We've primarily used Auvik for:
- network monitoring,
- mapping out client networks,
- and being able to get remote access to networking equipment.
We've primarily used Auvik for:
Being able to get documentation through ConnectWise Manage and IT Glue is one of the biggest ways we're able to reduce our response time. Auvik provides relevant documentation and information from endpoints that we would normally have to manually collect. If we need to open a case with Dell, HP, FortiClient, or FortiGate, Auvik does a fantastic job collecting and providing the information required to our team so they know exactly what we're dealing with.
Auvik helps visualize the network mapping/topology reorganization but we can't always export the information and have that be the best network map when we're presenting to a client. However, with the exported information the solution provides us and a few touch-ups in Visio, we can clean the information up and make it very presentable.
Auvik has improved our IT team's visibility into our remote and distribution networks globally by providing us with a single pane of glass that most of our teams can access. This allows our escalation team and project team to quickly identify and fix network problems, or set alerts so we are notified of any issues. This is a fantastic feature.
Having visibility is very important for our IT teams because being able to see and communicate with everyone quickly and easily is a huge component of transparency and making sure everyone is in the right place.
Auvik keeps our device inventories up to date. We found that without Auvik, we were not able to get all of our network equipment into ConnectWise Manage, and it was difficult to keep track of all the relevant data. With Auvik, we were able to get everything set up efficiently and have all the information we need at our fingertips.
Auvik's ability to keep our device inventory updated has saved us time.
We spent 10 to 20 hours a year updating and validating information before Auvik. Auvik has dramatically cut that down.
Since we've been using Auvik, communicating with our escalation team has been a lot more concise. We can focus on issues easier when it's a client that has Auvik because we can pinpoint exactly what's going on with their network. This dramatically increases our time to troubleshoot and reduces how long it takes to identify an issue and resolve it.
We have a client that has two different locations with at least one location using Auvik. The solution has been fantastic in helping pinpoint their networking equipment and firewalls and validating and providing data to the client on the performance of their network equipment. Auvik has been fantastic at providing our medical institutions with real-time data on their network and monitoring. We work with medical billing companies and it's very important for them to keep their networks up and running. It gives everyone peace of mind knowing that Auvik will notify all of us when there's a problem. Most of our clients are in medium size business areas, with a lot of them being singular locations. We have some clients in the manufacturing space where we use Auvik for monitoring temperatures in the environment.
The network discovery feature allows us to put in a subnet and have the software automatically detect all devices connected to that subnet. Once the SMP is set up correctly, we can then go to our clients and tell them which devices are connected to each other. Being an MSP, it's beneficial to be able to go to our clients and require as little documentation from them as possible, as long as we have access to help them discover their own network. We've had a few clients that we've taken over from departing IT people who didn't leave us with much information. Auvik has helped us become successful with those clients.
Auvik's monitoring and management functions are easy to use.
It is easy to use but it's not intuitive until we familiarize ourselves with the solution. Once we are familiar with the solution it is easy to set up.
The solution provides a single integrated platform for a number of our clients.
We have integrated our RMM which has multiple components with Auvik because from a network monitoring and management perspective, having a single integrated platform is very important.
Auvik helps our team to focus on high-value tasks and delegating. One of the great advantages of Auvik is its ability to automate the collection of information. This is an immensely important part of our operation, and it makes automating the process very efficient.
I haven't used many on-prem network monitoring solutions, but the fact that Auvik's in the cloud and we can switch between different clients very quickly is a huge win. It may take a little bit longer to connect to a device when we're doing it through the Auvik portal in the cloud, but we don't have to VPN in or do anything else to connect.
The training is not intuitive. The little bit I've done with the training is fantastic but I would like to have a bit more intuitiveness.
I have been using Auvik for two years.
We've never had any problems with the tool itself, but sometimes we have issues with equipment or lack of documentation. Auvik has never been at fault though. The only time Auvik had a problem was during the AWS outage that impacted 75 percent of our tools.
The Auvik probe is designed for businesses of all sizes. Once it's deployed, it automatically starts pulling in data and scanning our network. Even interns can use it, and it's easy to hand off to other team members.
Auvik's tech support is the best I've ever used. I only opened one case with them, and within five minutes the support person called me and we resolved everything within an hour. He even went above and beyond to resolve the issue. I've been working in tech support for over a decade now and that was one of the best people I've ever worked with. We found out that no one had updated Auvik's API integration with ConnectWise Manage. The support person walked me through the process and shared everything that was reported. The fact that he called and walked me through the steps, especially as I was a new person to Auvik, left a big impression. I compare all of our other vendor support to Auvik's support, with Auvik being the gold standard.
We previously used LogicMonitor but we didn't leverage it because it was absolutely atrocious, painful to use, and did not compare to Auvik in the slightest.
The initial setup is straightforward and I look forward to deploying the solution each time because of its ease.
I've deployed the solution to at least three or four of our clients. I've been the one to clean up the subnets and get everything mapped out with credentials or find missing credentials. The biggest aspect that slowed anything down was our lack of documentation or having to confirm exactly what we need to do in order to fully deploy.
We've mostly installed Auvik on preexisting servers and the first thing we do is set up a probe. We find the server we're going to use as our deployment server and install it there. It takes five minutes to get everything set up. Auvik then starts scanning to find the information. From there the solution tells us what credentials are missing, and if we have them we start entering the credentials. Within a day we have a full network map. It takes some time for Auvik to fully discover and do everything it requires.
Deploying Auvik is one of my main responsibilities as part of the onboarding team.
We started having information populate within half an hour of doing its initial discovery. The one client we had the most documentation on had most of the environment mapped out within an hour. Some had 10 different subnets we had to go through. It was a lot of discovery, but the solution was also validating credentials on our side. Auvik was fantastic to use and provided too much data at times.
The implementation is completed in-house and only requires one person.
I have seen time-to-value with Auvik. I use the solution frequently when we do onboarding or when we are trying to assess a situation in a client's environment.
We can't put a price tag on the efficiency and reliability of Auvik.
The pricing model makes a lot of sense and it's pretty reasonable considering it's based on the Managed Network devices that we have out there. We've been able to wrap that efficiently into a lot of our contracts when we're selling a full IT solution.
Compared to other solutions Auvik is streamlined so even if we're paying more for Auvik, it reduces the overall amount of time that I have to put in one place, which means I can bill for other items and take on other billable tasks.
We evaluated two other security providers, but they weren't direct competitors. Lionguard is more focused on event security, while the other provider is more focused on guarding property. There are some overlaps, but they provide different tasks.
I give the solution a 10 out of 10.
We're not using a lot of the automation and so, we're not as familiar with it as we could be. We've been dabbling with the alerts, and that's where we're looking to expand. But I'm not familiar with the automation side of Auvik.
Once we know what we're doing Auvik is a very efficient tool. It's very different from a lot of other tools. That's just the nature of it being a network management tool. Auvik is excellent at what it does.
There is very minimal maintenance required and Auvik is not usually the cause of this problem. Maintenance usually occurs when someone is working on a project and does not update Auvik or the project's documentation so that the rest of the team can update it.
When deploying Auvik for the first time we must make sure we have our documentation ready to go when doing a mass deployment to new sites or replacing our current existing one. The lack of documentation from the company using the solution is the only aspect that slows Auvik down.
We use Auvik to monitor configurations, devices, and discovery.
Our staff has a much easier time managing devices, networks, and configurations. We're in the middle of a project involving a full-blown switch replacement. There are about 80 switches, and we can grab configurations quickly and easily. Our staff doesn't have to worry about configuration backups or look in 10 different places for logins to hit a switch or firewall. Auvik discovers rogue devices that happen to be on the network, which saves us time and stress. It makes our lives easier.
Auvik saves us a lot of time. For example, for configuration backups, we used RANCID. It's been around forever, it's free, and it's open-source, but there's no support. It would take a lot of time to stand up to the three to ten different solutions, which would be required to get what Auvik gives us out-of-the-box. The amount of time it would take, the number of sites, the networks, and the cloud or on-premises environment would vary from company to company. If it's a 10-person company, standing up those solutions would be a little bit easier. If it's a 3,000-person company, it could take months to get everything correctly stood up. Auvik is a click-and-go solution. It has easily saved us hundreds of hours.
The solution affects our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally. If there's a network problem, it's normally given to a network engineer or somebody who at least knows what they're doing. With Auvik, each of our staff members has access to it. They can make changes according to their best judgment. It helps a lot of our staff understand basic networking, VLANs, trunks, and how networks are laid out. If somebody says, "Port 12 on Switch 2," they can find it.
The automation has a positive impact on our IT team's availability. It saves us time, and our team is more available to help with other tasks.
Tasks that would take hours now take minutes, especially if somebody doesn't have a lot of knowledge or skill set. Auvik doesn't turn someone into a full-blown network architect or engineer, but for people who wouldn't necessarily know how to crawl around on the command line or do discovery, everything is in front of them and they're able to set it up.
We've been able to delegate low-level tasks to our junior staff. Right now, someone is manually doing around 50 switches, four core switches, and a firewall deployment by leveraging Auvik. He's had very minimal network experience prior to this, but he's learning about the network, port, and VLAN through Auvik.
We have seen a reduction in our meantime to resolution. Between the alerting and the ability to leverage Auvik to find it, fix it, and roll it back, we've cut down our response time by at least half, if not more. We haven't needed to keep track of that metric because we hit the ground running with Auvik. At my last company, the amount of time we spent on issues was insane. There were meetings on an almost daily basis about why people were spending so much time on network-related issues.
For example, we had a major customer that was down for over a week and a half due to a network issue, and they weren't pleased about it. It happened again after we started using Auvik, and I was able to identify the issues with Auvik within five minutes and resolve it within ten. The amount of time it took to resolve the issue went down from a week and a half to 15 minutes.
All of the features are valuable, but the ability to remote into anything, whether it's a terminal or a browser, is really big for us. It makes things a lot easier day-to-day. It keeps track of all the firewall or switch configurations, so if anybody makes changes, we can roll back and have an alert on it. Discovery has been useful.
It's easy to use Auvik's monitoring and management function. We can roll out a site in under 15 minutes, so it's up and working right away.
The solution's ease of use has been very important to our operations.
We have a lot of tool sets, so we don't want to spend a lot of time deploying and tinkering with it. Auvik is a click-and-done solution, so there's minimal effort involved.
Auvik provides a single integrated platform, which is pretty important to our organization. Everything is one pane of glass. We don't want to have 20 different portals for 20 different customers because managing each one individually would be a nightmare scenario. It's a lot of overhead. It's pretty useful in general, but it's also incredibly important because the more time we spend managing those tasks, the less time we have for everything else.
Auvik helps to visualize the network mapping and topology for our organization. It's just there, so we don't really think about it. It makes it very easy. As it discovers, it draws out the map. We can see where things flow and what they're connected to. We can answer all kinds of questions like, "What happens if I unplug this," or "Where is this machine, generally speaking?" We've used it to hunt down everything from rogue devices to a missing laptop. Thanks to the topology view, we were able to see which AP it was connected to.
Customers like to see what their network looks like. They may think they have a tiny network, but they actually have 500 devices that are just sitting on their network in a 20-person company. It helps them understand that we're actually doing something and not just saying that the network has a problem. It's good for visualization and for keeping track of where offices are located so we don't need to commit it fully to memory.
It's very important to us that visibility helps our IT team focus on our networks. We want our staff to be aware of the network, what's on it, and how to manage it. We've used it as a learning tool. It discovers everything. One of our guys wants to get more into networking, and we said, "All right, go into here, go to this switch, get all of the port configurations, and figure out how to apply it to the new stuff," because they're not the same. It's a manual process, so he's learned more about networks and networking in the past week than he has ever been exposed to before.
Auvik helps us keep device inventories up to date. It's helpful to know when the software ends and what the last support dates are.
The higher-level and more experienced guys on our team have been able to delegate simpler tasks to our help desk and people who don't have 10 years of experience with network engineering. It frees up our team, and it helps our less-skilled employees get a hands-on education, which is usually the best way.
Sometimes it's a little bit slow to load, but I can't think of anything else that could be improved.
I have used this solution for two years, in my previous company and now in my current organization.
We have never needed to use technical support.
We previously used multiple applications for managing our networks. We used Device42 for asset management, discovery, and collection. We also used an RMM and SolarWinds.
There are no other solutions that do what Auvik does. Other solutions can get very convoluted. You could have a monitoring solution, a configuration backup solution, a Syslog server, a SIM, and a Device42 or something similar to track hardware life cycles.
Auvik has packaged everything into one solution. I remember thinking, "No one really does everything the right way." The more you see a solution smash different facets into one product, the more you think, "There's no way they can do everything really well." Auvik does what it says it will do. It meets all expectations. The monitoring is just as good, if not better than a dedicated monitoring solution. Cisco is happy to charge you boatloads of money to do Syslog and configuration backup, but Auvik does it out-of-the-box.
The icing on the cake is all the integrations. You can throw it into Teams or into a ticketing system. We've used other solutions, but for the rest of my career, Auvik will be the default solution that we use.
I deployed Auvik myself. It only took 15 minutes to set up. After giving some credentials and installing a collector, it started up immediately. We had usable information within half an hour and fully discovered networks within a couple of hours. It was insanely easy.
We're a little bit different from most organizations because we include what Auvik does in our monthly fee for our customers. Technically, we're definitely making money. We don't actually break it down and say, "We made $500 on Auvik this month," but as soon as we have a customer, we're making money, and part of that is thanks to Auvik.
Auvik's pricing isn't astronomical. Auvik is extremely fair in how they break down a billable device versus something that isn't, especially compared to PRTG, which charges for a number of sensors. Auvik makes it really easy to understand that you aren't going to get billed for certain things. They're cutting themselves short, in my opinion, but I've never had to worry about pricing from Auvik. It's always been very affordable.
We evaluated five other direct competitors of Auvik. Essentially, we did our due diligence and put it through the paces. We did a demo and a trial.
I would rate Auvik as 10 out of 10.
I see absolutely no point in an on-prem monitoring solution anymore. If the collector goes offline and something is down at the site, you know that you're looking at a very minimal amount of issues: either the firewall just burst into flames or the ISP is down. Because everything is in the cloud and we're able to see it 24/7/365, I wouldn't deploy an on-premises monitoring solution anywhere.
Auvik is the best piece of software we have used across the board because of the value it offers, especially compared to what it costs and the value it adds to the organization. I've worked for major companies like ESG, Abiomed, and Akamai. I wish I knew about Auvik earlier in my career because it would've made my life a million times easier as a systems administrator, systems engineer, and architect.
We use it to monitor the network infrastructure and assets of our clients. We are a managed service provider and it fits neatly into our role. We also use it to keep configuration change records, which is something we didn't have before. It's nice to have that in one platform.
When we are onboarding a new client with network infrastructure for monitoring, Auvik makes it very straightforward and simplified. It can map out and easily visualize the customer's network so that we don't have to manually do it. It definitely has increased automation.
We used PRTG but it lacked the mapping function to visualize the network with an interactive map. It also lacked the configuration backup tool, the hardware life cycle, and good NetFlow insights. Moving to Auvik has saved a good 30 to 50 percent of our time.
Another thing that I love that Auvik does and that PRTG doesn't do is the integration with a lot of our MSP tools like ConnectWise and Teams. PRTG would open tickets via an alert, but it would never close them if the alert cleared. All those tickets from PRTG would go to me and I would have to manually close them. I would get inundated with tickets. Auvik will also open a ticket but, once the alert clears, it will automatically close the ticket, saving me from having to close a lot of tickets. That too has reduced repetitive work for me by 30 to 50 percent.
Our MTTR has almost been automated because of the tickets. About 90 percent of our tickets have been automated. I still have to manually look at the rest and maybe do a little work against them, but it's not crazy. It has unquestionably helped out with resolving issues.
It has also helped tremendously with quarterly business reviews because, with just a click of a button, we can get the hardware life cycle and export all the data to an Excel spreadsheet. That helps our management.
And because most of our clients are remote from us, that visibility that Auvik gives into their environments is in a better overall layout than our previous platform. The UI of PRTG was very '90s-esque, like a poorly designed website. It had the functionality but the UI was lacking tremendously when it comes to ease of use and organization.
The visibility Auvik provides almost makes it so that we don't have to be actively monitoring things. We don't need a NOC or a SOC to get alerts. We're more confident now in the network management solution that we have. Before, we were getting alert upon alert and my phone would be blowing up and then I would get all the tickets. Auvik has put that kind of stress on the back burner.
Overall, it has freed up about 25 to 30 percent of the time I used to have to put into things.
Another advantage is that I didn't want to show a junior tech our previous platform because they wouldn't know what to do with it. Auvik, on the other hand, is more geared toward all levels, rather than just the high-level engineers. It will tell you what might be the cause of a problem rather than just alerting on something that it sees. While we don't have it geared toward our lower-level team yet, it's very easy to use and they should be able to pick it up.
Among the most valuable features are the hardware life cycle and configuration backups, when applicable, since that's not applicable for all vendors, platforms, and networking types. When it does show you the hardware life cycle for, say, a Cisco device and the configuration backup, that's the most useful aspect for me as a network engineer.
Once it's set up properly with the SNMP strings or credentials, it's very straightforward to use. It has a small learning curve, which is nice for a network monitoring tool. Ease of use is very high on our list of requirements, not just for me as a network engineer, but when I want the help desk or the level-ones to be able to look at something. It needs to be easy to use.
It's also very much a single pane of glass, which is especially helpful for our business model as an MSP.
In addition, I greatly appreciate Auvik's ability to visualize network mapping. It's very good for visualizing how the network is formed and the interconnections. Since it's interactive, it's more helpful than a static map or static video diagram. It's a very helpful feature.
I like how you can request features, and one feature that I think they're working on is the ability to export the topology map as a video.
Something else I would like to see would be additional vendors for the hardware life cycle. Right now, they mainly focus on Cisco stuff, which is fine, but not every customer we have uses Cisco. I'm not looking for them to add every networking vendor, and these just might be legacy devices, but Fortinet is a big one that we've used and I don't think Auvik has the hardware life cycle for that. I don't know how it does on Aruba, but we have some legacy HPE as well. I do like the Meraki integration, although it would be nice to see a Juniper Mist and Aruba Central integration.
Another improvement that would be nice, one that should be at the top of their list, is the ability to properly identify vulnerabilities, based on a vendor's security alerts. If it could recognize, "You're on this version of firmware and you're hitting these types of vulnerabilities," that would definitely check off a big security feature for this tool.
We demoed Auvik early in the year and we fully signed up sometime in the summer, so we have been using it for several months.
Overall, it is very stable.
Every platform or NMS has its own quirks or kinks that have to be worked out, but it's nice that Auvik will update on the backend. I don't have to worry about updating a server platform.
Its scalability is very high. It gets a 10 out of 10.
We have Auvik across multiple organizations. We monitor, administer, and maintain, network monitoring for dozens of clients. It's deployed across all their different environments and in organizations with multiple branch offices. Our clients include the smallest, one-branch organizations up to medium-to-large enterprises. It definitely fits all those use cases.
The technical support that Auvik provides is very good. They're very quick to respond. They have a live chat feature, which is very nice. They're pretty knowledgeable since it's their product. There's no comparison between the support from Auvik and the support we received from our previous vendor.
Positive
We used PRTG before and we're still using it now. We're trying to slowly migrate from it. We put all our eggs in that basket, even though it was a very flimsy basket. We used it for networking servers, mainly.
We didn't use it for endpoint and computer assets. That was handled by ConnectWise Automate. We wouldn't want Auvik to do that.
The deployment was very straightforward because of the user interface. This is where it's more straightforward than Domotz. Sometimes, when you have too many choices, it can be a burden. With Auvik you decide: Do you want the OVA? Do you want to install a .exe? It's very simple. I could probably have someone on our level-one team actually set it up.
It took less than 10 to 15 minutes after the collector was implemented before the network mapping started to populate with basic devices. Then it was a matter of fine-tuning. It was up to me to categorize devices as I saw fit and tune the SNMP so that it got the data that I wanted.
Overall, our implementation of Auvik took a few weeks because of the number of sites and devices and the fine-tuning. Also, an NMS is always being worked on. You're rarely perfectly happy with how it looks. It's constantly being fine-tuned so that alerts generate correctly without over-alerting.
That's one thing I have liked compared to PRTG. Auvik's out-of-the-box alerting is very straightforward and handles the alerts you are likely to see. But that's also where it could do a little bit better, in the customization of alerts. With PRTG, we could alert on almost anything, whereas with Auvik, you're somewhat zoned in.
We have definitely saved a good amount of time on the setup of Auvik, compared to PRTG. PRTG was significantly cheaper, but there was no onboarding help. It was a matter of, "Here you go, do it yourself." Auvik had a customer success team to walk us through and help iron out any kinks, which was greatly appreciated. That was part of what we're paying for. The pricing helps with support. PRTG's support, while it was okay, wasn't as straightforward and easy to get a hold of someone compared to Auvik.
The maintenance involved with Auvik is around fine-tuning for data collection, but it does not involve updating the agent or the backend. It's nice that I don't have to worry about updating the platform itself. I just have to worry about the data getting collected and making sure SNMP strings are updated.
I was the only one involved in the initial deployment, from our side.
I didn't set up PRTG but compared to my brief time with PRTG, Auvik has been night and day and the value has been very quick. For some of our customers, we never had a solution in place to back up configurations. Auvik now provides that. There's definitely peace of mind knowing a config backed up. It is definitely proving its value.
I don't think Auvik's pricing should be based on device, which it is right now. I don't know what their market share is or how they compete with Domotz, but if they want to stay competitive, Auvik should have simpler pricing. Domotz is $21 per month per site, whereas Auvik is per device, so it definitely adds up very quickly.
In addition to the other issues I mentioned, Auvik and our previous platform are night and day in the following way as well. We would almost be scared to put in a subnet for PRTG to scan because we wouldn't know what we got. Now, it's easy to see what we're getting in terms of the devices and prune it from there.
It's also helpful that it's not onsite because we're trying to move servers and services off-prem. Auvik is definitely a step in the right direction. It's one less piece of infrastructure to worry about. You don't have to open up your environment to collect monitoring information. It just needs outbound traffic, which makes things easier. That's where it shines compared to an on-prem solution. Also, you don't have to maintain or update software or the agent. It does that automatically. I don't have to worry about updating firmware.
With an on-prem solution, everything is hub and spoke and everything has to go back to our data center. Auvik, as a cloud solution, eases up on that usage of our circuits and internet.
While Auvik is geared toward network infrastructure for an MSP, it could probably do a little bit better on the server side. PRTG definitely had that as an advantage over Auvik. It could monitor servers and that type of infrastructure better than Auvik can.
Auvik also doesn't have some customizable automations for a specific use case that might need an if-then-that statement to run a script or commands. That might be very niche, but one of our clients is using PRTG like that.
It is nice to see that Auvik has an expanding roadmap. I don't know what PRTG has on its roadmap for new features, but it's nice to see that Auvik is not getting stale.
I did evaluate Domotz and the pricing worked out in favor of Domotz, but we ended up going with Auvik. We're only in Auvik for a year and we'll see how it goes, but unless the pricing becomes too high, I don't see us moving away from it. Domotz was the only other one that was within reach and more geared toward MSPs.
An MSP business can almost flip a coin between Domotz and Auvik. Auvik is priced per device, whereas Domotz is priced per location or site. It works out in Domotz's favor, although I can't speak for its feature sets. Domotz does have a leg up in terms of deployability. It has a hardware appliance, almost like a Raspberry Pi, so it's easy to deploy on anyone's network, whereas you have to run Auvik as a virtual appliance. It can't run on ARM, which is not a deal-breaker, but it is nice to have options when deploying. You're somewhat locked in with Auvik for deployment because you need to run it on a server or in someone's vCenter. It's not that customizable, whereas Domotz can run on ARM as well, I believe.
Auvik has two versions, Essentials and Performance, which is similar to Domotz's model. With Performance you get NetFlow visibility and another feature and that increases the price per device. But the device types they charge for are only those that are part of network infrastructure. Overall, it's probably cheaper via Domotz, but if you have a lot of sites with just one device, it might be cheaper to go with Auvik. Auvik doesn't charge for access points, but they do charge for switches, routers, and firewalls.
Auvik definitely helps keep device inventories up to date. If I have the scan running, it does a really good job of finding devices on the network when the subnets are put in. However, the network infrastructure shouldn't change that much, so I don't typically have it running scans all the time. We're mainly using it for network infrastructure and not as much for endpoint devices. It primarily shines when it comes to network infrastructure, but it did do a pretty good job of doing the initial inventory of the networks.
My advice would be to do a proof of concept if you are in an MSP role or organization, because the costs can quickly add up.
We are an MSP. We use Auvik to monitor our customers and to get up/down tickets. We get alerts from the SIEM, so we use it to make sure where those clients are in the SIEM. If we get an alert that something is sending 5 gigs, we can use it to make sure it is on the network or not on the network. We use it for alerts as well. That is mainly about it. We also give network maps to the customers to use.
A lot of our clients want compliance. There is active monitoring of the system, and it is just easier to get a network map. It is easier to see all the clients that are on the network. If somebody needs to know who is using the x subnet, we can search for it and send it off to them. It is pretty easy in that respect for most of our customers.
Auvik Network Management makes it a little bit easier to troubleshoot network issues. If we get an alert saying that there is a high interface usage, or something is very high, I can click right on the switch and look at it. I can see which port is being utilized. I can see the total utilization on the switch. If I need to, I can terminal into it and turn it off or turn it on.
Auvik's network map along with its dashboard gives us a close to real-time picture of our network. It is not in real-time. It is close enough to real-time. If I want to see how much traffic is going from all the clients to the server over the course of a day, I can see that. However, if I want to see a broadcast storm or if we accidentally created a loop or something, it gives me the tools to find it, but it does not explicitly tell me that we created a loop. In terms of visibility, if I click around, I can get about 90% visibility for investigating things.
We have been able to more quickly identify issues in the network. We did not do documentation on clients before. It is now easier for us to get the documentation done because we can see that there is a switch here and there is a switch there, and get it done. For new clients, I can plug it in and put it in the network. I do not have to walk everywhere. These are the nice, immediate, and tangible benefits that we saw.
Auvik Network Management has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution, but it is hard to quantify the time savings. Sometimes, you have to dig in. It at least cuts 30 to 45 minutes off of getting into the server, logging into the switches, pulling all the switches up, etc. I can click from one to one to one.
I like the quick mapping. I can put a customer in, and I can put the Auvik monitor in, and then probably within about half an hour to an hour, I can see most of the map. I have to tweak things here and there with the switches to get it to read correctly for credentials, but it is very quick. I can see the network pretty quickly.
There are a few things I would like to change about the interface, but in general, compared to a lot of other products, it is a little easier to use. It is a little hard sometimes to find MAC addresses and a couple of other things without getting a couple of clicks in, but in general, usability-wise, it is better than the ones we tried.
I would like more customizable alerts. I can put all the firewalls. I can put all the switches. However, especially with our firewalls, I would like to create an SNMP alert when there has been a change on the firewall, such as a rule change or a configuration change. We want to use it as a part of change management, but we cannot because we cannot get alerts. The alerts are basically whatever Auvik has. We cannot create or at least submit a ticket to get a customized alert, so we have to rely on our SIEM instead to do that alert. It took months. We had to get them to create it for us. That would be one thing I would like to see. There should be more customizable alerts or an easier and more accessible way to get customized alerts in some fashion. We really need those alerts. Otherwise, it mostly works for us.
It would also be nice to be able to customize some parts of the interface so that we have the information that is most important to us, and we could display that in some way.
Overall, there should be more customizability. It does what it does, but trying to change anything about it is a little difficult. We would save more time if we could put certain things on the front dashboard and are able to pull it up and go, "I want the switch and the firewall monitored on these ports." If I am trying to do some testing, I should be able to just put them there on Auvik and pin them instead of having to go to each one of them individually.
3+ years
It is definitely stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
It is pretty scalable. It could get a little dicey, but it is not on the Auvik's side. It depends on the implementation. I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability.
We have ten people who work with Auvik. Our clients are mostly medium-sized organizations. We have about a dozen or so large enterprises, and we have about 300 medium-sized organizations and another 300 small-sized ones.
I never had to call them. My colleague did call support to talk about the alerts. They did answer pretty quickly, and we were pretty quick to tell them no. They were helpful and quick the one time we called them. We do not really call them.
The documentation that they provide is pretty good. The deployment information is pretty detailed. They have the options for Linux, Windows, and even Unix. I do appreciate that. It is pretty good.
We used Domotz for a while, and we then switched to Auvik. We ran into similar problems, but the dashboard of Domotz was not as accessible as Auvik.
We also used Observium. It is an open-source one. Observium did everything we wanted to do, but it was way too in-depth. It is an actual open-source developer one, so it is not easily accessible to the average person. We used Observium for a brief period.
Many customers are getting contacted by ManageEngine. I've take a tour of their platform and it seems to be very similar, but can be more robust - for a price.
The time to value of Auvik is not very long. The platform is pretty quick. There are good instructions online. It was almost immediately.
I am pretty sure it is all on-prem. At least I have not deployed one that was in the cloud.
The deployment is pretty straightforward. It is super easy. The instructions online are usually pretty good. I do not have any problems with it. It is pretty easy and straightforward.
For small customers, it takes a couple of hours. For large customers, with ten switches and a couple of firewalls, it can take four or five hours. Auvik itself usually takes 20 minutes. If we have access to the server, we can just boot up Windows or Linux, and it is done.
In terms of maintenance, we do get alerts when the collectors go offline. Sometimes, they just fall out, and sometimes, the network does some weird things. There is a small amount of maintenance but nothing crazy.
We have definitely seen an ROI in terms of time to resolution and time to work on things. It has definitely shown value in that sense. It has saved us about half an hour on a ticket.
Auvik allows us to spend less time on the setup and maintenance of the solution and issue resolution.
Relative to others, it is affordable. It is not terrible. The Performance licensing is a little expensive for what you get, but the standard licensing is fine.
Observium was free. It is open source, so you cannot beat that. It is open source, so it is free.
Domotz is probably a little more expensive. I never got into that because that was a little bit before me. I used it a little bit but did not get into the pricing structure too much. It seems pretty comparable.
Technically, there are critical devices that are monitored by Auvik at no charge. We have to pay for servers. We have to pay for network devices and firewalls. We do have some PCs that we want to make sure do not go down. This free monitoring is nice. It does not add too much value. We want to see the workstations and where they are at. It would be weird to be charged for that.
It definitely does what it is supposed to do and what it is advertised to do. If people want to use it, it would be fine. For MSPs, it works great because the pricing structure is pretty good, but singular individual or giant enterprises would probably go with an in-house solution, such as Observium, for some of the alerting. In general, for MSPs, it is great. The pricing structure is great, and it is definitely usable.
Auvik has not empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own because we do not give it to our entry-level technicians. In our case, it is specifically for our network team. Our entry-level technicians do not handle any of the network. It is something we want to do with them, but as of now, our entry-level technicians do not use it.
Overall, I would rate Auvik Network Management an eight out of ten. Customizable alerts would be good. It would also be nice to be able to customize some parts of the interface. There should be more customizability.
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 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.
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.
I work for an MSP, and what we do is work with different companies. We monitor all the networks. We have an integration with ConnectWise. We get to receive alerts directly to our ticketing system, and that is awesome. It saves us a lot of work. We don't have to have someone monitoring the networks 24/7. We receive the alerts in our queue and that expedites a lot of work.
The integration is the most important aspect of the solution. If it wasn't for the integration, we would have to have someone monitoring all those maps, all those locations, 24/7. However, with the integration, we see notifications directly to our ticket system, and that helps us a lot to streamline the workflow process.
The fact that we get to see the whole network on a single pane of glass is great. We have a map on our main screen, and we can see all the network devices and the end devices as well. It's very useful.
It's easy to use. You can collapse things via buttons if you have too many devices visible on-screen. When you do that, it helps you see the bigger picture.
The interface is intuitive. I don't find it that difficult.
We gain a real-time image of the network.
Our team was able to realize the benefits of the solution pretty much right away. As soon as I was provided access, I was able to see if there were any failure points, and I could deal with them immediately. It's been a game-changer.
The product has helped decrease our mean time to resolution. I have the option to access any network device if we have the credentials. It saves us a lot of time. I also do not have to have someone on-site. It helps expedite things.
We're able to spend less time on maintenance, setup, and issue resolution.
It's not 100% user-friendly. However, it does offer a good balance. Still, if I wanted to add or change something, I'd have to think about how to do that.
It should be easier to see Mac addresses. I'd like to be able to see every Mac address of every device by just one-clicking on it.
I've been using the solution for seven months.
The solution is generally stable. I've never experienced any crashes.
The scalability is good. If you need to monitor more locations, it's pretty simple.
I've never reached out to technical support in the past.
I haven't previously used any other solution.
The initial deployment is very easy. There's a step-by-step process that pretty much guides you through. We did have to do a few integrations before going fully operational. It took around 30 minutes to create a site integrated with ConnectWise and have the other connector up and running.
We don't need maintenancevv on our end. The only maintenance happens when a device becomes disconnected. Then we would need to go and see what's going on.
For this deployment, or whenever we are building up a new location, either myself or one of my co-workers, and someone on-site can handle the implementation.
We had documentation in regards to integration with ConnectWise. I don't know if we had any other outside help.
I don't have any visibility on the pricing.
We're an MSP.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
There is a lot of documentation on the website, from my understanding, and it is very useful to navigate all that documentation before getting started. I'd advise new users to just try to get as informed as possible before starting to use the product.
The main purpose was to gain better visibility over our network. We were having frequent short internet outages, and we were trying to gain better visibility as to what could be going on in our network.
We were experiencing these frequent, brief Internet outages, and through the use of the network map, I was able to determine a misconfiguration that we had on our network. Auvik was able to identify there was a path that didn't really make sense and just moving a couple of wires around fixed a huge headache for us.
We have two branch offices. Both of them aren't exactly a close drive away, however, the alerts that I get from Auvik help me determine if there's something like a device that's down that just needs to be restarted, and I can just direct somebody to unplug it, plug it back in, then it'll fire back up, and they'll be all good to go. That way, I don't have to travel there. It'll help me determine if I need to jump in my car and drive down there or if I can direct someone on-site.
I appreciate the alerts that they send and the customization with them. I have our environment set up so that between our three sites, I get an alert anytime. If we get an Internet outage or device goes down, it really helps gain better visibility as to what's happening with our different branch offices and to know if there's a potential issue that might mean I need to get in the car and drive down.
I also like the network mapping feature that they have, and I appreciate the configuration and backups as well.
Auvik provides an intuitive interface that supports ease of use. There are a couple of features that I find can be a little bit difficult to figure out how they get working from the interface. For example, if you need to remove a device or add a device and it's not automatically detected, that sometimes can be a little bit difficult. That, as well as changing the IP address on a device. There are a couple of hoops to jump through, however, for the main core processes, it's intuitive.
The network mapping is the most crucial for managing our network performance.
The alerts are another good feature. They definitely give me the greatest insight. I also appreciate the different IP address tracking that they include with it. I like the ability to add notes on the devices right from the dashboard. It really helps provide clarity to the rest of the team if somebody else needs to jump on and see what's going on with the device. They have the history of it right there.
The network map along with the dashboard gives us a real-time picture of our network. It requires a little bit of leg work to get it up and running if your network environment wasn't already set up for it. However, for the most part, it was pretty easy. Auvik provided a support engineer for the onboarding process, so which made it much easier for me.
We've seen a dramatic improvement in resolution. We've gone from network issues being potentially an all-day affair to sometimes solving in a matter of minutes. The alerts really do help us know exactly where the problem is starting from - for example, if it is just one specific device in the chain or all the way at our first firewall. So it's been a dramatic improvement. We've seen the time to resolution decrease by 50%.
Auvik influenced our operation costs and productivity overall. Just having better visibility of what's going on when there is an issue means we can respond fast. Our users aren't left in the dark or struggling for nearly as long. It just helps us respond faster when there is an issue and helps us see where there could potentially be issues and address them sometimes before they even become a major headache.
Tying in with the IP address and the network mapping could be improved. I've spoken with some of their support engineers before about this as well. One of the areas it struggles with the most is it doesn't always work the best for mapping in DHCP Management. It would be good if your devices were statically assigned or IP addresses so your core network infrastructure doesn't suffer. However, if you want to see where a host is connected to in the network, that's not always the most reliable. Sometimes, getting those addresses reassigned once they get tagged by one device, even if that device no longer holds that address (ANM), can be a little bit confusing. As great as the mapping is, it feels like it's only dependable on the higher architectural levels. It's only truly accurate if everything holds the same same address.
I've been using the solution for a little over a year now.
The solution is stable. Any time they have to do maintenance work, they tend to do it either off hours or over the weekend. So if you work in a traditional nine to five management cadence, you see very little disruption. I can't recall anytime I wasn't able to access Auvik during work hours. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten.
We have the solution monitoring 200 endpoints. It's at our main headquarters and two small branch offices. We have 100 users.
It's very scalable. I'd rate scalability ten out of ten. It's very easy to add sites as necessary.
Customer support has been beneficial. When I had questions, especially during the onboarding sequence, they were very quick to respond and get back to me when I was trying to get some clarity over what some of the data I was seeing meant.
I can open a ticket with their customer support portal, and they were prompt about getting back to me and explaining what I was seeing and being honest about certain limitations of the software itself. They let me know that what we're trying to achieve might be impossible.
I appreciate that they spell out what they were doing via online webinars where you can jump in and just learn a bit more about a specific feature.
Positive
We did not use a different solution previously.
The implementation was straightforward. They do most of the work for you. You just need to spin up the virtual machine. They've got a config file that you load up, and they're more than happy to have a support engineer get on a call with you and walk you through how to set up the collector. We were able to deploy in a matter of hours.
In terms of maintenance, Auvik handles that for us. They are very transparent about issues and send you notices when they are about to update their services.
I handled the deployment mostly myself. Two other people helped out a little bit; however, it was mostly about getting it up and running.
We have witnessed ROI. We had the ability to rule out that one outage issue we were having that was causing frequent service disruptions around the office. With that one issue, there were times when employees were unable to do their jobs. Fixing that issue alone paid for Auvik. We've witnessed 30% in time overall. We used to have a lot more outages.
The solution is cost-efficient. I appreciate that they charge by enterprise device, and it's scalable in that way. So, if you only have one firewall and one switch you need to monitor, it's pretty affordable. If you throw in more devices, obviously, your price goes up. It's mainly on our high-level network devices. They don't charge us for monitoring individual access points, and so it feels like you get a lot more bang for your buck, so to speak.
We did look into ManageEngine and PRTG. Auvik was easier to get configured and it was easier to understand the data. Overall, it was more than just user-friendly and had a good price scheme.
I'm an Auvik customer.
I'd recommend the solution to others. If you're running into any kind of network issues and you don't have a great picture of what's going on, Auvik is definitely the way to go. In the right environment, it can be a great life-saver should you run into any configuration issues. I haven't really even discussed the configuration backups, however, those can be a real lifesaver if you have an issue and need to go back where you have equipment failure and need to transfer that configuration to a new device.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
