Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We used Auvik to monitor the networks of our two separate companies. Each company operates on its large network, with approximately 100 to 150 employees.

We implemented Auvik for better visibility of the network.

The intuitiveness of the interface was good. It was not that hard to use.

The network map offers a real-time view of our entire network. Gaining real-time visibility is simple by using the network map and dashboard. We can start by navigating from the top level of the network down to specific elements we're interested in. Alternatively, we can select a specific network segment from the left-hand column for a more focused view.

While Auvik would have provided us with complete visibility into our network, our reliance on rented switches limited our control and prevented them from functionalities like syslog.

We saw the benefits of Auvik as soon as it was deployed.

Auvik helps us reduce our mean time to resolution for network connectivity issues. When a device is unexpectedly disconnected, Auvik can pinpoint the problem quickly. This is especially helpful for troubleshooting complex issues, like a downed VPN.

The most valuable feature of Auvik is its ability to drill down and identify unusual activity on the network, such as unauthorized devices connecting to our Wi-Fi.

One drawback I found with Auvik was its inability to generate clear network diagrams. The connection lines appeared messy, and devices weren't grouped logically. In contrast, HP OpenView, which I used previously, produced well-organized network maps.

I have been using Auvik for 3 years.

Auvik was stable with no crashes or downtime.

Scaling Auvik was easy because it integrates with Discovery. We were able to collect syslogs from controllable devices like firewalls, but Auvik would likely perform even better in an environment where we have control over the switches as well.

In the past, we used HP OpenView. It consisted of two very different programs. Our current solution, which we've been using for some time now, allows for remote connections to machines and collaboration with users. This functionality was absent in Auvik, which would have been a valuable addition. With our current system, we can simply right-click on a machine and initiate a remote connection through tools like Screen Connect or Splashtop.

Auvik was a very good network mapping tool. However, the lines on the map could sometimes be misaligned, making it difficult to understand the network layout. Additionally, a major limitation of Auvik was the lack of remote control functionality. Ideally, the tool would allow administrators to look up a user and connect to their machine's file controller while on the phone with the user for troubleshooting purposes.

Deploying Auvik as a virtual machine is surprisingly easy. We download the template, import it into VMware, and it configures itself automatically.

I completed the deployment in a couple of days.

The implementation was completed in-house.

While Auvik's pricing was attractive, we ultimately had to make budget cuts. After evaluating our various solutions, Auvik was not the best fit for our current needs.

I would rate Auvik 9 out of 10.

Auvik has the potential to reduce the time spent on setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting. While we didn't fully utilize it for that purpose, it could have offered some benefits. However, we ultimately decided to discontinue using Auvik because it lacked features available in our other tools, creating some redundancy.

No maintenance was required on our end.

Auvik offers a demo program. You simply load and install the provided VM template. I can't recall the exact length of the demo period, but I highly recommend trying it out.

We are demoing Auvik to see if it makes sense for us to implement. As a managed service provider, we are utilizing it to monitor our clients' networks, perform inventory of devices, and diagnose and troubleshoot network issues.

I wouldn't say that we couldn't do business without Auvik, but it's a way for us to be more profitable because it cuts down on the total hours it takes to service our clients. We gain efficiency in areas that, otherwise, would have been manual tasks. We're no longer spending a lot of time manually digging into each network device when there is an issue. We can easily track down where something is happening.

We've benefited from better efficiency as well as from better clarity into issues, sometimes even before they happen. Before a client is calling or beating down our doors saying things are down, we usually have an alert from Auvik saying there's a problem. When I'm able to pick up the phone and say, "Oh yeah, I'm already aware that you have a network outage," that is very helpful.

We have a more accurate view of everything going on within our clients' networks. Our clients are located across the United States and being able to easily view what's going on in their networks, and have alerting on top of that, is very helpful. That visibility is very important because of the way we are leveraging Auvik, which is for detecting and alerting us about issues before a client contacts us about them. Auvik is how we're being notified when there's an issue, ideally in a proactive manner. We can remediate the issue before any downtime is noticed by a customer. It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution.

It also keeps device inventories up to date. Ensuring an accurate inventory is one of the key components of our service to customers. Our business model is focused on consumption, so we need to have an accurate count of our customers' devices so that we can give them an accurate bill. Knowing that we have 100 percent accuracy on what devices are stuck to their networks is critical. The fact that Auvik does it automatically cuts down on the time we spend managing that aspect. It saves us a couple of hours per month per engineer. The customer is happy, our billing team is happy, and we don't have to spend cycles doing it. It's just a triple-win situation.

Also, because Auvik is in the cloud, we can troubleshoot with it from anywhere. Whereas, when dealing with an on-prem solution, if something's wrong with the internet coming in and I'm remote, I can't troubleshoot it or fix it. It's a different methodology and I feel that it is Auvik's special sauce. Because it's built around the cloud, it allows for a better, holistic view of what's going on and helps identify where the problems are. If you're on a broken network and you're trying to work on that network, it's very difficult.

The inventory and audit features are the most valuable. We are able to get a good map of everything in a network. Some clients don't know what they have or own, and having a tool that can compile all of that is a beneficial aspect of the solution. It cuts down on the number of hours required to search for things, because if you don't know what you don't know, you can miss things. Auvik is truly going to discover everything that is connected to the network. It gives us peace of mind and cuts down on the number of hours it takes to onboard a client.

We usually devote approximately an hour of time to onboarding a client environment. What that entails is gathering some basic information about passwords, SNMP credentials, et cetera. Being able to spend just an hour to get everything captured is pretty effective.

It is incredibly easy to use when it comes to its monitoring and management functions.

And it's incredibly important, given our work as a managed service provider, to have a single pane of glass environment. That is very crucial to being able to identify and diagnose issues with a network and fix them promptly. We don't have to log in to 15 different devices to track down how things are connected.

We've used different tools in the past for mapping network topology and we've also done it manually. The fact that Auvik is able to create a network map that is accurate and to do it automatically with its collector is supremely helpful. 

Since I last used the product about eight months ago, all of the things that I had complaints about have been fixed by Auvik.

One thing I would like to see is more functionality designed for managed services, such as multi-tenancy, to better manage things from an MSP perspective.

I have used Auvik for three different employers. I began using it four to five years ago.

I have never seen an outage with it. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to be on all the time.

It scales very well. You just install collectors on the different segments of your network where you need them, and it pieces everything else together in the background. It's really as scalable as you need it to be.

I have only had to deal with tech support once and they were able to identify what my issue was and referred me to their documentation platform for the resolution. If I had bothered to just read the documentation first, I wouldn't have needed to even have opened a ticket because they already had my issue fully documented. 

It was excellent support because not only did they know the answer, but they had proactively documented it and had it available even before I needed to ask the question. It was a good experience.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks before Auvik. Having switched, we are saving a lot of time, at least 10 hours per client-onboarding.

At my previous employer, we were using SolarWinds. The main and direct reason we made the switch is that SolarWinds had a gigantic breach. We've tested and talked through the security of Auvik's backend and we feel that it meets the various security controls that we needed to have implemented.

SolarWinds was, if I recall correctly, double the cost of Auvik. We gained cost savings and security by switching to Auvik. Also, when we were using SolarWinds, we had to have a dedicated SolarWinds server, whereas with Auvik, we do not need to have a server, we just have to have a collector device. And that device can be a "potato computer." We don't need a lot of resources or compute available to run the collector. We don't have to maintain a server or licensing or any of that other nonsense for the collector.

The initial setup was incredibly easy and easy to follow. They have a guide with very detailed and in-depth instructions for how to proceed. They also have detailed, in-depth instructions for every device on my network and how to get it talking to the Auvik collector. They provide very verbose, detailed instructions for how to make the tool work with a multitude of products.

For example, we had a WatchGuard device that was not communicating properly. I was able to go to the Auvik knowledge base, read through their troubleshooting article, and resolve it with some simple steps that they had documented.

For our implementation, it took maybe three minutes, after the collector code was implemented, until the network started to populate.

We have it deployed for multiple departments and multiple teams with a single location and a site-for-site VPN to another location. We have the collector installed on a VM in a Windows Server environment. It's connected to our switches and pulls through all the data.

With my previous company, we saw time to value within six months. With my current company, we're looking at closer to a year or a year and a half to break even with an investment in Auvik, but that's because of the clients we're working with.

Auvik is probably one of the more expensive options on the market for what it does. But if, as a managed services provider, you are working with clients that have large networks with large numbers of network devices, you can find efficiency to be gained that will make that value up.

It's been a harder sell for my current company because we are a very small MSP, and I don't know if we're going to be able to afford it overall. I know that the value is there, but when you have smaller clients that can't afford an extra few dollars a month, maybe it's not the right tool for them.

I think that Auvik is perfectly suited for a mid-range business model where there are many network devices or many networks that are segmented and connected in different locations. There is a ton of value in that scenario. Or, if you don't have a good inventory tool, the fact that Auvik builds that inventory has been really huge for our team. It cuts down on what tasks need to be done and allows for true transparency and knowing, 100 percent, that we have everything inventoried. We don't ever have to question what we see on Auvik, we know it's accurate every time. And that has helped us increase our billables because, before, we would have network devices that weren't being detected, but we were supporting them and not billing for them. Depending on your model for your managed services, there might be some ways to increase your billings.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing Auvik. That was mostly because Auvik was already in that magic quadrant. We just picked the tool and ran with it because we needed to be fast. We didn't have the luxury of time, we had to make a decision promptly.

Auvik's network visualization is intuitive to somebody whose job it is to work in that environment. It is not intuitive to someone who is a C-level executive. I would not want them to be looking at the tool. It's highly technical data. When you are a technical person you get the information you need. But if you're not technical, it's too much data. Don't use it as what you're going to present to a C-level. Use it to fix the problems and then make a different diagram to hand out to C-levels.

We have not leveraged a lot of the automation functionality within Auvik. We have not been able to use the tool to its fullest extent. We're gaining in that we can easily get the information we need, but we haven't leveraged the automation.

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 are a small company of about 15 people. We do open-source kernel development for lab machines. We have about 100 of these machines and they are all connected using smart routers. However, it is hard to monitor the routers' states.

We do open-source driver development as a contractor for other companies that may have licensing issues. We write the open-source network drivers for Linux and other open-source operating systems. That is the reason we need good network monitoring software: so that we know where there are problems in our network drivers. If the network drivers produce very bad network traffic, we need to know the first time. We have a lot of test devices, laptops, running in our lab, and they are currently monitored by Auvik, and we are very satisfied.

Before we got Auvik, we had to write scripts to get every device's state, to see the upload speed and download speeds, and whether there was any abnormal download or upload bandwidth. Because we develop network drivers, these are very important metrics for us, so that we know if there is any bad traffic in our network. Previously, we had to update our scripts every time there was an update to our routers' firmware. And if we had to update our requirements, we needed to rewrite the scripts and redeploy them on all of our routers. That required a lot of manual work. Auvik helped us eliminate that work.

Previously, when we managed the system, we needed to write our own script to run a single command on all the routers. Now, we can do that on the console. We can select everything and run a single command for all the devices with a single click.

A lot of tasks used to be repetitive work, like for new-device support. One of the really great points about Auvik is that it helps to reduce all that toil, including debugging scripts and maintaining them for the latest version.

The most important thing is that you can control everything, every device, all at once. As a unified platform, it handles all kinds of devices and all kinds of brands. If we decided to buy a new brand of router, we wouldn't need to check the manual and write new configuration scripts or record configuration macros ourselves. Auvik handles everything for us.

Before Auvik, we used multiple applications for managing things. Every week, we save hours. Previously, we spent a lot of time watching dashboards to see what went wrong. When a bug would occur, we would need to dump all the logs and look at everything. Now, we can usually diagnose everything within 30 minutes to an hour. It is saving three to four software-engineer-hours per week. That is a lot.

Auvik saves time and effort for our IT team. We can automate more things with the help of Auvik. It makes our team more available, always. It not only helps with availability of the software engineers on the IT team but with the availability of all our IT people. It has eliminated a lot of low-level tasks. And sometimes, it could be reducing work for senior engineers. Some of our issues can be hard to resolve, especially when dealing with the in-lab hardware. It can be hairy. Those weekly hours can be better used for the introduction of new devices or maintaining the high availability of our devices better. We can focus on expanding our labs a lot. It makes us more scalable, overall.

One of the most valuable features is the remote monitoring. It monitors the egress and ingress bandwidth and you can add custom rules to monitor if something is wrong. You can also add your own metrics if needed.

Auvik provides us with a unified management console. It is a website that displays all your routers, network switches, and devices connected to that router. You can easily see everything in that single dashboard.

You can use rule-based or simple, program-based monitoring to see if there is any abnormal traffic. 

It has good support for our devices, including our routers and Ethernet switches that come from the major brands. We are using Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, and Auvik has very good support for them. And it has pretty good support for other major brands like Netgear and TP-Link, as well. One of the reasons we choose Auvik is because the devices we currently use overlap with its list of supported devices.

Overall, the monitoring and management functions of Auvik are easy to use, but at times they seem oversimplified. Sometimes, we need more complicated scripting. Only using the basic logical rules like AND or OR or NOT is not enough. It can make the rules too complicated.

Also, when you load the Auvik website, it shows the topology. From my experience, it is mostly accurate. When we configured our network, there were some mismatches between the automatically-detected network topology and the actual topology. Some of the devices were not detected or were not supported by Auvik. We were able to manually modify things and everything has worked well since then.

Another issue is that to use Auvik you have to have a dedicated machine, either a virtual or Windows machine. Auvik continuously listens to the devices to look for all the devices on the network. This is a problem because it is a single point of failure. If that machine fails, all the functionality of Auvik stops. We can have redundant nodes, but it is still a problem.

Another problem is that it only works on Intel processors. Some of our machines do not use Intel processors. This was a problem initially because we had to get a new machine that runs the Auvik service. I would like to see it support more platforms and operating systems.

We started the 14-day trial plan this summer, and then we decided to purchase a license. So we have been fully using it for four or five months.

So far, the uptime has been really ideal.

Performance-wise, it's also good. For our use cases the monitoring machine is just a server, but it is not that powerful. It uses a lot of networking I/O, but it hasn't caused any network congestion.

It is scalable.

We have not been in touch with their technical support that often, but on occasion. Most of the team is in Toronto or the Eastern Time Zone and we are located in the Pacific Time Zone. But they are pretty responsive and their technical support team is pretty professional and reliable.

Positive

We didn't use any solution other than our own scripts to maintain the network.

As the head of IT, I led the work of deploying Auvik. It is straightforward because you use a new machine to run Auvik. It still needs to be part of the same VLAN as the other devices, but we didn't see any real glitches.

Our deployment is just a single location and we only use it for our lab devices. The lab has multiple layers of switches, Layer 3 switches, and routers, and all the test devices are managed over SNMP and Intel vPro.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping went pretty fast. After it started running, it populated almost immediately, within minutes. But to get it fully propagated and have every device fully scanned took a while. That was expected.

We did our test of Auvik in a physically isolated, small testing network during the trial period. When we actually deployed it in our prod environment, it went pretty smoothly. We followed the playbook and it worked well.

The time that Auvik takes to search all the devices and get everything propagated is average or slightly above average. If there is a device update, for example, and a router reboots, it could take a while for it to be rediscovered by Auvik. I think that is because the frequency with which Auvik checks devices is pretty limited. If it worked otherwise, it would make the whole network congested. So the speed of checking devices is throttled and that means it could take minutes to get the latest state of devices. But once everything is online, you get real-time information.

We haven't had to do any maintenance on Auvik itself.

We did it ourselves and we didn't run into any issues. We had two software engineers involved.

We have only used it for a few months, but in the future we are going to expand our testing-devices fleet. We are going to double our number of testing devices. For most of the tests, the waiting time will be cut in half. Developers will spend less time waiting for tests to finish running everything and spend more time on actual development.

It is on a monthly subscription plan and it's charged by the device. We decided to use it for a year, first, to see how good it is.

PRTG Network Monitor and LogicMonitor were quite a bit more expensive compared to our current solution. Some of the other solutions we looked at are one-time purchases, but they are longer-term investments. For our projects, Auvik is more elastic. Per router, per month, it is a fixed price. We negotiated and got a more competitive price.

We did shop around for other network monitors to see what the best option was before we decided to buy Auvik. We tried PRTG Network Monitor and we tried LogicMonitor, but both are pretty focused on automatic network monitoring using protocols that are common to all devices, like SNMP. 

Auvik attracted us because of two things. One was that it is easy to configure. You don't need to set up your own web server or something like that. There is a trade-off there. If you do everything yourself, you own all the data within your network. However, that scenario is more vulnerable to external threats. But if you give all the network topology to websites like Auvik, there could be some privacy or security concerns. We did an evaluation and it seemed that Auvik would be a reliable partner for us.

The second thing that attracted us was Auvik's pricing, which is pretty competitive.

In terms of deployment, Auvik is a mixed model. You don't need to buy a dedicated machine from Auvik, but you need something that can run the Auvik monitor, whether it is a Docker instance or just a physical machine. We chose to use a physical machine mostly for security. That gives us better physical isolation from the rest of our network and makes it easier to manage and monitor if an attack were to occur.

As a very small company with a limited IT team, we found that Auvik is really helpful when you don't have a large IT team to do a lot of things. A lot of tasks can be done by Auvik and it will really help automate things.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization provided by Auvik is an eight or nine out of 10. There are some glitches, but it is easy to handle.

On the whole, it is a good solution. There are some issues, but I'm really satisfied.

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 use Auvik Network Management to monitor the networks of our clients who subscribe to our network monitoring service. This includes everything from backing up and restoring configurations to maintaining a complete network map.

The interface is incredibly user-friendly for basic tasks. However, more advanced features require some effort to learn and master. Overall, I appreciate the intuitive design that allows me to simply point someone to the interface and say "figure it out," and they can usually do so without much difficulty.

Auvik's configuration backups have been incredibly beneficial. They've saved us on multiple occasions in a pinch. The same goes for remote access - it allows us to troubleshoot issues remotely without having to immediately send someone on-site. We saw these benefits almost right away. We've had some client onboarding experiences that were quite challenging. However, by deploying Auvik, we were able to sort out the devices and identify the issues that same night.

It has empowered our entry-level technicians to resolve more tickets independently. Our company uses a tiered support system, and the help desk is primarily staffed by tier-one technicians whose expertise may not be as strong in networking. However, with Auvik's assistance, they can still identify basic problems, such as a network outage caused by a switch malfunction. In these cases, they can at least diagnose the issue or perform initial troubleshooting before escalating it to the appropriate team.

Auvik has significantly reduced our overall mean time to resolution. In some cases, this improvement is because resolving the issue remotely with Auvik avoids the need to send someone on-site, which could have taken a significant amount of time – up to one or two hours for the drive alone. Thanks to Auvik, we can now resolve these issues in some cases in as little as half the original time, or even a quarter.

Auvik helps us reduce the time spent on setting up maintenance tasks, troubleshooting issues, and resolving them. As the person who performs quarterly network maintenance for our paying clients, Auvik is a game-changer. It allows me to easily export all the necessary information, identify devices that need patching, and get started quickly. This saves me a significant amount of time. Thanks to Auvik, I've been able to reduce the time it takes to complete maintenance tasks from a full month to just two weeks.

Topography mapping is incredibly useful, especially when it's functioning properly. It's important to note that there have been some issues with it in the past. However, when it's working, the map is fantastic for locating even small devices. You can quickly identify the specific switch a device is connected to and troubleshoot issues like port connectivity. Additionally, remote access is incredibly helpful, and I use it frequently.

Recently, the map performance has become incredibly slow, even for small maps. For example, simply changing a device type can take up to five or ten minutes to reflect the change. This seems to be a new issue that has only emerged in the past few weeks.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for three years.

Auvik had been running flawlessly until the past few weeks when we started experiencing incidents where the entire site would crash for a half hour.

Auvik's scalability is great. It allows me to manage multiple sites easily. For example, a client can sign up with 15 sites, and I can simply add their website information and deploy Auvik to all of them in one go.

I frequently contact Auvik's technical support. They are incredibly fast to respond, even if an issue isn't immediately resolved. In those cases, they efficiently escalate the issue to the appropriate team to ensure I get the right answers. For simpler questions, they can quickly direct me to the relevant documentation, often within minutes. Additionally, their communication style is friendly and helpful.

Positive

I am responsible for the Auvik deployments for our clients. These deployments are straightforward. For a typical deployment, excluding any on-site work such as deploying physical collectors for clients without server sites, the process takes less than an hour. This includes entering all credentials, subnets, and other necessary information. The deployment time remains consistent even for larger sites.

Some of our clients have complex network setups, with up to 17 devices. This includes configuring them with all the necessary credentials. I'm currently working on assigning designations to devices that are functioning properly. My meticulousness added about two hours to this task, but overall, it should be completed within half a business day.

I'm generally responsible for deployments. However, if someone else needs to handle them, they can follow the combined documentation – both what I've written and what Auvik provided. It's worth noting that Auvik's documentation is incredibly thorough and helpful.

I evaluated Liongard, but I was not impressed with them.

I'm not entirely sure why our company ultimately chose Auvik, but I've been a strong advocate for keeping it. It offers a wide range of functionalities in a single tool, which is something we lack in other areas. For instance, when we acquired another MSP and integrated it into our system, they were using Liongard. While Liongard serves its purpose, Auvik consolidates all the necessary features into one platform. This provides us with a unified view of our IT infrastructure instead of having to manage separate tools.

I would rate Auvik Network Management ten out of ten.

Maintenance for Auvik is minimal.

To ensure a seamless rollout, new users should gather all their documentation and credentials beforehand. Having everything readily available will significantly expedite and smooth the deployment process.

I have 21 different locations in different networks that I have to manage. It gives me the ability to see the devices on the network, to see any troubles, to diagnose and support end-users or get into the network devices that are having issues.

It provides a single integrated platform for everything that I need. I can go and monitor the device, and I can get into the configuration of the device. It's a very powerful tool to have. Having a single integrated platform is very important. I have many tools to use, and to me, the ability to integrate it all into one platform is essential.

Aside from having a unified dashboard, it provides the ability to pick a particular site or a group of sites and see how they are configured and what issue a particular device is having. We are able to drill into that device from this platform, and we don't have to go outside and use different tools to access and get into the device.

It's very intuitive. It's probably the best in terms of getting up and running in short order. I have a team of network professionals who work with me, and we brought them in, and within an hour or two, they had their own dashboard set the way they wanted. So overall, the whole product is intuitive and very easy. It's not difficult.

It has given us a greater amount of visibility that we didn't have before. This visibility is absolutely essential for us. Before that, we would have about four different ways to test. Having it all in one location and one platform is very essential.

The ability to have visibility on a network to see the traffic and the ability to see if devices are misconfigured and if something changes in that configuration, are most valuable.

It's very easy. It's very intuitive. They had me up and running in a matter of hours, so it wasn't a steep learning curve to learn the interface or to learn the controls.

I would like to be able to get a little bit more granularity in turning on and off alerts because I get flooded with alerts. It gives too much information at times.

I've been using it for almost a year.

I haven't had any issues in the year that we've been on it, so it's pretty good.

It's amazing. 

I have not contacted them. 

We used a SolarWinds product. We used some rather rudimentary, built-in network tools. Obviously, there is SNMP, and we would use that through other means, but having it all essentially integrated into Auvik makes a big difference for us in terms of time and ease of use. Switching to Auvik saved us probably 20 hours a week.

It was very straightforward. There was very little in there that did not make sense. I had a great trainer that came in, and we did maybe two or three sessions, and then we were off and running. 

The name of the contractor is Darrell Norton. He works for Sedona Technologies, so we're contracted with them. We met with Darrell and then we went around installing the agents. He assisted with that. We did a lot of that remotely, and then, once the agents were installed, we started building the networks. So, in terms of me getting into the backend and programming, I did none of that.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping started to populate
almost instantaneously. Each site took maybe 20 minutes at the most, and then it started giving us the information. It was amazing. I was pretty impressed. In terms of the full deployment, we were up and running in one or two days. We had 23 different geographic locations. They were not on one campus, so that was pretty impressive. 

I can't compare the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solutions. It was probably the easiest deployment I've seen. With the other solutions, I spent a lot of time. I had to spend an enormous amount of time doing the configurations and programming, whereas, with Auvik, it was almost a plug-and-play.

For the maintenance, including myself, there are three associates. We all spread those duties out. We don't have anybody designated as the network administrator, so it's me and two other people who spend the most time with it. It's a daily function. In the morning, I get in, and I look at it. If I don't see anything wrong, I move on. It has made our jobs a whole lot easier.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. Getting in there and being able to see what that network is up to at any given moment, what the issues are, and being able to address them right from that platform has been a huge time saver.

We have seen a good 15% reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). 

They're very competitive on the pricing front. They may not be the least expensive, but they're certainly not the most expensive. They're right in a sweet spot. For our organization, at least, it was right within the budget.

We were using the SolarWinds product, and I went through demos of probably a dozen or more. We had CrowdStrike and others. I sat through probably a year's worth. I spent a year evaluating different products before we settled on Auvik.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise making sure that they have full control of the network, they understand all the devices, and they have the administrative capability to get into managed devices. We discovered a few that we hadn't known about, which provided a challenge. They also should be aware that there may be privacy concerns for some people because the system does take over and look into things. They may need to put controls on before they deploy it. I know that it goes in and gathers the configuration data, but I'm not sure how much personal data that is. I don't watch that part of it, but that would just be my top-of-mind concern. It's so powerful and it can take so much control. What's it looking at?

I'm very impressed with the product. I don't have any complaints. I wish I had it several years earlier. It would've been a lot easier. We've been through a number of acquisitions. So, taking on new different networks was a chore before. If we had this at the onset, it would've been a piece of cake.

We haven't yet utilized the program to its full potential. The most automation I see is getting the alerts, but we haven't yet designated tasks in that automation. So, there's still some manual work. In other words, we get the alert, and then we have to go deal with it. We don't have an automated dispatch or anything to any particular person.

I am sure Auvik is helpful for keeping device inventories up-to-date, but we use something else. We're still getting our feet wet with the product. The more we use it, I'm sure it would be valuable for that. I can go in and see all the devices that are reporting on the network, so in a sense, it does help us to keep device inventory up to date, but I'm sure there's a better way we can use it.

In terms of comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus on-prem network monitoring solutions, as long as I have network connectivity and I have internet, it's great, but if I'm in a situation where I don't have connectivity, it doesn't help me.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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