Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We're an MSP, and we handle and monitor the network for many different organizations. So, we use Auvik for any client that has on-prem resources such as firewalls, switches, and servers. It's basically for any client that has a physical office.

We used it mostly for alerting and to have visibility over resources on a network. It's centralized oversight over what's going on.

The network map is really good. It gives us a good idea of the topology for new sites as we deploy the software. The ability to remotely connect the network devices is great. If we don't have direct access we can pretty much just do it from anywhere that we have an internet connection to. That's really helpful.

My team does the knowledge training. They have a university, and when we have new staff, they take the Auvik certification course. Otherwise, there is a lot of stuff to do in the solution and a lot of things to see. Without training, people will have to guess their way around it. Maybe they will see some basic features, but to actually leverage it to the fullest, you do need to take the training.

The dashboard and the network map give a real-time picture. It is really good so long as you have the credentials for everything. I don't really have any complaints. I think it's really helpful. It has been a lot of use for us in the past. Regarding things such as suggestions, it tells you where you have devices you do not have credentials for. That's something you can see if you go to the discovery settings. 

The benefits were realized pretty immediately. The benefits are very self-evident. The only thing you have to do to see the proper benefits is make sure you have a good setup. It's important to know how to deploy things, which credentials to add, etc. Otherwise, the topology will not be of much use. You will not get the configurations. However, if you have the proper knowledge of how to set this up, it's great.

We do not give our entry-level technicians access to Auvik most of the time. It's usually for tier-two technicians or our network engineers. However, it does help them with the Epic training. Before we are going to give entry-level permissions, we have them take training, and the training gives them a lot of information on the network on how to use the platform. 

Auvik helps decrease our mean time to resolution. What's good about Auvik is you can define thresholds where you can close alerts. So, if something goes down, you can see the condition. That definitely helps us take time out of the resolution process and lowers our oral ticket numbers.

In terms of the dashboard, maybe seeing on the map, for example, if you have an access point that's connected to switch one, and the access point you do not have credentials for, that could help us make management a bit easier. However, it's not terrible. It's just something to make it easier.

It has a monitoring feature. Besides just monitoring the network, you can tell Auvik to monitor a host name, like a domain name or an IP address on the cloud, and it just pings the IP address and gives you information. I feel like that's something that could potentially be improved a bit. For the service monitoring feature, we can check for port status or cloud ping checks. We can check against domains and against IP addresses in the cloud. That's a feature that has been of a lot of use to us. However, it is a little bit lacking in some features compared to other solutions that we have also used in the past. We used to use another solution, and we wanted to transition this service over to Auvik since Auvik does largely the same thing. However, as we were migrating, we noticed specific features were missing, and we could not add some of the monitoring back into Auvik since there were some technical limitations. For example, if Auvik has an IP address for the domain you want to monitor, and if the domain does not respond, it will take it as the services down, and it's going to trigger the alert at that point. It does not check when giving out a ping request. It checks by just making an HTTP request to the website. However, basically, some websites that we manage do not respond back to ping requests based on safety settings and so on. So, we have to do HTTP checks to check if the service is up. However, Auvik does not support that at the time. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

Mostly, it works well. We do have some sites that seem to stress the platform a bit. We might have been over the edge when it happened, and that's the only time I have seen performance issues. 

It's really easy to scale. Previously, and I'm not sure if this is true any longer, you could not turn a single site over to a multi-site and vice versa. In that case, you may need to delete your current site, or sites, and migrate things over. 

Technical support is really good. They are really quick. I have no complaints. 

Positive

I've also used Datto. However, Datto provides actual infrastructure, whereas Auvik is just monitoring. They aren't quite the same. 

Setting up the solution is not difficult. We just have to make sure we have credentials for everything on the network. However, that's something that comes from our clients. As long as we have the credentials, it's pretty quick to set up. We had everything set up in about two weeks. 

However, if someone is not tech-savvy, they will see many unfamiliar terms. If someone has knowledge of API integrations, they'll have an easier time.

We tend to need two people for each deployment. Someone will take care of provisioning and collecting, and someone will do the technical setup within the platform.

There isn't really any maintenance needed. There may be alert tuning. Auvik does come with a lot of alerts that are already pre-built in. Some we disable, some we modify, and some we just create from scratch. 

I do not handle the licensing aspect of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten with my biggest complaint being the documentation and knowledge base, which is difficult to navigate.

We're an MSP. We're pretty much monitoring our client's network. 

We offer a full suite of outsourced IT management solutions. We use this as an internal tool, not something we sell to clients; it's mostly something we use internally to make life easier.

It's reduced manual workaround troubleshooting network incidents. It also works around alert management. We get alerts, and those alerts create a ticket in our ticketing system. When the power comes back, the ticket closes automatically. We can have zero-touch intervention. Previous to the solution, the process was much more manual and a person would have to go and see what was happening.

When it comes to network visibility, we can see incidents. We found a lot of issues with our billing system, for example, and that's probably the biggest value-add for us. 

The network monitoring is great.

The solution covers a bunch of things. It's designed to be MSP-focused, which is useful. Your clients are tenants, and you can set it up at a global level so that you can drill down at a client level. It makes it very scalable. That's the biggest pro for me. Once you set up things correctly, it can scale very easily. You can just keep adding clients. You don't have to touch anything beyond deploying a connector on-site.

The alerting and network mapping are the most important aspects of our organization.

The interface is intuitive and easy to use. It helps a lot with troubleshooting network issues. It's comprehensive. It gives us a real-time picture of what's happening. It's fairly easy to gain visibility. Once you have things set up correctly, it provides a lot of visibility.

The automation of alerts and ticketing has saved us about 30% to 40% of our time.

We've been able to decrease our mean time to resolution. It's hard to gauge an average, however. For some tickets, it's significant, and for others, it may not be that much. Likely, we've improved mean time to resolution by 15% to 20%.

Auvik has positively influenced our operational costs and productivity. It's saved us a lot of time in terms of manual human effort. Since we're saving time, we're saving costs. It's also allowed us to position ourselves as network management and network monitoring experts and perhaps target a few clients more on the network side of things that are more network-focused than just the MSP and IT support side of things.

Sometimes we run into a new switch, firewall, or router brand that the system doesn't manage or interpret. If they could expand the products they support, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution for somewhere around two years.

The solution is absolutely stable. We haven't had any problems in two years. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. I do get the odd email that warns that the service is down. However, it's usually during the night, and it resolves quickly.

Our clients are mostly small businesses. 

The scalability is excellent. I'd rate it ten out of ten. 

Both support and the onboarding process were excellent. They have the best technical support experience across any vendor we deal with. The first person you talk to actually knows what is going on. You don't have to wade through different levels of service. 

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously. We did have some scripts set up to run manually without RMM that would mostly check online/offline status. However, the system was very precarious. 

The initial setup came with a bit of a learning curve. Unless you've used the product before, it's a bit complex. However, they offer the best onboarding experience I've had with any vendor. I had a team of people at my disposal.

I mainly handled the deployment myself. It took a few months to implement. Then, when we onboarded a new employee, they also assisted. We were a bit understaffed at the outset, however, once I had the extra person, the implementation went much faster. 

Once it is set up, there is no maintenance needed. 

The vendor assisted with the setup. They were very helpful and answered all of our questions. It was very personalized. Their service is very good, which explains the price point. 

I was able to negotiate the price. The list price is pretty unaffordable. 

We did evaluate other options before choosing Auvik. Other products seemed a bit buggy. Auvik was also cheaper and had a lot more room for growth.

I'm a customer.

I'd recommend the solution to others. It's not a cheap tool and may not suit all MSPs; however, it works for us. While it can be hard to get clients and end-users to understand the value of network monitoring, they do provide a lot of resources that can help.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are a managed service provider. We use it for our customers, and we use it internally for our own network as well.

By implementing this solution, like most people who have to manage networks, the first thing we wanted was to monitor and see what is on our network. 

The network map along with its dashboard gives full network visibility.

Auvik Network Management is helpful for our engineers. We are structured a bit differently. We do not, as such, have entry-level engineers on our team. Our engineers already have pretty good knowledge of these things, but it does help them quite a bit. They do use it.

It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution, but it is hard to compare the numbers. From the time I have been here, we have had Auvik. I do know that we use it quite often when there are issues. It is most likely the first place we check to make sure that the device is offline or to check for any alerts that might have been generated.

Auvik Network Management has helped us quite a bit with the issue resolution. It helps us trace certain things. It tries to map out as best what devices are connected to certain interfaces. In the past, we have used that quite a bit to troubleshoot when certain things were down.

Its user interface is easy when it comes to where things live. Navigating to certain places and things like that is easy. The other part of the user interface is their map, which has not been the greatest. When I had to search for a device using the map, I found that difficult. They have implemented something to address that. It came out a month or two ago, where when I search for a device, it will automatically bring up that device. I can click on it, and then it will zoom into the device, whereas before, I had to go look for it.

Being able to terminal into the devices without going anywhere else is valuable. All of it can be done within Auvik.

The backups of the configuration seem to work for the most part. I have not had any issues with them. I have used a couple of other solutions, such as WhatsUp Gold which had a lot of issues with making backups, and so far, from what I see, Auvik just works.

Auvik's network map along with its dashboard gives a real-time picture of our network. However, if a device is unreachable, there is no indicator for that, at least from what I have seen. If it is offline, there is an indicator for that, but if it is unreachable, there is no indicator.

The network map is hard to use to gain real-time visibility into our network. We have some bigger sites, and we have all of it in one Auvik site instead of having multiple. If I am trying to look for devices in a particular building, I have to do a couple of different things. I wish there were views that I could save and say, "This view is for this first floor." They do have views, but there is no easy way for me to go and find those views. When you have too many of them, that becomes an issue because they start getting cut off by the pages.

Alerting can also be better. There are limited options. We cannot create alerts that are not there in the system. There are no custom alerts. That might be something that I would like to see more.

I have been using this solution for a year and a half.

So far, we have not had a whole lot of issues with stability. I know that there were a couple of times when Auvik seemed very sluggish and slow, and we did not get any notifications about it. Later on, when we reached out to support, they said that they were experiencing some issues. Over the year and a half that I have used it, that has probably happened twice.

I find it pretty scalable. Because we are an MSP, we are having to add multiple customers. We do not have a whole lot right now; we only have three, but so far, there are no issues there. I do not see any issues there for adding more customers.

I have interacted with their support. Their support is not that great. Usually, I use the chatbot on Auvik's portal. Most of the time, it is very difficult to get a full answer to what I am looking for. They usually have to take it back and research or discuss it with their team. They will send an email for the follow-up, but sometimes, it takes a really long time to get a follow-up email about the resolution. Usually, by that point, I would have already figured out the issue, or the resolution is no longer needed. It could be because we decided not to do that. I cannot remember exactly what type of resolutions those are, but I know that sometimes, it just takes a long time or it does not point me to the right resolution.

In terms of speed, they are pretty quick in answering, but the resolution can take time. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I am not aware of any other product being used in my current company.

I have used alternatives to Auvik in other companies. I have used WhatsUp Gold. I have used Zabbix. I have briefly used SolarWinds.

To me, Auvik has been better in almost everything. Zabbix is a very powerful tool, but at the time I used it, it required a lot of setup. Getting it to work required a lot of setup work. Auvik also requires some setup work, but it is a little bit easier. You just have to get the credentials in. Everything is scanned. The collector does the rest once you have everything in there.

One thing that I do not like about WhatsUp Gold is that you have to install it on a Windows machine. It uses a SQL database to store all of its information, so you have to do upgrades or migrations. I had to do that. It is just more work, whereas, with Auvik, if you need to move something or migrate, you just spin up a new collector and shut down the other one. There is really no impact. WhatsUp Gold also had issues running backups of configuration, whereas, with Auvik, I have not had any issues on that front. The only thing that WhatsUp Gold does better is to allow you to do an SNMP walk on your devices, so you can see the OIDs and all the information that is being pulled, whereas, with Auvik, you do not have any of that on the portal itself.

When I joined the company, Auvik was already in place. 

Its deployment is easy. It is more about making sure that all the devices on your network have everything configured. Auvik just takes in whatever you provide. You need to set up new SSH credentials on every device so that Auvik can read it. So far, I have not had too many issues with the setup.

It takes some time to see its benefits after the deployment. I came into Auvik pretty new. At the initial stage, you have all your devices there. They are all being monitored, but once you start getting all the credentials, traffic insights, and Syslogs and you get all the information configured, you start seeing the full benefit of Auvik.

It does not impact the setup of devices at all. I cannot do anything unless the device is connected to Auvik. We need to use the terminal session on that, but not every device is supported in that way. It is pretty limited, but it helps out a little bit on that. In terms of Auvik setup, if we are putting devices in, as soon as the device is scanned, it automatically gets put into Auvik. Maintenance-wise, there is very little required on the maintenance side. The only thing that we need to do in terms of device maintenance is to put the current firmware. If we are going to be implementing a patch, most likely, we are doing that on the device itself. We can terminal in from Auvik itself without having to VPN into the client network.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the environment. It depends on how many devices are on the site and how much access we have. It generally requires two people.

The time taken for deployment also depends on the size of the site. It can take ten hours if we are just straight working and trying to get it set up.

There is no maintenance as such. The maintenance is mostly in terms of cleaning up devices. There can be devices that need to be removed from Auvik because those devices have been removed from the network.

I do not have a whole lot of information on the pricing, but our pricing seems to be okay. Internally, we have not had any issues with it, so we have not had the need to discuss pricing.

My advice to new users would be that in order to have a smooth setup, they need to put in the time to set up their devices. They have to make sure all the devices have proper login credentials, SNMP credentials, and NetFlow setup if you are using NetFlow. After you have all of these set up, it is very simple. From what I have seen from other deployments, when those things are not set up, people seem to think that it does not work. It all depends on the devices.

We used Auvik's SaaS Management product for a month. To me, it seems like a whole separate module. We only used it for a short period for demoing it internally, but I did not see any benefit from having them together. It almost seems like a separate product. Overall, as a product, we definitely liked it. It provided a lot of information. We were testing it internally for our own company before trying to sell it to our customers, but it came back to pricing in terms of whether it was worth it to have this information on our users based on the price. For us, there was not a use case for it. Also, none of our customers have reached out with any interest in having SaaS management. The Auvik rep that I had talked to had mentioned that this came out because a lot of people were asking about it, but none of our customers asked about it. It just did not seem like a product we could push. I would recommend Auvik's SaaS Management product if someone is looking for this type of information.

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

Our company operates in the IT field and offers managed services to our IT clientele. We provide a range of IT solutions to these customers. One such service is managed networking. To ensure the smooth delivery of this managed network service, we utilize Auvik for network monitoring purposes.

After exploring the market, we evaluated several products that offered device monitoring features. Our key objectives were to track device status up or down, receive alerts for offline devices like switches or access points, and gain network visibility through a visual dashboard or network map that would provide real-time health information. Ultimately, we decided to implement Auvik to meet these needs. 

In our evaluation of competitors, Auvik emerged as the superior product across several key metrics. It stood out for its usability, ease of onboarding, and customer onboarding. This meant minimal training and upskilling for our staff, as the product is intuitive and user-friendly. Overall, Auvik impressed us with its user-centric design and streamlined implementation process.

The network map and dashboard offer a real-time view of our networks, which aligns with our expectations. Since most of our customers are located geographically close together, a single top-level dashboard provides a clear picture of their network health. This centralized view allows us to quickly identify any potential issues and zoom in on specific areas for further investigation. The alerting system is also very responsive, notifying us promptly of any problems.

Gaining real-time visibility into our network is a breeze thanks to Auvik's intuitive dashboard and user-friendly network map. This feature has been a major hit with our clients, who appreciate the ease of use. The ability to filter and search directly from the dashboard makes it simple to identify specific information, saving us valuable time and effort.

Auvik has made significant improvements in device protection, along with enhancements to how the network diagnostics and network map are built. Their recent launch of additional loop tools is quite impressive.

We have empowered our entry-level technicians to resolve more tickets independently. Previously, we had to escalate network-related tickets to two network specialists. Now, Auvik allows us to assign these issues to generalist engineers, at least for initial triage. This way, generalist engineers can gain valuable information to troubleshoot the problems much earlier in the incident lifecycle.

It has significantly improved our mean time to resolution. Auvik can generate those corrective alerts promptly, which is a significant improvement on the previous product we were using.

Auvik has been a valuable tool for understanding the health and composition of our customers' networks. It provides us with proactive insights into firmware and software versions across a wide range of devices. This information is crucial for planning and implementing security patches and improvements. Additionally, Auvik helps us track hardware lifecycles, allowing for better planning of replacements. The richness of the data provided by Auvik makes it an essential asset for network management.

The value of Auvik became immediately apparent. We were tasked with onboarding a significant number of customers – roughly 150. While the onboarding process itself was quick, taking only about an hour per customer, the true benefit came after deployment. Auvik's proactive reporting allowed us to identify issues that our previous products had missed.

The true value lies in its ability to provide immediate network visibility. By minimizing setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting time, Auvik empowers users to spend less time on the software itself and more time on understanding what's happening within their network devices. This easy access to information is what makes Auvik a valuable proposition.

In my experience as an MSP, Auvik stood out for its ease of deployment. We were able to quickly roll it out to over 150 customers without any hassle. Additionally, it was straightforward to configure the alerts to meet our specific needs. Finally, the Auvik team provided excellent support when we were integrating the software with our ticketing system.

Proactive monitoring, particularly proactive alerting for misconfigurations, is a powerful tool. For instance, if a switch has incorrect VLAN configurations, the system can automatically detect the mismatch and raise an alert. This allows us to proactively resolve these issues before they cause any problems for our customers or even our own team. Additionally, the ability to see a high-level overview of network issues and traffic throughput provides valuable insights. It's important to remember that we're currently only using the essentials package, which is the most basic offering.

To improve customer onboarding, Auvik could consider offering a free tier of the product. This could be a discovery-only model, allowing potential customers to explore the software's features without a financial commitment. Alternatively, a per-site pricing model could be implemented for initial trials. This would enable them to experience the value Auvik brings to their specific network size before committing to a full subscription. The initial cost can be a hurdle for smaller businesses, but they often recognize the value after using the product. The challenge lies in getting them past that initial barrier.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for almost two years.

Auvik is stable and we are always notified ahead of time of any scheduled maintenance.

Auvik is easy to scale once the deployment is done. We scaled up from ten to over 100 within a couple of days. 

Out of all the SaaS products I use, Auvik's technical support team stands out as the absolute best. They consistently impress me with their professionalism and deep technical knowledge. They are, without a doubt, the most effective support team I've had the pleasure of interacting with.

Positive

We previously relied on a network monitoring solution that is no longer actively maintained by the vendor. While the vendor has released a newer product, it fell short of our needs during our evaluation. In our search for a replacement, we prioritized network monitoring solutions. Unfortunately, neither the original product nor the vendor's new offering aligned with this requirement. While both products aimed to address network monitoring needs, they lacked the established reputation we were seeking within the industry.

Our deployment of Auvik involved a staged approach, which took a significant amount of time upfront for research, development, and planning. The actual deployment of the Auvik itself was relatively quick. The most time-consuming aspect was customizing alerts to align with our specific business needs. This customization likely took our team a combined total of more than five to ten hours. While I primarily performed the deployment myself, a team of two or three people could have completed it seamlessly.

I understand Auvik's value proposition, but the retail price might seem high at first glance. However, for commercial businesses, the cost becomes quite reasonable when considering the broader commercial benefits. Our challenge lies in targeting small businesses and educational institutions. These customers, often with tighter budgets, may not fully grasp the value of proactive monitoring. This makes it difficult to convince them of the product's worth.

Despite this hurdle, we have successfully sold the product to these customer segments. The value it delivers is undeniable, and we haven't had a single instance where a customer needed to be removed from the service due to lack of benefit.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

We have 100 engineers that utilize Auvik.

Agents deployed to network probes are automatically maintained. This is a natural advantage of using a cloud-hosted service for Auvik. Since the software resides on the vendor's cloud infrastructure, they handle product maintenance and updates. This translates to a lighter workload for our team, as there's no need for manual maintenance on our end.

I definitely recommend Auvik to others and have proactively encouraged friends and colleagues in the industry to consider the product. However, it's important to acknowledge that Auvik might not be the perfect fit for every business model. Additionally, the price point can be a challenge depending on the scale of your deployment.

We are an MSP and use Auvik Network Management to monitor network sites for our clients, including firewall switches, and other network devices.

We install an Auvik collector on a probe at each client site.

Integrating Auvik Network Management is easy and their support is fantastic, which helps the process.

Auvik provides an intuitive interface. The user-friendly interface makes network troubleshooting quicker.

Auvik's network map, combined with its dashboard, provides us with a more real-time view of our network health. We've even found that sharing this real-time data with our clients has been well-received. Using the network map is extremely easy.

Their network map gives us full network visibility. We don't use any other tools.

Switching to Auvik offered immediate advantages. Not only was it more affordable than our previous solution, but it also proved to be far more reliable. The rollout process was remarkably smooth, standing out as one of the easiest we've ever experienced with any new tool.

Auvik empowered our entry-level technicians to solve more tickets on their own freeing up our senior team member's workloads.

It has helped reduce our mean time to resolution by 85 percent.

Auvik helps us streamline our network management by reducing the time spent on setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting. It provides a quicker and more comprehensive view of the entire network. For instance, we can easily visualize network loops or identify connected devices to specific switches. This significantly reduces the time required to obtain basic network infrastructure information compared to traditional text-based methods. As an MSP supporting multiple clients, Auvik empowers us to share this information and ensure client comprehension quickly.

The integration between Auvik Network Management and Autotask is particularly valuable for us, along with similar integrations with tools like IT Glue. In general, these integrations are helpful.

Our billing structure is device-based, with different service levels offered for each device. Ideally, we'd like Auvik to integrate with Autotask and allow us to set service levels within Auvik e.g., Monitor, Manage, Protect. This would streamline our workflow by automatically syncing these service levels over to Autotask.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two and a half years.

Auvik Network Management is stable.

Auvik Network Management is scalable.

The technical support is fantastic. They are quick to respond. We can chat online or on the phone. The support team knows a lot about the product.

Positive

We previously used LogicMonitor but their pricing went up, and they had promised us an auto-test integration for years that never came. They eventually took it off the road map.

Our Auvik deployment was the smoothest rollout we've ever had for any tool. The deployment took less than one month to complete.

Two people were required for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Auvik is significantly cheaper than what we were using before.

Due to Auvik's licensing structure, I believe there are some devices in our network that we're not currently being charged a license for.

In addition to Auvik, we evaluated Network Glue.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

Auvik requires minimal maintenance. However, the level of effort depends on how we configure network scans. If we choose to set up automatic network scans, there may be occasional maintenance tasks. These might involve removing devices that haven't been detected for a while and verifying that any associated notes are still accurate.

Following the instructions makes using Auvik a simple process.

We primarily use Auvik for managing and monitoring devices, including network devices, access points, and printers. We utilize Auvik's alerts to notify us of offline devices or any unusual behavior it detects, such as high interface utilization or low disk space. Additionally, we employ Auvik to automate the backup of our network switches.

We implemented Auvik because we lacked visibility into potential network issues, such as switch or access point utilization. While I have a wireless controller that provides some insights, Auvik unifies this information into a single, comprehensive view. This centralized visibility enables us to proactively identify and address network problems.

Auvik is deployed in a hybrid model because we have an on-prem collector that sends the information to the cloud.

Auvik is intuitive.

The ease of use provides me with peace of mind. It eliminates the need for me to independently explore certain aspects.

It has significantly reduced our mean time to resolution. For one particular issue, it saved me an estimated 10 to 20 hours at a minimum. Additionally, it has enabled me to respond to a handful of other issues one to two hours quicker.

We have been enabled to dedicate less time to the setup and maintenance of the solution and reduce the time required for issue resolution.

I have utilized configuration backups to replace equipment. I have employed alerting mechanisms to correlate user concerns with known alerts, enabling me to grasp the situation promptly. I can inform users of the need to replace toner cartridges or alert them to power outages caused by switch failures. Overall, this process aids in identifying the expected network status.

One of the primary advantages we observed with Auvik was the immediate availability of switch backups. This enabled me to seamlessly track configuration changes between backups. This was particularly valuable during the initial months when I was implementing numerous network switch installations. Auvik's ability to quickly adapt and incorporate new information is impressive. The only aspect that might require a time investment is understanding the normalcy of specific bandwidth or statistical data. However, this is not a learning process but rather a data-collection exercise.

The monitoring and backup are the most valuable features.

The Auvik network map and dashboard are not reliable enough to provide a real-time view of our network.

Metrics should be reported for individual devices rather than IP addresses.

I believe it would be highly beneficial to display the paths over which each VLAN is accessible on the network map.

I have been using Auvik for almost six months.

The stability of Auvik is excellent. The only time it goes down is when they announce it beforehand for maintenance.

Auvik should be extremely scalable. I have not seen any issues in that regard.

The technical support response time is slow. With 20 years in the service industry and nearly 30 in IT, I find that while the technical support representatives are polite, I sometimes feel more knowledgeable than they are. It's frustrating explaining my concerns to level one support only to have them escalate the issue to an engineer, leaving me in a communication limbo for potentially weeks.

Neutral

The initial deployment was uncomplicated. While Auvik itself was very easy to use, it requires SNMP to be configured correctly on all devices. This is the time-consuming aspect of the process. If SNMP is already configured on all devices and we have the necessary information, the setup can be quite straightforward and likely take less than an hour.

I was the only one from our organization involved in the deployment.

We used Auvik for the implementation.

Initially, I was an enthusiastic advocate for this product. I told many people about it and was very excited about its potential. However, once I started using it regularly, my enthusiasm waned somewhat. While the product does excel in certain areas, the recurring cost can be a deterrent. Overall, I believe the product is fairly priced, but I would consider it a better value if it were improved in certain areas.

If an alternative monitoring solution is not available, Auvik will take care of it. While we pay our MSP to monitor the servers, Auvik provides me with the essential information I need to stay informed about their status at no charge.

I would rate Auvik seven out of ten.

Auvik may require minor maintenance after adding or correcting connections, as some of these changes may not be displayed correctly.

Ensure the SNMP configuration is accurate, as Auvik relies heavily on it for network monitoring and management. Additionally, use managed switches instead of unmanaged switches to avoid potential network disruptions and complications.

It has got a lot of use cases, but in my opinion, it's probably the best full-stack network monitoring management and alerting platform that's out there for routers, switches, firewalls, and non-server infrastructure.

It makes it a lot easier for our IT teams to have visibility into remote and distributed networks. Once you get your IT team members used to it, when you're having an issue, for example, while trying to SSH to something, they will go to Auvik first just because they have the geographic map, and they have these little dummy-proof exclamation marks. So, there might be an issue here. The way Auvik portrays the network from the outside looking in is like being Zeus on a little cloud. We can see what's going on with all our devices which we couldn't see before without having to log into each device individually, or we had to use a diagram that we made when they were set up and refer to that. Now, we have a live reactive changing diagram that allows our network guys to go straight to the actual device that's causing the network issue somewhere in this region and start troubleshooting that right away versus having to troubleshoot three, four, or five devices in that general area blindly, and then, eventually getting to the device they need to work on. It has saved an insurmountable amount of hours of network outages and down networks. It has also reduced our response times. We are able to get that information really quickly, and we don't have to go back and forth. What used to be a four-hour fix is now done in 30 minutes.

It has been great to allow our teams to focus on high-value tasks and delegate low-level tasks to junior staff. It has been great just because of the integration with our PSA ticketing system and the way we can set triggers, priorities, and levels of urgency with notes and all the other cool features they have there. It allows us to route tickets appropriately and then, they already have little checklists that pop up for common alerts that say, "If it's this and this, try this. If not, escalate to senior staff." It has sped that up quite a bit. Often, there's a lot of noise, and by getting the alerting down right to where there are actionable incidents that come in, it has sometimes added a little extra time for the tier one guys because often there are just too many alerts. You have one device that brings down a whole network, but you get alerts on every single device that's inside that network, whereas you only need to know the one. Sometimes, it's not easy from the face value to know which specific device it's until you get used to the tool and the customer.

Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date has helped save us time and money. We don't miss a lot of the warranty and inversion roll-ups, and some of our commitments where we have to do quarterly upgrades of the router, switch, and firewall environment. They are the kind of upgrades that aren't done automatically for anyone because you can't do those in the middle of the day. So, our ability to track assets, models, versions, and even warranty expiration dates, which they pull from public databases automatically for you, is invaluable.

They allow for integrations into their platform via API with PSA tools like ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Automate. They have a lot of add-on integration and plug-ins for a lot of the big names and IT RMM stacks commonly used in my industry space. These integrations are absolutely valuable. With the integrations into ConnectWise, we are able to automatically create and close tickets across systems. As alerts and new information comes into Auvik, when an issue or a trigger that was alarmed has been resolved, and it detects that it has gone away, based on our threshold, it can talk back to our ticketing system and auto-close it and send a notification. It's phenomenal. You don't have to wait on an email to go to another email, and then that email creates a ticket. It's very useful.

The network visualization is great in terms of overall intuitiveness. They couldn't do any more than doing a coloring book with pop-up pictures and coloring stuff. They made it easy for you to know where to look. They guide you to the right place. I always use the term Windows 85 just because they tried to simplify it so much and make it so easy that it became difficult for people because they are used to doing more steps. They're like, "Wait, that can't be right. That's all I had to do? There have to be more steps." Some of the things are hidden in plain sight, but when you find it once, you're good. The diagrams and the groupings of the sections are very down and out. Like Merkle Tree, they are easy to navigate, and then, they have a lot of cross-referencing hooks inside those sections of the UI that lead you back to the next expected place you'd want to go after making a change in that section. It's nice.

The monitoring and management functions or the out-of-the-box functions are fairly easy to use. When you need to tailor an onboarding for a customer who wants different triggers and conditions for alerts that don't come out of the box in their default alert set for certain device types, you can make it happen and create those, but doing so isn't that easy. Luckily, Auvik support is usually the best. They respond very quickly. You can message them right on a chat. You always get someone who knows what they're talking about, and then, they get you in the right direction. From a user perspective, customizing it's not intuitive, but it can be done with their help.

Its asset inventory is amazing. The only thing that they're still lacking is the ability to make it easier to import assets into their system when onboarding. Other than that, exporting and pulling data that is set up in Auvik is very easy, and it has made QBR with customers and things like that a lot of fun.

So, there should be more custom reporting options when importing or exporting. It should have better data ingestion capabilities, and we should be able to import more than just a CSV. They should also improve it in terms of customization for customer tenants and reporting and onboarding options for migrating from non-Auvik systems or no network monitoring systems into Auvik. It's still a very manual process even with the discovery. The onboardings are probably the longest part.

There is a hidden or unspoken bottleneck that I would like to see improved. When there are 800 to 1,000 devices in one subtenant, that is huge performance segregation. Generally, you're not going to have a lot of customers that have that much, but the solution is to create different sub tenants and such, but it's more of a hassle than it's worth. In the future, I would like to see if they could find a way to break through that bottleneck for the namespace tenants or for the customer tenants to where I could have all the customer network devices in one tenant. They could even be sectionalized inside the tenant, or there could be a way to mask the US1, US2, Customer-1, Customer-2, or whatever namespace in a way that they all also show up in the same portal tenant customer organization, and they all tie into our PSA tools with same API integration. I would like to see that happen. That's been the biggest hurdle for our enterprise customers and deployments because when you're first doing discovery and you start scanning, it starts pulling in everything like printers, computers, phones, and all the stuff you don't need. It adds up to 1,000 really quickly, and then the UI or refresh rate on the tool cripples drastically. That's the biggest thing, but it's not something that can't be overcome either by the options and suggestions they provide as of today. In those kinds of situations, it just requires a little bit of extra work to set up the additional tenants and get everything integrated.

I've been using it for about five years.

Its stability is great. 

I couldn't speak on their actual infrastructure because of the hosted solution. So far, I've seen just massive fast scaling from their infrastructure side just based on namespaces alone. I haven't seen any limitations personally other than the bottleneck I have, but that's not a limitation when there's a solution to create satellite tenants that will talk to each other for the same customer. If that were to continue on, I haven't seen anything that would stop me from creating unlimited 1,000 device namespaces per customer all tied into the same functions of their stack.

I would rate their support a 10 out of 10. It's like they look out for me when I message support. For the last five years, every time I messaged them, they sent me the best guy they had, or that's the experience I've had. I have had nothing but a great experience with their support. I never had to get them on the phone either. It has always been through the chat, which is amazing.

Positive

We only use Auvik for routers, switches, and firewalls or just the network. We don't use it for any servers. We use a combined stack for that piece. Before we moved to Auvik, we used to use two extra tools, and then Auvik replaced those two. Now, we're just down to using two main tools to manage the entire customer infrastructure. We got Auvik and ConnectWise Automate.

In the past 13 years, I've used SolarWinds, NetNat, and Kaseya Traverse. We have used a good handful of managed service provider-focused tools. I used LabTech's very limited network monitoring management tool before they got bought and the name was changed to ConnectWise and ConnectWise Automate, but essentially, LabTech was the same tool as Automate. Anyone in the MSP business over in Houston was either using the Kaseya RMM tool or they were using LabTech's RMM tool to manage their customers. They mainly excelled at just workstations and server management, but they had some limited network functionality or network monitoring and management that you could do. Outside of that, this is the first one that would do it all. Usually, you had to get a vendor-specific one. You'd be doing a bunch of different vendor tools. You'd have a Cisco tool, you'd have a Fortinet tool, or you'd have a SonicWall tool. Each one of those tools monitored and managed just that class of product. It's nice to have one that does it all.

In terms of comparison of Auvik's cloud-based solution versus other on-prem network monitoring solutions, the only thing they have is collectors. They got the collectors, and all they do is that they relay information via HTTPS back to the AWS. AWS does all the magic with the databases.

Deployments are extremely straightforward. My response would be biased because I have been using it for a while, but I don't see anything that someone who doesn't use it regularly might see as a problem or hurdle. I've worked with the support and used the tool so often. So, I know the little caveats where if something is wrong with the way it's talking to a device, if I wait 30 seconds and set the device to unmanaged and then set it back to managed again, I can reset it and reconnect the service. So, it's super easy. Their level of support is quick and very knowledgeable because their support doesn't work with any non-technical people because all of their customers are IT teams. You could probably log into a tenant, and if you have no idea what you're doing, just pop in there in message chat, and you can probably have them walk you through it at a fast enough rate to get you up in line and managing the day-to-day tasks for the customer in that tenant portal in just a matter of a week or less, depending on the size of the network. It could be a matter of a couple of hours.

We have our own process. We streamlined the onboarding process. We took the bits and pieces out of the Auvik documentation that we found to be more relevant and valuable during the initial customer discussions. When you're dealing with a lot of customers who also have internal IT departments, you have to lay out a lot of different concerns, questions, and things that evolve around their specific operations that you just can't predict from the get-go. So, we have our own process where it picks out the protocols that are relevant, the level of permissions that we need, the service accounts that we need, etc. We set those requirements and expectations in our scope with the customer, and they sign off on it that they get us this information within a certain timeframe. That helps speed up the process out of the box. Assuming everything is perfect and we have all of the access and all the keys to the kingdom of someone we're trying to deploy out of the box, we should have no problem deploying it very quickly. That's because all the credentials that we need to manage those devices are automated by an Auvik service account for logins, remote sessions, and SNMP. If all those are plugged in before we deploy the collector, and as we deploy the collector, it does all that magic for us. That's the automation piece involving connecting, discovering, pulling information, and wrapping everything together.

I got a new guy who works with me now, but for the last three years, it has been solely me deploying Auvik for every customer and internally for our operations as well. I deploy it, configure it, and then I hand it off to Ops to maintain it, and they handle it from there. 

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require much maintenance. In the past few years, there were some instances where they couldn't automatically update collectors from certain versions to certain versions when you passed a certain point. So, you just have to go in and update or just redeploy collectors for customers, which is due to the nature of how they are set up. You could have one that just breaks. You can spin off a brand new one in less than 30 minutes, and you're back to where you were before.

Every time we onboard a new customer to provide our IT services, there's a kickoff call that just says, "Hey, we're doing this." Auvik provides us the ability to perform discovery as soon as we have keys to their infrastructure.

There has been a reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). From incident to resolution, it has probably cut that time down in half for the operations side.

The prices change based on your partnership with them and based on the bulk amount that you buy and the account rep you're talking to. It depends on negotiations and the number of customers you have. 

It's absolutely worth the money. I would probably charge more if I were them. They don't charge you for anything that's not a router, switch, or firewall controller, or a network device. So, you can throw anything like servers and ESX hosts. You can throw network storage and all that stuff in there, and they have functionality in there for you to build out, monitor, and manage those as well, which you don't get charged for. You only get charged per device for a switch, router, or firewall, which is nice. You can have a collector for a customer, and it's just a minimal fee for the tenant. It's pretty neat. You can deploy as many collectors as you want to talk to that tenant for the customer on the fly and do discoveries. We also handle some emergency requests such as, "We need to figure out what we have on our network because we got ransomware, and we need to make sure all of our devices and all of our assets have the new antivirus. We're supposed to have 6,000 devices, but we're only showing this many." There have been times when we've literally just used the tool for discovery on a customer to collect a full report of assets and then used that to fix another whole different type of issue and provide solutions for more revenue to additional projects for that engagement. We use it ad hoc. We use it for month-to-month management of infrastructures. Now, we use it for discoveries and emergency projects where we need to collect a lot of information very quickly when we don't have any other IT at the other end to provide information on situations.

When I got hired with Computex, now Calian, they hired me because they didn't know what to do with Traverse. I made the decision and met with the engineering team. I was certainly 90% of the reason for the decision for them to move away from Kaseya's Traverse tool to Auvik's tool. I made that decision when I came on because I had a lot of background in it, and they had an acquisition where they had that tool for half of their businesses they were providing IT for, and then, they had Traverse. I convinced them to get away from Traverse because it wasn't a good tool, and then we moved over to a tool that did what we needed.

I had to do a lot of training. I had to host a lot of training and calls and some webinars for our NOC team, but once we got a hang of it, we were able to display it while the customer was at our NOC. We could display the active live network monitoring diagrams on our dashboards with all our other systems. It gives everyone a warm feeling when they can look over and see what's going on.

I would advise first figuring out what you're trying to accomplish. If you are trying to ad hoc or duct tape other tools, rethink. Auvik performs and shows the most value when it becomes your sole tool for all of your network monitoring and management and alerting. If you're trying to ad hoc, duct tape, or throw in just for a feature or a filler for another product, you're just going to run into more headache. You only need Auvik to manage all of those things. If you're looking to Auvik for server management, workstation management, it's possible, but it's not built for that. So, make sure that it's for network devices only. It's not really designed to manage storage and hypervisors and remote access. It's not a day-to-day help desk support tool for you to hop on to user workstations and troubleshoot from that standpoint.

If you want just another monitoring solution, Auvik can do it, but Auvik's magic is the fact that it's a full stack. It's not just monitoring. It's full network management, remote access, and preventative maintenance. It's a full RMM tool. So, if you're looking for strictly an alerting tool for your network, you'd be wasting some very well-engineered features on the product by going with Auvik just for that. 

Its ease of use isn't too important for us, but it depends on the kind of use because we have layered access and levels of skill sets that are allowed to do certain things in it. From a broader perspective, 90% of the engineers that work for a managed services provider and 90% of the guys on our support desk aren't going to be there changing anything. It's just going to be the project team that sets it up, onboards it, and configures it. Once that process is standardized for us, there are only minor tweaks, based on the customer type, when we set up new clients. It becomes pretty streamlined. The only time that the ease of use helps is in the beginning when you first start using the tool itself. Once you've been a partner with Auvik, you've onboarded a few customers, and you've dug your way in and out, and around it, and you do a couple hundred after that, it's not as relevant.

It hasn't helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. They don't have much automation in the platform itself. The only automated thing that they do is to monitor conditions, and then the routing of the alerts, who they go to, and how those are handled. In terms of automation of maintenance on the network, there isn't any function like that in Auvik that I'm aware of. It's mostly just analytics monitoring and a remote access tool.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use Auvik to monitor our customers' networks for performance and availability.

Auvik's ease of use is essential for our operations.

We previously used multiple applications to manage our networks. The solution provides a single integrated platform for our organization which is vital for our operations. 

It has streamlined our management of networks, time-wise. Auvik has drastically cut down our time by 50 percent.

Auvik's ability to monitor multiple hardware manufacturers in a single pane of glass makes it very easy for our engineers to respond to alerts.

The ability to help visualize the network mapping or topology allows our engineers to see what is connected to what in order to troubleshoot quicker.

We have found that being able to see the misconfigurations on network devices has lowered our troubleshooting tremendously. This is because we can quickly identify and fix any problems. The solution helps to reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation.

Auvik affects our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally, which is extremely important.

The ability to scan the network and find devices frees up our IT team's availability. 

In any engineering job, we're going to have some downtime. Being able to turn our attention to low-level tasks and resolve some easy tickets is great for our IT department.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up to date.

Rather than delegating low-level tasks to our junior staff, we use the inventory a lot for pooling devices and serial numbers. If a customer wants to know how many switches they have in place, we can pull the inventory from Auvik.

Compared to the other solutions we use, Auvik is easily the most solid.

We like the alerts, the network mapping, and the backup of configurations.

The monitoring and management functions of Auvik are extremely easy to use straight out of the box.

Auvik's overall intuitiveness of our network's visualization is excellent.

It requires very minimal maintenance.

When we deal with larger networks, the current interface is difficult to navigate around the network map because of the volume of devices. The solution can improve by providing a simpler way to display and navigate through all of the devices on larger networks. 

The stability can use improvement.

I have been using the solution for five years.

Auvik has gone down a couple of times. We haven't been able to log in, but that's common in the industry. 

Auvik's scalability is extremely high.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We have used SolarWinds in the past. We also use ConnectWise manual SNMP monitoring to see if firewalls are up or down. We moved from LogicMonitoring to Auvik five years ago. When we moved from LogicMonitor to Auvik, one aspect was immediately apparent: the notifications were a lot better. The notifications through Auvik were timely and relevant, while the notifications through LogicMonitor were often delayed and irrelevant. The interface for LogicMonitor was not as good as Auvik's. Auvik was a breath of fresh air. The notifications were clear and concise, and the monitoring of devices was top-notch. We quickly realized that there was no going back to LogicMonitor.

Once we put the collector out there and populate the username and passwords for our devices, Auvik is easy to set up. The deployment required two engineers.

It takes between 30 minutes to one hour from the time the collector is implemented to the time our network mapping starts to populate.

The implementation was out of the box and completed in-house. 

We have seen tremendous value with Auvik.

Auvik's pricing is very competitive compared to other network management solutions. We get our pricing from ConnectWise, and we also use SolarWinds. I know that their prices are higher than Auvik's, or at least what's been proposed to us was higher.

We did not evaluate other options. We were introduced to Auvik by Continuum before they were bought by ConnectWise.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We generally prefer to install the Auvik collector on-premises onto a server and run it in the Linux configuration. We do this more so than using the cloud, likely for performance reasons.

I recommend Auvik. It is a great tool for managed service providers because it works with any hardware vendor and allows them to scale their networking practice greatly.