable feature. I worked at an MSP before where they didn't have something collecting network device configurations. It was basically up to the technician who did it last, and you never knew if they saved a copy or not. Auvik makes that a lot more automated so we don't have to worry, if a device dies, that we don't know how it was configured. That's my favorite feature.

Ease of use is paramount for our organization. We have 15 technicians and everybody has to be able to get in there and work consistently. If it's not easy and we have to come up with all these rules on how to use it, there is a lot of room for people to make mistakes.

Auvik's network visualization is pretty intuitive. There's a legend right there and you can hover over any of those lines and it will give you the breakdown of the information. You can even click on any part of it and it takes you right to the device.

We have some clients that are rather large and the topology display can be a little bit of a mess. For smaller organizations, Auvik is perfect. You have your firewall, it connects to your switch, it connects to your LAN, it connects to your clients, and you're done. But for some of our larger clients, the topology view is almost unusable. I don't really know how to solve that. I don't know if you can.

I would like to see a better IT Glue integration in Auvik. With most platforms, when they dump something into IT Glue, it just shows up as a configuration. That is somewhat helpful, but it's not as robust as it would be if it filled in a flex asset for network details, or if it took that topology view and somehow pushed that into IT Glue as an image, for example. We try to treat IT Glue as our source of truth for documentation, and the better integration we can get from Auvik into IT Glue, the more we don't have to go logging in to everything to check everything.

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

I get emails frequently about service interruptions, et cetera, but I don't experience them very often. I think a few weeks ago we had some collectors that started flaking out, but I'd seen the email, so I knew it wasn't a big deal. I do get those emails regularly, so it seems that they have problems frequently, but I don't experience them very often. Are they shooting themselves in the foot by letting me know? Probably. But at least they're being transparent.

The amount of effort it takes to set up one client, when you have one client, is the exact amount of work it's going to take to set up one client when you have 100 clients. In that sense, it doesn't scale with the number of clients, but it's certainly much more scalable than doing it all manually.

We deploy it to every one of our 50 clients and about 2,200 endpoints, and that includes computers. We have configured every switch and firewall and WAP that we possibly can in Auvik for management. 

All of our technicians have access to it. Support uses it to troubleshoot network problems and our technical alignment team uses it to review standardizations. Our centralized services team uses it to make sure that we're backing up configs and that the devices are working correctly. BCIO will use it for life cycle management and phasing devices in and out. We deploy it to all of our clients because the value makes it worth it.

I haven't had to use tech support very much. It's a pretty intuitive application. But the times I have had to contact them, I have usually done so with the chat so I can do other stuff. They always send me a knowledge base article and stick with me to make sure everything's working correctly. I have no complaints. It's been smooth.

Positive

The only "solution" I used previously was "sweat equity." You can rely on Auvik a lot more. It takes some of the human error out of the equation. I can be forgetful, so I assume most people are. You can't be 100 percent all of the time, but Auvik can get a lot closer. It's a lot more reliable.

If you have a lot of clients already, there can be a lot of work to get everything into Auvik and fully turning. That being said, you can drop a collector and start discovering network devices really fast. When we onboard a client, I'll drop a collector and let it start scanning and then I'll go do something else. I'll come back 10 minutes later and it has a fully populated network scan. So you can get up and running pretty quickly with just the bare bones.

But to really get a lot of the benefit out of it could take some work to get all your clients in there and get everything integrated. You do have to touch every device and configure it to point to the collector or put in the right community string. There can be a little ramp-up time, but it's worth it.

We have a lot of problems with licensing in many other solutions, but I've never run into a problem with Auvik licensing. That's a pretty good vote of confidence.

When comparing network monitoring solutions, if the concern is pricing, you need to factor in how much time the different solutions could potentially provide. If you can save 10 percent with this one and 40 percent with that one, but the last one costs a lot more, your time is valuable. You have to assess just how much easier it will be knowing you don't have to worry about something and how much more you can focus on other things. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis. 

Some of our clients are co-managed. They have technicians onsite who work for them and they work with us. One thing we do is give them access to Auvik and they just go crazy. They say, "Man, look at all these cool tools. You mean we get to have access to this?" Just being able to tunnel straight into a device within the Auvik portal saves a lot of time. I don't know if every network monitoring tool in that class can do that. There are a lot of features within Auvik that may not be present in others.

It is about as easy as any other SNMP monitor when it comes to monitoring and management functions. Sometimes, it can get a little tricky to get stuff logged in and connected to the collector, but that's not on Auvik. That's just authentication and networks.

We've used Auvik to generate tickets to alert technicians to go and set up SNMP or to look at a particular alert. That's not really what we use it for, but we've gotten some benefit from that in the past. It's not crucial, but we've saved some time with it.

Every solution requires maintenance, even if it's just checking in and making sure things are working. But I don't think there are a lot of things that break that we have to fix, unless it's something that we've broken, like changing a password or changing a community string. The agents that we deploy are usually pretty solid. I don't recall having to reinstall an agent recently. So it doesn't require a lot of maintenance. It's mostly just the setup time to get everything integrated and get everything working.

I have used Auvik on our local network and our remote network over VPN, and I used it to look for physical devices automatically on our networks.

The main benefit I'm seeking from Auvik is automation. I want to automate the process of pulling resources from our network. I am trying not to do things manually. I would also like to pull information from cloud systems, but I can't do that now. 

It doesn't take long to set Auvik up, and it accurately maps all my network devices. It's rare for a product to simply work the first time. The trial was super easy. I turned it on and let it go. It told me where I had to add login information, and then it just worked, so I think it's pretty good.

I haven't used Auvik in production, but I've been testing it by disabling devices to see how the network map updates. It updates very quickly, so I know immediately when something goes down. Based on my limited testing, I can say that it's ready to go if I put it into production. 

Auvik is effective at scanning the network. It pulls information from devices automatically using the devices' login credentials, creates a network diagram, and displays the network logs. Interestingly, Auvik can manage hardware life cycles. You can see which devices are reaching the end of their lives.  It does a built-in audit, but the solution's strength is automated discovery. Auvik does this really well.

Auvik is easy to use. It's probably one of the best. The network map is something that has been undervalued in these solutions. They're often a secondary thing that network admins are left to build out on their own, and they don't work properly. With Auvik, the network map updates quickly on its own automatically, so it's quite helpful. When there's a problem or disconnection, you know, somewhere, it shows up right away. 

The network map updates in real-time, and I quickly started to trust that it's showing the correct information. It's constantly updating. It's easy to use and set up. You don't need to maintain it. It maintains itself. If the hardware in the system is disconnected or disabled, it continues to update the map.

Auvik only covers the physical network devices. It doesn't include remote apps working in the cloud, but I'm hopeful that they'll have that at some point. It maps virtual machines and physical devices but not low-level cloud systems. 

I've done a couple of trials with Auvik. I did a trial about a year and a half ago. I just did a trial for a few days last week.

I haven't had any issues with Auvik's stability or seen anything weird about performance. Network scanning could be hard on a network, but this has been consistent and reliable so far. 

We monitor some large systems, but for our trial, I only gave it access to about 50 devices. We monitor about 2,000 in total. 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. During my last trial, I asked them for help, and they remotely connected to my Auvik instance to provide help immediately. I didn't need help this time. 

Positive

I've used many network monitoring solutions over the last 30 years. Auvik's biggest advantage over the others is the easy setup. As soon as you install it, Auvik asks for some basic credentials and starts scanning. it just works. That's pretty rare. The interface is clean and easy to use. 

The only disadvantage is that it doesn't capture cloud activity. To be fair, that's outside their wheelhouse. That isn't a capability they advertise. It's more like something I would like to see, but it's not really what they do. So it's kind of unfair to request that.

Auvik's time-to-value was extremely good. Other solutions require a lot of manual work and config file setup. I spent considerable time determining the connections between devices, and often the connections aren't configured correctly on other systems. Auvik sees the interconnections between devices quickly and correctly.

Deploying Auvik was straightforward, and we completed the setup in under 20 minutes. Our network has a few parts. There are local and remote components. There are also some remote connections, so we had to pivot the remote subnets. Within an hour, we had the local and remote networks, including network devices, firewalls, etc. 

I am not familiar with the details about Auvik's pricing. I know that there are billable devices and some that aren't billable, which are displayed on the dashboard. You need to see all the devices to get the full picture of what the network is doing. It's all part of the network. If something is missing, it won't work properly. 

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. When deploying, you should have all your network credentials ready. That's all it needs. Make sure whoever is installing Auvik has access to all the systems you want to monitor.

We primarily use it to monitor our clients' networks. We are also using it as a monitoring tool for some of the clients for whom we manage VMware clusters. We are utilizing Auvik log gathering and alerting. It is like a poor man's VMware monitoring tool.

Auvik's network map along with its dashboard gives us a real-time picture of our network. It is nice. I like how it changes. Based on how big your screen is, it expands to fill in the free space, and as it understands the environment better, it gives you a nice topology. You can see that this device is connected to that device through this port and everything else. It gives you a lot of information in a very clean, concise manner.

The network map does get cluttered if you have a very large environment and you are not tearing it down to smaller sites or smaller chunks. I know early on when we started using it, we would have clients who had MPLS connections, so we were scanning all seven sites in one Auvik site. It was definitely unwieldy because of the number of devices there. Once you get an idea of how you can search and filter, it gets a little bit easier. In our experience, it was better to start creating multiple sites and breaking out each of our clients' sites into a sub-site. Even then, some sites were quite large, so we had to delve into it. It can get messy, but it is something that we worked through.

It gives you full network visibility assuming that you are setting up your devices correctly because, with the bad data in, you are going to get bad data out. You need to get into all your switches, firewalls, and everything else and make sure that SNMP is configured correctly. You need to ensure that your logging is pointing to the right IP and that creds and other things are correct so that Auvik is able to ingest the data correctly. Auvik can then provide a good map of what it is seeing and where all your devices are. It is definitely not a quick and easy setup if you have a fairly large environment. If you have an environment where maybe you have never set up SNMP, there is a little bit of heavy onboarding, but once it is in and Auvik is collecting the data, it is a good product.

We could see its benefits within days of having all the environments configured correctly, sending logging data, and having SNMP configured correctly. Within days, Auvik was able to collect the data, connect to all the devices, and see how switches were connected back to the core and how the traffic flowed. We started getting good data and performance metrics on port speeds and things like that fairly quickly. It was pretty quick.

We are still rolling out access to the solution for different levels of our support team. Those who do have access to it have found it beneficial to be able to see the data that they would not normally have access to.

Auvik has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution. We are not tracking that per se, but for the few issues that came up, we went to Auvik to review performance metrics. That minimized the amount of time it took to resolve whatever we were looking at because we had the data given by Auvik. We were not blindly trying to figure out what was going on by using a device's features.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on the setup and maintenance of the solution and less time on issue resolution. For some of the clients that we have brought on and utilized Auvik with, there has been a little bit of onboarding. We had to go and change SNMP settings or just enable SNMP, community strings, etc. We had to repoint the syslog so that it is pointing to the Auvik collector. There has been onboarding time there, but in the long run, because of the data that we get out of Auvik, it reduces the amount of time it takes to look into issues. So, there is a wash and probably a net positive, where we take less time to deal with issues because of Auvik than the time it took us to get it set up.

I love the ability to remote into network gear such as switches and firewalls directly from the Auvik dashboard. We do not have to get into a jump box or VPN to a client. We can get a nice, secure terminal session straight to any network that we are monitoring and managing through Auvik. I can access that directly from the Auvik dashboard. That is probably one of the biggest benefits since we got it. It saves time. We do not have to look up passwords for a random jump box in a client's environment.

Most of the past frustrations have either been resolved or were more about how I was trying to figure things out. They were not necessarily an Auvik problem. I have been pretty happy with the usage. I have not come across a pain point that was a deal breaker.

They can maybe provide some more best practices or guidance around how large a network should be. They can provide some cutoff points, such as, if you have 30 network devices, you might want to chunk that into a smaller subset or site. They can help you better plan and design how to create your Auvik sites, especially if you have a large environment. Most of our client environments are less than a dozen devices, but we have come across a few where they have had 60 switches. It has been interesting dealing with so many devices and seeing all the data that Auvik can provide with so many devices in one single pane.

It has been about a year since I have been exposed to it, or maybe a little bit longer.

I have never experienced any lagging or crashing with the product. With the amount of updates and the communication that they have about when they are doing updates or when they are having issues, it has been easy. Everything is well communicated. They do a good job with it. I have not experienced the product crashing on me or something like that.

The scalability is pretty good because right now, we have maybe 40 or 50 base sites in our environment. A lot of those base sites are multisite sites. We probably have 60 to 70 total sites that we are managing through Auvik. There have been no slowdowns or hiccups. Everything has been good.

I have contacted their support. There was a problem trying to get a device recognized in the dashboard or send data to the dashboard. It might have been a networking issue, not necessarily an Auvik issue, but they were helpful from what I remember.

The quality of their support was good. It was not necessarily a system-down type of scenario. It was not a high-priority ticket that I put in, but from memory, they responded in an adequate amount of time to the question I was posing. For the scenario, their support was good.

Positive

I have not used any similar solution. The closest thing I have used would be Meraki, but that is Meraki-centric. It is not something that you can use with anything. That would probably be the closest thing to the single pane of glass and seeing how everything is interconnected. It is a hard comparison because the Meraki dashboard is made for Meraki software. I like Auvik a little bit better just because it does not necessarily matter which network equipment is there. With Auvik, we are utilizing clients that have multiple kinds of network hardware such as Aruba, FortiGate, Cisco, etc. They have anything and everything. Auvik has been very good at giving us that guidance into what is going on in the environment.

It is cloud-based with on-prem collectors at all of the different client sites. There is usually a service installed on a virtual machine somewhere unless we have a physical management device in their environment, and then we put the collector on that. Aside from the collectors in the actual environment, the service is cloud-based.

Its initial deployment was easy. There is obviously a learning curve when you get new software. It took us a while to understand all the features and abilities that Auvik provides, but the initial standing up of the site, getting the collector spun up, and adding network devices was pretty quick. It probably took thirty minutes.

The implementation took a couple of days the first time. Now, when we bring on new clients, the time depends on how large an environment is, how many switches and other devices are there, and whether they have already configured SNMP across the LAN. On average, a normal new client takes 8 to 16 hours to stand up, set up the Auvik sites, get collectors posted, and start ingesting data after setting up all the settings on the switches to point to the collector. It is a decent amount of time. It is not too much, but it is not necessarily super quick.

We did it all in-house. A few technical people from Auvik assisted us, but I do not believe we pulled a third party in on it.

For a new client that we bring on, it is usually a one-person job. We assign a tech, and they get it going. It is simple enough that a single engineer can handle it unless you are organized a little differently, and then I could potentially see multiple people being required. Generally, a single person who understands Auvik management and dashboard has basic networking skills, can go in and change SNMP settings, and set up logging can easily handle it on his or her own.

For us, it has been good. I do not get too much into the pricing side. We are an MSP, so we have a number of clients, and we are utilizing Auvik as a way for us to be able to better manage and support our clients. The more clients we bring into Auvik, the better the pricing, so we have been happy with how it is.

There are critical devices in our network that are monitored by Auvik at no charge. That is why we have been using Auvik for some of our VMware cluster management clients. We can add VMware servers to the Auvik dashboard and get basic monitoring and up/down alerting by utilizing Auvik, but we do not pay for them because they are not network devices. That has been a nice additional feature. We have way more network devices that we are monitoring, but being able to add those in and not having to worry about additional costs has been nice.

The data you get out of Auvik is only as good as the data you put into it. So, you need to make sure that you are scanning the subnets that you need to scan. Ensure that you are scanning everything in your environment, you have all your devices configured for SNMP, and you have syslog set correctly out the gate. That will set you up for the best usage of the product and get the best data out of it.

It is pretty good in terms of ease of use. Over the last year or so that we have used it, it has improved here and there, not drastically, but in terms of little annoyances that I cannot even think of right now. It is definitely easy to understand once you go through basic training for how the dashboard is laid out.

I would rate Auvik Network Management a solid nine out of ten.

We set Auvik up on several of our sites to monitor different devices, including computers, printers, and the network. We used it to collect data to see what's going on in our network.

I wanted to try it out to see if we could have all of our devices managed in one place.

The reporting that they have available was good. The options to customize the reporting and the depths to which the system worked were helpful.

The interconnectivity and ease of use were good. It's not very confusing. It's pretty well laid out and easy to understand.

The network map in the dashboard gives you a real-time picture of your network. It did a really good job of showing you an overview of everything.

Our networks weren't weren't very large, so we had no issues with the network map.

Overall, it gave you a pretty deep in-depth view of what was going on. 

We did see the benefits of Auvik immediately. It started pulling data within minutes of implementation. 

It actually did empower us to be able to solve problems more quickly and to stay on top of them and be more proactive rather than reactive.

It helped with our mean time to resolution. We noted a 50% decrease.

The solution allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution. 

With the time savings, I've been able to work on other projects and have been busy with other issues. 

We might have encountered a bug. We notified Auvik when we had an issue with every single installation of their controllers. Using the normal uninstall process was not able to remove any of the controllers from any of the devices. 

I just started using Auvik. I went through the free trial just to test it out to see if it would be something that we could use at our organization. I've used it for 14 days.

I haven't had any stability issues. Other than factors that were outside of the control of the controllers, like the Internet going down with the ISP, it was up the whole time. 

The scalability felt clean. It was easy. If I need to add more sites, it is really simple. 

While I didn't contact support directly, they had a support specialist who had multiple Zoom meetings with the sales team. One of their support specialists or engineers jumped on the Zoom call and asked me about the uninstall problems that I had. They walked me right through the process of uninstalling it, however, I had to go into the registry to do it. It was a little bit more complicated of a process than just a normal uninstallation.

Positive

We do use Ubiquiti. It's similar. However, it only deals with Ubiquiti devices. 

The initial deployment was easy for me. Since we had multiple sites, it took me a couple of days. 

After deployment, I'm not aware of any maintenance needed. 

I handled the setup by myself. I didn't need the help of any integrators or resellers. 

The pricing is a bit more on the higher end. If you are paying by device and you have a hundred billable devices, the pricing can get high pretty quickly. 

Based on the overall usefulness and ease of use, I'd rate it seven out of ten. However, we are already suffering from a bug, which knocks off a few points. 

I'd advise new users to read up on the setup process and familiarize themselves with the way the system collects data and what's required on all of the devices in order to properly pull the data. 

Auvik is our main network monitoring platform.

We were struggling to monitor our network hardware for uptime, bandwidth usage, and errors, all while managing firmware updates and configuration changes. Thankfully, Auvik solved all these problems for us.

In our VMware environment, we use a virtual appliance for Auvik. This appliance acts as a data concentrator, collecting information from all our network hardware. The collected information is then uploaded to the cloud by the virtual appliance.

Auvik's network map provides a close to real-time picture of our network.

The network map is user-friendly, though initially, the text can be a bit difficult to read due to its spread-out nature. However, zooming in and navigating different sections allows for easy readability. Thankfully, all the objects are clickable, providing instant access to detailed information for each one as needed.

I took advantage of Auvik's 30-day trial, and within that timeframe, I became thoroughly convinced of its benefits.

Auvik has significantly improved our mean time to resolution. Before using Auvik, troubleshooting network issues could take hours of investigation to pinpoint the problem. Now, with Auvik's features, I can typically identify the cause within just a few minutes.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on maintenance and issue resolution.

The most valuable features for me are network monitoring and alerting. This means I automatically receive an email notification whenever an issue arises, eliminating the need to wait for users to report problems.

There's room for improvement in the interface. While we only have one location, logging in presents a world map designed for multiple sites. This unnecessary extra step to access the information I need could be eliminated by offering an option to disable the world map view.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one year.

Auvik Network Management is stable. We have not had any problems.

While our current environment handles our needs well, Auvik's easy scalability allows us to seamlessly expand into a larger environment in the future. The multi-site dashboard lets us manage everything from a central location whenever we're ready to grow.

The technical support responds within 24 hours.

Neutral

At my previous company, I relied on a combination of SolarWinds, Lansweeper, and an open-source tool for IT asset management. While Auvik offers a more user-friendly experience compared to these free options, it doesn't provide the same level of detailed functionality as SolarWinds.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The deployment took a couple of days. One person was required for the deployment.

Auvik helped us deploy the system remotely. The on-site process itself was very straightforward: it involved downloading the software, installing it, and then entering information into the interface.

Auvik holds its own compared to other contenders. It's priced fairly, avoiding any underestimation of its value. What truly sets it apart is the per-network device licensing structure, with additional device monitoring included at no extra cost.

I would rate Auvik Network Management nine out of ten.

Minimal maintenance is required.

We use Auvik mainly to monitor switches and firewalls but also use it to monitor VMware. We also utilize the extra monitoring that Auvik provides for desktops.

Auvik gives us better insight into devices and helps us troubleshoot better because we can compare configurations. Auvik also gives us better and faster alerts on devices. If a client has a switch that's down, we tend to be able to find out and react to it before the client has to reach out to us, which is always a great benefit.

When internet connections are down, we can find out quickly, especially after hours or over the weekend, and can make sure that everything is working before the staff come back in to work for the day. We can make sure that everything is back up and running. The number of alerts and the granularity of the alerts mean that we can pinpoint on a particular switch the specific port that is causing the issue.

The other great aspect that has come in handy a few times for us is traffic monitoring. We can see if someone's internet connection is running slowly and see exactly where the traffic is going. We can zero in on what the traffic is, which user is using the traffic, and what switch it's going through. The information that Auvik gives us helps us troubleshoot, which is a lot of what we do. Auvik has helped us make sure that the company continues to run efficiently.

The most valuable feature is that it will back up the configuration and it will keep multiple copies of it. If a change is made to the configuration by someone else in my company, for example, and something goes wrong, I can bring up the previous configuration and the current configuration, and it will show me exactly what's different. It greatly reduces the time it would take to troubleshoot because I can pinpoint exactly what was done. I can then either change whatever it may have been or roll back the change.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions are easy to use. For certain devices, switches, or routers, you have to make sure that SNMP monitoring is enabled on the device. Once it's enabled, Auvik is extremely simple to use. I've worked with other monitoring software in the past, and it has taken weeks to configure all of the alerts and get everything monitoring the way we want it to. With Auvik, once the device is capable of pushing the logs, it's simple. Auvik also has many out-of-the-box notifications that are pre-built and that automatically monitor. Setting up a switch or a router is simple and quick.

Auvik provides a single integrated platform and two different ways to install it. If you have VMware, you can put an appliance right into your VMware for monitoring. If you have a Windows server, you can install the agent, and it crawls the network and finds everything easily. Having a single integrated platform is important for our organization because we don't want to have 10 different programs or applications and have to go through each one to differentiate which one is using what and where. We want to be able to have one central location where we can find everything we need.

Before we switched to Auvik, we used three or four different applications to monitor different functions. Some were designed to monitor VMware, some were for desktops, and some were for switches and firewalls. Using multiple products was a pain, and none of them actually had as many features as Auvik does now. We have saved quite a bit of time by switching to Auvik. We have central alerts, and we have functions pre-built now that we truly understand what it takes to get a new client configured. We just added a client in the past few weeks, and all we had to do was throw the agent on a machine, let it figure everything out, and put in the passwords for the devices into Auvik. That was it, and Auvik took care of everything else. It definitely saves a lot of time, especially in terms of the configuration of the monitoring.

We can visualize the network mapping/topology of our organization with Auvik. It's really nice that it breaks it all out. When we have clients that have 40 or 50 switches across multiple buildings, the map will be very large. In these cases, it's very difficult to zero in on the map; however, we will still be able to pinpoint which devices are connected to which switch. If a particular switch is down or having issues, we'll know exactly which segment of the company is going to be affected by that. We'll know if there are network loops because certain things are interconnected.

The ability to not have to try to manually figure out where everything is and just be able to pull up a map and identify a switch that is connected to it is great. It makes creating a network map for new clients much simpler. If we go into a new client, we can run Auvik for 24 hours, and then it will bring up all the switches and all the devices connected to the switches. It will show where the firewall is as well. It has definitely taken away the time spent creating the network maps, which were never one of my favorite things to create in the first place.

Auvik helps keep device inventories up to date for us, especially with regard to switches, routers, and firewalls. Even if we're the ones who put one of these in, we don't necessarily have to go write down the serial number. We can get it configured, put it in, and then go back into Auvik to make sure that it's being picked up and monitored. We can also check whether we have all the information right there for us so that we can get everything right out of Auvik. If the switch gets replaced and it goes directly to the client, we don't necessarily need to see the switch because we know we can pull out everything we need right from Auvik to update our inventory of the devices for that particular client.

Having a stronger inventory and the flexibility to more easily find particular aspects allows us to delegate certain low-level tasks to junior staff. Because we can pinpoint exactly where particular devices are easily and quickly, we are able to delegate more high-value tasks such as important firmware updates so that patches are done as quickly as possible. It makes it much simpler because we know exactly which clients need the update. We can use Auvik from the portal to remote directly into that device to apply the firmware that we need.

Having Auvik keep our device inventories up-to-date takes away the need to have someone dedicated to recording that information or keeping the information up-to-date. We can just log into Auvik and get it. It's much faster, and we're not wasting time on doing something that, although is very important, takes away from us having the ability to do other much more important tasks.

The time-to-value is worth every penny. The speed at which Auvik alerts us when there are problems with switches or firewalls, or when switches or a segment of a network is down is worth it in and of itself. Then, you have the added benefits of VMware monitoring at no additional cost, configuration backup, and log storage. The cost of Auvik for the amount of time that can be saved and the ability to look good to a client because you're on top of everything is well worth it. The amount of time that Auvik has saved us is certainly worth its cost.

We have definitely seen a reduction in mean time to resolution. Auvik is very quick to alert us and give us the information we need based on the client and the switch. We can log into the Auvik website and get more information so that we can be more on top of things. There have been several times when we've had a switch go down on the client in the middle of the day, and we have been able to reach out to them to let them know that the switch is down and that we're working on it before they even realize that the switch is down. It allows us to get to a problem much faster and also helps us to look better to our clients. Prior to Auvik, if there was a problem we typically found out when the client reached out to us. The client typically would find out within 10 to 15 minutes that there was a problem and then reach out to us. So, it would probably be 15 to 20 minutes before we would know about the issue. Whereas now, we know about an issue within three to five minutes, so we're on top of it. Auvik has cut down our time by 10 to 15 minutes.

The biggest area for improvement is the speed of the website because it's not something we host. Each of our clients hosts an agent that gathers the logs and pushes it up. The website can be slow to click around in or click through.

One other area for improvement is a central location to figure out what devices are not having their configuration backed up or are not monitoring a certain item. Right now, you have to click into each switch, router, or firewall and then just make sure that all of the boxes are checked for backup and monitoring. This, technically, should already be happening as soon as a switch is installed. However, for auditing reasons and to verify that no one missed anything, having one place where you can click and see a list of all the switches, what's missing, and which switches are not doing what in the realm of backup or monitoring would be great.

I've been using it for three years.

The stability is good. Auvik is hosted on AWS, so if AWS is having issues, then Auvik will as well. However, the few times that I have remembered them having issues, they have been resolved quickly. We've seen no ill effects from any of the times they've had issues.

It appears to scale very easily. We have small clients and large clients, and Auvik handles them all very well. It doesn't seem to have any issues with any changes we throw at it.

Auvik's technical support is great. We don't have to reach out to them very often because we don't have that many issues. However, the handful of times that we have reached out for assistance with configuration they've always been easy to work with and helpful.

Technical support staff even reach out to us periodically and ask if there's anything that they can help us with. Auvik's support has been top-notch, and I'd give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used a ManageEngine monitoring solution for monitoring switches. It may have come a long way by now, but the downside at the time was the sheer time it took to get it to monitor what you wanted it to. It did not have a configuration backup or the ability to check configurations and what was different between two particular configurations.

We had a big client we had just taken over who had quite a few switches and devices on the network, and we figured that it would be the perfect time to give Auvik a test run. We really liked the fact that Auvik would monitor, back up configurations, and map everything out.

We wanted the ability to retain logs for more than 15 days, and Auvik implemented the ability to push logs out to Azure or AWS for retention. You can get your own bucket of storage, connect it, and keep logs for as long as you like.

One of the reasons why I like Auvik's cloud-based solution is that it's easier to get alerts. If an on-premises network monitoring solution goes down, it's much harder to get alerts, whereas the cloud solution can tell you that it's down because it can't see it. You may get a false alert that it's down, but it's better to have a false alert and look into it than it is to figure out that it's a true alert. Alerting with a cloud solution can be a little bit better than that with an on-premises solution.

The other aspect that's nice is if hardware crashes on-premises because of a ransomware attack, for example, and I have my logs stored in a cloud solution such as Auvik, I can still get to those logs to figure out what happened or how the attacker got in and do some forensics work. Whereas if the logs were being stored on-premises, I would probably have lost them all.

The initial setup was very straightforward. You have to go into Auvik, create a customer, get the agent to install, pop the agent onto a machine, and give it credentials so that it can scan. You let it run for a little bit, then you add your SNMP credentials into Auvik so that it can log into the devices, and you're done.

You can do more configurations to make sure that the backup feature is turned on or enable traffic insights for each switch. These are just a couple of clicks on the mouse. The initial setup and onboarding of new clients have been simple and quick. We've never had any problems.

We implemented Auvik out of the box. The network mapping started to populate within 10 to 15 minutes after the collector was implemented. How long it may take to truly grab everything depends on the size of the network, but typically, within an hour you will have a pretty solid understanding of the network via the map. If you were on-site with a new client, you could install the agent with their approval and have a meeting about the different aspects of what you're going to do for them. By the time the meeting is finished, you would have a pretty strong understanding of the entire network and what devices are out there.

We deployed it with the help of someone from Auvik.

Given the types of alerts and the different aspects of Auvik, I think it's worth the cost that is associated with it. I don't think the cost is terribly high. The infrastructure is the core or the backbone of a business. If it goes down, then the business stops. You have to decide how much money you're going to lose if your network is down and you can't figure out why for hours or days versus what Auvik would cost you a month.

If you want to evaluate Auvik, give it a couple of days at the minimum. If you have any questions, reach out to their technical support. Ask them how to do things and how things work, or watch some videos on it. Auvik has a lot of functionality, but don't get overwhelmed. Look at each one separately, spend some time on each one, and just give it some time to sink in and see what it can do.

Overall, I would rate Auvik at ten on a scale from one to ten.

We use it for network management. We use SNMP to get notifications about various issues on our network.

We implemented it because we tried out a free trial. The goal was to get more visibility into our network. I get notifications on everything from printers being low on paper to network cards that are dropping packets. It does a lot of things that otherwise I would not have known about.

It is very easy to use. After you do the initial setup, it is kind of set-it-and-forget-it.

The network map is pretty straightforward. It is like a lot of other discovery applications that I have seen. The network map gives a good visualization of our network as an overview. We can make it larger, and it is easier to see. Our network is pretty well segmented. It shows different switches and things coming out of it. We have got everything segmented very well, so we have not had any issues with it not being able to fit everything in.

I had to have a couple of support sessions to get everything configured correctly. The simple SNMP monitoring was pretty easy for devices using a public tag, but I did have to get some support with the firewalls to get them correctly into the system. I had to make a few configuration changes on the Fortinet firewall to get it to work, but after I got that worked out, the benefits were immediate. Within two days of implementing it, I realized that I had a lot of packet loss on one of our Hyper-V servers, and I was at a loss for what the performance problems were. I immediately found a lot of packet loss on one of the network adapters. I was able to swap that out. That immediately fixed the performance issues we were having with our Hyper-V server.

Auvik has not empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own because this is a one-man shop here. It is just me. I do not use it as much for resolving tickets, but it prevents some tickets from being created because of the notifications I get for various issues. I simply would not know about them otherwise.

As long as everything is cooking along fine, I do not get any alerts. I do not have a lot of false alerts that cause me to waste time. When I do get an alert, it is usually something that is pretty important, and then I can look into it. Oftentimes, it gets resolved before tickets are created by end users.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on the setup and maintenance of the solution and less time on issue resolution. The initial setup took a little bit of time, but it was not anything outrageous. It was not super complicated. For the most part, all the devices were plug-and-play after they were discovered. Firewalls were the only ones that took a little work to get working, but after that, the notifications that I get do save me a lot of time from responding to tickets because oftentimes, I can get things resolved before end users even notice it.

The notifications for events are valuable. If a copier is low on toner, I can get the toner ordered instead of being surprised when it runs out. It saves me from running around and having to check a lot of things. I get notifications based on the alerts that we have configured for it.

There was an issue where I did not have the ability to turn off certain notifications or noise that I did not care about. I worked with the support guys. They showed me how to do it, and I was able to silence notifications on a specific device, which is something that I was having trouble with. I had one device that was getting non-stop notifications about one issue that could not be fixed. It just had to be that way. It was a legacy machine. After working with support, I was able to turn those notifications off specifically for that one device and that specific problem, which I could not find on my own. After they showed me how to do it, I have not had anything to complain about this product.

If anything, the spacing on the network map can be better. In the network map, we have one switch crammed in there. Some improvements in the spacing on the network map would be good.

Their documentation and knowledge base can also be improved.

We have been using Auvik for about a year and a half.

I have seen a couple of emails come through about them doing scheduled maintenance, but other than that, I have not had any issues with any downtime. If they did have any downtime with their cloud application, I did not notice it. I might not have seen any alerts for that short period of time. If they were down, nothing has been to the level that I noticed it.

We only have 150 devices here. We have not had any issues with scalability because we are not that big of a shop.

I have called them two or three times, and each time, they have been able to resolve my issue very quickly. I always try to do things myself using their documentation, but I had a little trouble finding the documentation for my Fortinet FortiGate issues. Another thing that could be improved is their documentation and knowledge base, but in terms of their support personnel and time for them to get a resolution for me and get me up and running, they did a great job.

Positive

I did not use any other product previously. This is the first time I have used this type of product. I do not have anything to compare it to, but I have nothing but good things to say about Auvik.

It is deployed in the cloud. It was super easy to deploy. The Fortinet firewall required some configuration changes on the firewall itself. I did that with the support folks on the line. I was able to do the rest of it on my own without any problems at all. I just had a few issues with the Fortinet firewall.

It was all deployed within one day.

I did it all myself except for the two firewalls. I had to have a support call to get that done.

The pricing is good for what it does. It has been a few months, so I do not remember exactly how much it was. I believe for our network here, it was about 2,000 a year, so the pricing was good.

A lot of printers and things of that nature are not one of the charged devices.

We went directly to Auvik. I got an email about a trial. I installed it and thought how useful it would be to be more proactive than reactive with the types of issues that it spots.

The only advice I have for new users is that if they have Fortinet firewalls, they will have to do some command line configurations to their Fortinet to prepare it to be able to send the alerts to all of it.

I have heard of Auvik's SaaS Management product. They sent me an email about it recently, but I just read the headline of the email and moved on. I do not have a solid understanding of what it does other than maybe keeping track of your software as a service license. I am not familiar with it that much.

I would rate Auvik Network Management a nine out of ten for what we use it for.

As a network engineer, I rely on Auvik Network Management primarily for troubleshooting network issues. Auvik's visual representation of the network is particularly helpful, allowing me to gain a clear understanding of how everything is connected. Additionally, Auvik facilitates remote access to switches and firewalls, streamlining my troubleshooting workflow.

Our organization previously lacked any network monitoring capabilities. This made it difficult to identify and troubleshoot issues. We've implemented Auvik, which has addressed this challenge. Auvik provides us with valuable insights into our network health and allows for easy remote access to devices. This overall improves our network management efficiency.

Auvik has a well-designed and user-friendly interface. It's easy to navigate and understand.

The network map dashboard is a valuable tool because it offers a near real-time view of the network. Additionally, it allows for filtering elements. As a network engineer, my first instinct is to focus solely on network devices. I want to see switches, access points, and firewalls – a clear view of just those critical components. This filtered view usually provides me with a good understanding of the network's health. However, there have been instances where a device appeared on the map but wasn't actually being scanned. This highlights the importance of ongoing learning about the tool's capabilities. I'm confident there are features I haven't yet explored that can further enhance my network monitoring experience.

The network map dashboard provides full network visibility. I am able to see all the devices.

Auvik has been instrumental in reducing our mean time to remediation, which is a major reason I want to migrate all our customers to the platform. Without Auvik, I lack a clear view of their network, making it frustrating and difficult to troubleshoot issues effectively. Having all our customers on Auvik would provide a central vantage point to monitor and manage their networks, ultimately leading to faster resolution times.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution.

The most valuable feature of Auvik is the remote access functionality. It eliminates the hassle of manually remote accessing a PC and figuring out its IP address and password. With Auvik, everything is stored securely within the platform. It's as simple as a few clicks. I can easily launch a remote browser session or access the terminal directly through Auvik, saving me significant time and effort. Additionally, Auvik allows me to quickly configure SysLog settings and even view device configurations, like switch configurations, without needing to establish a remote connection. This is incredibly helpful for situations where I just need a quick glimpse of the settings. These are the functionalities I use most frequently at the moment, but I'm constantly exploring and learning more about what Auvik can offer.

The responsiveness of the UI can be sluggish at times. While I understand occasional lag when remotely accessing devices, the overall performance of the application itself could be smoother. In other words, it would benefit from improved responsiveness for a more seamless user experience.

I was working on a device in the AP that had disconnected from the network. I needed to troubleshoot the issue and wanted to find the switch it was connected to using LLDP information. Ideally, I wanted to know the specific switch port it was plugged into. Unfortunately, when the device went offline, Auvik didn't retain this information and it was lost. Having Auvik automatically save this data, even for offline devices, would be a valuable troubleshooting feature. This would allow me to quickly locate the device, even if it's currently disconnected, by looking up its historical connection details. Currently, according to the support team, this functionality is not available.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for one month.

Auvik Network Management appears to scale and handle large networks easily.

I've contacted technical support several times now. While the chat representatives are helpful, the escalation process has been slow. I opened a ticket a week and a half to two weeks ago and only just heard back. I understand they might be busy, but perhaps some additional resources could be allocated to expedite escalations.

Neutral

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

Auvik has been a lifesaver for me and I would recommend it to others.