Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We used PRTG as our network monitoring stack and SolarWinds network configuration manager. SolarWinds has hacked a couple of years ago, so we have been left with PRTG but no configuration management. PRTG doesn't do network monitoring very well, but it's suitable for server monitoring. I had known about Auvik for quite some time and decided to give it a look. We tested it and got insights into our network we had never seen before. We have three disparate physical networks, which provide insight into how everything is interconnected.

We have 55 users spread out over all our locations. Our sales staff is remote, but we have a primary site with two physical networks and a disaster recovery site co-located with one physical network.

Auvik has made things more accessible, and we're much more agile in dealing with problems when they arise. It has also given us an extraordinary amount of visibility into the connections of the physical network. We've found many issues that we didn't know existed before.

We've probably saved around an hour each week using Auvik, but it varies. We're typically looking at the network stack to troubleshoot a problem, which doesn't happen that often. I usually log into Auvik when there are alerts unless something is misbehaving. However, I log on to Auvik at least once or twice a week to look at some of the net flow things or get a feel for what's going on in the network in general.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventories up to date, which has saved us time. We're a company in the financial sector, so we regularly go through compliance audits. Having a centralized location for configuration management is helpful because we don't need to spend time doing that manually throughout the year. The cloud solution enables us to have our configurations offsite in case of a disaster. That is a benefit. 

Network mapping is the most valuable feature. It's handy to see which devices are connected to what ports. The net flow stuff and traffic insights are also helpful. The network mapping is a little better than average. That's one area where PRTG falls short. It's tough to use. Auvik makes that a bit easier. 

Auvik's initial setup and discovery were effortless. Tuning the alerts takes a little bit more work. Ease of use is essential. Usually, there has been some alert, or we need a specific piece of information promptly. It must be easy for us to find that information.

The integrated platform is a nice-to-have, but it's not essential because we only have three sites: primary, guest, and DR. I only use Auvik for the primary site. For an MSP, the integrated single pane of glass would be a huge deal. 

I would relegate the network map to its area instead of being the focus of every page. The network map is in the front and center of the UI. I would rather have the option to look at it when I need it instead of having it on every single page. It's beautiful, but I don't need it on every page.

We've been using Auvik for about four months now.

I have found Auvik extremely stable. They do a lot of scheduled maintenance, but it's almost always on the weekends, so it doesn't impact us. 

Auvik looks incredibly scalable. We scaled it out to three sites without any problem.

I rate Auvik support seven out of 10. I want to give them an eight, but eight seems too generous. 7.5 is kind of where I want to be.

Neutral

We previously used PRTG and SolarWinds Network Configuration Monitor. SolarWinds got hacked, and their software was janky at best. It worked, but only because we didn't put a lot of load on it. We finally decided to find a solution that worked. We got along without it for about a year before realizing we needed a solution.

PRTG is an excellent server monitoring solution but a poor network monitoring solution. It does the job, but it's not good at it. Auvik is a fantastic network monitoring tool that does everything PRTG does, plus all the things that SolarWinds and CM did. It took the place of two different products. PRTG is usable, but it would take me 10 minutes to do something Auvik can do in a minute. Auvik is light years better in terms of usability and simplicity.

Setting up Auvik was surprisingly easy to do. The initial installation took a day or two, but it took a couple of weeks to start seeing the results I wanted.  The network map started to populate within 24 hours. It was so much easier than PRTG was and a lot faster.

I deployed it by myself. The involved tasks included setting up virtual machine collectors, modifying the firewall and ACL rules, setting up accounts, doing SSO, going through the training, and training my team.

I did the setup myself with a little bit of help from Auvik support.

It took a little time to get it up and running, but now that it's running, it hums along and does its job. I don't have hard data about our ROI, but we've seen value from Auvik. For example, say we had a bandwidth problem where traffic was slowing down on one of our guest sites. It would take me 15 to 20 minutes in PRTG to look at the net flows and figure out who was doing what. It takes me a minute or two in Auvik. That is a huge time saver.

I was under the impression that it was costly in a larger environment, but I was very wrong. It's pretty reasonable. The pricing is much better than I thought it was because it's based on network devices, not devices. That was a key thing that I did not know.

I like that it's flexible. If we have a device that we need to spin up for a month, we pay a little extra that month, and it goes back down. We don't have to renegotiate the contract or pay that amount forever.

We also considered Zabbix, but that seemed like a ton of work.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. I've heard of Auvik for 10 years, but I always shied away from it because of the size and complexity of the networks I work with. I figured it would not be cost-effective because Auvik is a big name. However, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be when I looked at the quotes. The value for the money is high, so if you think you can't afford it, look into it anyway because you might be surprised.

I'm one of the biggest Auvik fans out there. I have used it personally, and I have brought it to every single company since 2015 as a product offering or for the internal use case. I currently own a firm, and I am yet to talk with Auvik. When the time comes, I will absolutely be doing its implementation for my company, and I will be offering Auvik to my customers.

I did its implementation for a company in the November of the last year. NetFlow was one of the biggest use cases, and it was for monitoring the type of traffic inside the network. We were also able to do a lot of Syslogging, and with one pane of glass, we were able to remote into the various routers and switches that we had.

It was deployed via Windows services and not as a virtual box inside VMware, which is probably better. We also had a cloud collection point, which was also a failover in our Chicago environment. I was deployed for five different sites along with the NetFlow application.

Auvik provided one of our clients the ability to see the network in its entirety. We were seamlessly able to implement an encryption deployment because we could see the whole network from a bird's eye view. It was internally implemented, so it didn't really help us in terms of performance, but it improved the productivity of the project on which we were working.

In terms of whether the automation of network mapping enabled junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks, as an IT Manager, it has allowed me to delegate tasks. What was nice was that a lot of people were annoyed that Auvik just didn't combine everything, and everything was slow when Auvik did combine the whole map. When we broke it out the way Auvik told us to, which was by the site, it allowed me to actually assign a small networking team of two or three personnel essentially to that specific location. Everybody knew what exact equipment they were responsible for, and then it just trickled down to all of the other systems and processes. This made the communication more effective. We could hand off jobs and shifts at almost a seamless rate. When it came to documentation and password inside of Auvik, I knew and felt that they were secure. It has definitely decreased our mean time to resolution. It improved our overall productivity by at least 20%.

Its TrafficInsights feature shows the network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption. Most of the time, I'm able to get a pretty detailed kind of report or visionary on it. This feature is extremely important. From a managerial standpoint, we wanted to know what people were doing. The pandemic was huge for a lot of work for home people, and we wanted to know what our employees were doing on their computers at home. While they were connected to the VPN, Auvik provided us the ability to see whether they were watching Netflix and things like that, or what other type of bandwidth they were taking up. It was very amazing. We were canning people over it, and we were utilizing it to kind of take a temperature of our culture.

The TrafficInsights feature is helpful in showing where your system is experiencing performance issues. When we have a network problem, I'm able to see where and what's causing it. Back in October, we had some sort of network storm on our layer 3 in Chicago, and we were able to pinpoint different types of traffic going on. It was nothing, and packets were coming back at zero bits and different bits, and it was just noise. We were able to figure out that there was a loop somewhere. We had to physically go down and examine it, but without it, we probably would have chased our tails around or spent a lot more money than we did to resolve the issue.

The TrafficInsights feature has helped in improving our network performance. It improved our understanding of the network and what was going on. It helped us utilize other tools that were in place to block traffic, allow different traffic, or redirect different traffic.

It provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. I had to go in and do some configuration myself, but it was very simple. It automatically pulled the configuration from the device, and I could download it from Auvik. It probably saved me a couple of hours a week. At $100 or $200 an hour, it could save you a couple of thousand bucks a year.

It has definitely enabled us to consolidate and integrate other tools. Auvik integrates really well with other tools such as Lucidchart and different PSAs such as ConnectWise. With that, I can just utilize more functions inside these solutions. I don't necessarily have to have my Lucidchart. It integrates well where I don't have to add any more products. It is kind of that last missing link theme. It takes away from having to purchase a Visio chart, individually go and pull network reports, or have a product at each site that does that. It has this overarching big brother side. Not having to spend on these tools has probably saved us $10,000 to $20,000 annually in licensing costs. These are the software that you got to get rid of, and they are probably about $10,000 per piece.

NetFlow is probably one of the most valuable features. Since starting with Auvik, and seeing how far it has come, NetFlow has been one of the most valuable features. This feature is important because as a network administrator, you always want to examine what type of traffic is going on. You can limit users from watching Netflix on a route, or you can also pinpoint malicious activity going on in the network. So, I really do find Auvik to be a utility, not only from a network standpoint but also from a security standpoint. It provides a very good security feature in a way even though it is not branded like that.

Towards the actual Auvik side or the networking side, one of the most valuable features is its capability to quickly go out, discover, and have the intelligence to either utilize known usernames and passwords (when it comes to SNMP) or ask for the proper credentials. If they weren't provided, then it provides information about how to go retrieve them. When you examine the whole workflow or compare it to SolarWinds Orion, which got hacked, Auvik blows it out of the water because of this feature. This feature is important because when you're monitoring multiple locations and managing multiple employees, it is important to have that piece fit inside of that business continuity. I like to involve those things in security and business continuity when I am selling, deploying, or implementing it, thus making it the culture behind the product.

Its network discovery capabilities are very impressive. The discovery piece is amazing. I don't know if they have an AI or some type of advanced intelligence inside of their program that helps with the discovery piece. I haven't seen anything that discovers products that well and is able to label them, tag them, and pull as much information about them. I don't know what drives that engine, but I'm just absolutely blown away by it. It is cool.

Its ease of use is great. I was very pleased with how the junior employees, and even a couple of senior employees who had not worked with the product, were able to jump in, learn quickly, and work through the interface.

Some of the automation pieces for discovery still need a little bit more improvement. I wouldn't mind seeing some more security features as that's the world we're driving into. I know Auvik probably wants to try to keep itself separate because that's its brand, but even if they brought on board another brand that was able to plug into them, it would benefit us. It would lower some more network security costs if as a company, they are a one-stop shop. They have already got the network piece going. If they improved in that area and focused a lot on that, they would gain me as a customer, and they would probably gain a lot of others.

I have been using Auvik since 2015. 

I've been pretty impressed with its stability. I've been with Auvik for such a long time, and they've improved over the years. That's why I have nothing bad to say about them. Its stability in 2015 was great, but now with the redundancy and this cloud thing that they've got going, it is even more impressive.

They've improved it in that area a lot. It is scalable now.

In the previous job, we only paid for 20 billable endpoints, but we had more than 100 endpoints. We had three users. My title there was a senior systems architect, and then I had a network engineer under me. Above me was my boss who was the Chief Information Officer. 

If I had to rate its usage on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being eight hours a day and one being twice a week, they would probably fall in the five range. They probably use it four out of five days and for an hour or an hour and a half a day.

Currently, I don't have it as an offering in my own company. We are brand new, and I just opened this firm this year in February. As we get the ground and the ball rolling, we will be an Auvik customer within the next six months for sure.

Their technical support is the best. You can talk to an Auvik support technician about something Cisco-related. They don't have to, but they are very knowledgeable in that technology, which is so impressive. 

I'm glad, and I'm sure that Auvik hires nothing but educated people, which is probably why it's just that much better of an experience. I can talk to them, and they know what I'm talking about. A lot of the things that we talk about are complex things related to the Cisco technology, FortiGate, etc.

In the previous job, we had a third-party firm called Transcendent, and they resold SolarWinds Orion, but it was not good. I replaced it shortly with Auvik after Orion was hacked, and then we integrated their team into the product. We had it all on-prem, but we utilized this hybrid thing that Auvik had. If our on-prem collector went down, we weren't completely blind. We had redundancy built into it.

It makes me so much happier to be an Auvik customer and a champion of the product. I'm really glad that Auvik hasn't been touched like SolarWinds Orion. It gives me the confidence to keep utilizing and selling their products.

Auvik automatically updates the network topology at an interval of approximately 60 seconds, and you can also go in there and forcefully update it. We, however, never really relied on that technology. You could click on a spot, and it was a 50:50 shot if we had to move in and relabel it, which was better than SolarWinds where you get a 10% chance of getting it right. So, you're doing 90% of the configuration in SolarWinds versus having to do 40 to 50% in Auvik. That's why Auvik is better.

It was pretty complex. When you are setting up Auvik, you can set up the collector, which is straightforward. However, when you are trying to set up your router and switches, you have to have at least an associate-level degree in Cisco networking, for example, to understand the commands and the things that you need to do to prepare your router or firewall to work or integrate into the Auvik system. You need somebody who knows networking. When it comes to finding those people, they're expensive. It is probably cheaper to go through Auvik's offering at that point. If you have them on staff, utilize them. So, it is complicated, but it is no fault of their own. Auvik was easy, but they can't really control Cisco or the other people who have their technology.

The deployment probably took about two weeks. In terms of comparing the setup time of Auvik with other solutions, Auvik allowed me to do it from one location and in my chair. For other locations, I probably would have had to travel at least twice with a SolarWinds solution. I would have had to deploy it on physical hardware at that location and then use my Cisco DMVPN to make everything toss, which isn't really all that cool or modern. So, Auvik saves me traveling time and money, and I am able to do it from one location. Such cost savings probably translate to $10,000.

Our implementation strategy was to start with our home office, which was our data center here in Milwaukee, and then to set up a redundant site in Chicago. We discovered there, and then we went by the office and deployed it office by office through discovery. We didn't move to the next office till every piece of equipment was accounted for, labeled, and documented.

I have not used any third-party integrator. I did it myself. I also did all the maintenance, which included server maintenance, different updates, patches, backups, etc.

They weren't like that, but I can tell you that they've made it.

The cost for all the devices that we were billed at in my last job was about $2500 annually. It wasn't much.

It has the most reasonable pricing as compared to any product out there. I can't complain. It is amazing. It allows me to bundle inside the package what I charge customers per user per month. I don't charge them per device anymore. That's not how we do things in the industry. It is per user per month. The way Auvik is charging us allows me to do it. For example, if they charge $250 for a certain number of seats, I'm just going to write the costs onto per user per month. I have a few leftover licenses to use, which allows me to go out and make some more sales and give some freebies at some shows. So, it makes me very flexible. I am very happy with it.

It is billed by network devices. You could choose which billable device you want. What is really nice is that if you don't want one switch to be billable and the other one to be billable, you can do that. You just won't have the features that the billable switch has, which isn't horrible. Sometimes, you don't need that. What I'm really happy about is that Auvik doesn't force things on you and doesn't say, "You have to have all of this," and that's a great business model.

Sometimes, you can get overages if you go over your agreement per device, but they don't try to nickel-and-dime you on it. They're very reasonable, and it is easy to go in and look and see. They harp on it too. They ask you to go in and check and make sure you have what you want because you have this many licenses.

They didn't evaluate any other product.

To anybody utilizing it internally, I would advise going through Auvik directly. You'll pay a little bit more, but you'll have the support as an IT staff unless you want to come through a company like me. Auvik has just recently opened up their company to accept companies that want to utilize it internally. As a consultant with the landscape that I'm looking at right now, I advise Auvik to keep pricing in the same way.

I would advise taking your time and doing your implementation right the first time. You're going to gain more knowledge about your network, and the people coming after you are going to be able to support your network that much easier. 

Its ease of use is great, but I firmly believe that if you don't have experience in networking, you're going to fail. If you don't take the time or pay the money to sit down with Auvik and have them teach you to utilize the tool, you're doing yourself a disservice because of what and how inexpensive it is to get the tool and how valuable it is to have their time to teach you how to utilize the tool. They have an implementation team that will walk you through it. You have to pay for this service separately. I utilized this service once, and I've been able to implement it myself. I would highly recommend that somebody without experience should pay for this service at least once in their career.

It doesn't really help us put out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. That could be because of the customers that I've had. However, Auvik does allow me to pinpoint the problem right away. I may get the alert two minutes later than my customer alerted me, but I'm able to get a fast resolution in place right away. It is easy. So, that's what I'm very happy about.

As a seller of Auvik, the cost-savings that it provides allow me to be more mobile. I don't have to hire as many employees because I can have them sitting in a chair watching a dashboard, which saves cost. If I'm a customer myself, I don't really see cost savings, and it is just another tool for my IT guys to be successful. So, it doesn't really save costs, but at the same time, it has a positive impact on the network.

As a consultant, Auvik has shown me the habits of end-users or IT staff. For example, Auvik has been able to pick up on rogue, small six-port switches that get plugged in somewhere under somebody's desk. I am also able to see the weird things that get plugged in or turned on in the network. I am also able to have conversations, but it is just weird to see how that technology or software translates to the behavior of these people. It is kind of neat.

Its time to value is what it is. There is a cost to everything, and there is really no value when it comes to implementation. Especially with how I am going to have it implemented in my environment, I have to ask somebody with a reasonable amount of knowledge, and he is going to cost me $80,000 to $100,000 a year to go out and implement. It is just a cost, and there is really no way around it.

I would rate Auvik a 10 out of 10.

We are a multinational company in almost 55 countries. One of the reasons why we selected Auvik was we wanted to have insights into our networks. Ultimately, we can control them at a central level. Auvik was the best fit because it has:

1. A cloud-based solution using a SaaS model. 
2. Visibility into end users using tools. 
3. Terminal auto-connect, where we can connect devices from Auvik. 
4. Some sort of an audit. 
5. Backup consultations in the tool, which it maintains. 

It has really eased our life in terms of network operations.

It is improving our network operations in 55 countries, including the US, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. 

Auvik automatically updates network topology. Since it automatically updates the topology, we proactively know what is happening in a country or our branch offices. It also alerts us if there is a topology change, e.g., if it discovers anything new in that country. So, it has reduced the number of failures in our operations. We went from being reactive to proactive. So, we are no longer reacting to what is happening and others are doing. This has saved us about two to three hours a day. We used to spend two to three hours every morning checking the firewall and router logs for malicious behavior.

The automation of network mapping enables our junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. The type of views that we have Auvik automatically discovering has helped our operations, as issues get resolved at Level 1 or 2 with the help of the topology. They don't go to Level 3 until they are serious. 

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution. Around three years back, there always used to be a heavy load on Level 3. Nowadays, in a month, there are maximum two tickets that reach Level 3. They all get sorted out in Level 1 and 2.

The most valuable feature is the auditing part. Whenever we are doing any changes, it captures those changes. Date-wise, if we want to refer back to them, we just need to view the date when we did those changes and it will give us a comparison of what has been changed from the last concept. 

The Auvik terminal's service is a value-add to our operations.

It is very user-friendly. It is easy to use, understand, and deploy. My guys have not taken any training from Auvik, but we have learned the systems quite quickly. Because it is user-friendly, you don't need professional training for it.

Auvik's network discovery capabilities are awesome. It not only discovers the network, but it also gives you a map by designing how your network will look like in your environment.

Auvik has very good alerting modules. If a connection or device goes down, it alerts us right away. A good part of that alert is it has some sort of intelligence mechanism. For example, if the router or network device has some sort of malicious activity or critical issue, then it alerts us upfront. It will say, "Hey, you have some issues that you might need to check." It alerts us to critical elements before something bad happens. 

They need to improve the reporting system. They still don't have a proper reporting system in Auvik. They have built a dashboard in Power BI using APIs, but they should build some sort of report within Auvik itself. If Auvik fixes the reporting or comes up with a good reporting module, it will change the game.

I have already talked with the CEO of Auvik about this. He agreed that he will be working on getting some reporting systems in Auvik. As of now, they only have reporting via Power BI, and it is an additional cost to get the Power BI licenses. Another drawback, the Power BI reporting is not that accurate and you really have to struggle to get the reports.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

It is a SaaS-based tool. Auvik takes care of their hosting environment. So far, I found this solution to be more stable compared to other tools that we have used on-premises.

The scalability is good. An important thing about Auvik is that this tool is available from anywhere. For example, we are in a pandemic situation today and forced to work from home. Auvik gives us the capability to do our network operations from anywhere. This is one of the important features that I like about Auvik. For the on-premise solution, you have to make sure you are in the company network and have the VPN connected with the resources.

In my department, we have 46 people using it.

We are expanding Auvik into other countries. For now, we have expanded it into Europe and Asia as well as starting to expand it into the US. So, we will have a long journey using Auvik.

Their technical support is good. They need some improvement. They are not quick. Whenever we raised an issue with Auvik, which was two or three times, the technical support was a bit slow in responding to our issues.

We used to manage the firewall and routers manually, connecting to the countries' VPN. Today, we don't need to have them connected. We can just manage it from a single Auvik console. This has really changed our network operations. 

The initial setup is an easy, straightforward process. You just need to download the Auvik collector, and it is just three steps: next, next, and next. Then, it is complete. From the employee perspective, it saves you at least four to five hours. Other tools take people  a working day to deploy one site. Whereas, Auvik takes just a few minutes. The reason for that is they have their automated discovery capabilities, where you just put in your SNMP credentials.

I deployed myself in five minutes.

Three years ago, we used to work out of the office for hours doing maintenance, like patching and upgrading tools. My guys are no longer doing night duty for operations like that. We don't do any maintenance on Auvik because it is done by Auvik.

Compared to other products, Auvik's pricing is more feasible since you get all its features. You pay for licenses on a per network device basis. It monitors hypervisors, but does not bill for that. There are no additional costs, which is something that I like.

We did evaluate a couple of tools, both on-premises and cloud, then we decided to go with Auvik.

Auvik works smoothly compared to other tools. It also discovers the entire network in a respective area, then Auvik maps it automatically and gives you a good topology. This was a key factor in our decision.

Auvik is for any networking department. If you have a very complex network or a lot of devices that need to be monitored, Auvik would be the best fit. Auvik is not for a simple environment. If you have 10 devices or 10 branch/site offices, then Auvik is not a good fit because it will become expensive.

We are still in the testing phase of the TrafficInsights feature, which gives you full visibility into what is happening on your network. Also, the TrafficInsights feature will help you to say where protocols or services are consumed heavily. In the long run, it helps you to optimize your bandwidth based on your country consumption. It gives you a lot of details and integrated traffic insight, which we unfortunately need to hold back on because of data protection laws. 

It doesn't configure out-of-the-box automatically. That is a manual job.

For an enterprise environment, I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

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.

I'm a technical team lead managing other engineers and specialists for several clients. I utilize Auvik for strategic discussions, escalations, and support tickets. I'm on the backend trying to coordinate responses to outages, feature requests, etc. 

We use multiple applications to manage our network. Auvik is our network mapping and discovery tool that creates alerts in our ticketing system. We use ConnectWise Automate and that suite of products for ticketing. It's not like Auvik is a ticketing help desk system with remote control, but it can do just about everything from a monitoring standpoint. We still use AppNeta for board mirroring or finding latency in network traffic.

Auvik is a total package for network discovery that completely meets our needs as a company. I don't see us leaving Auvik for some other network discovery tool. It's a one-stop shop where we can dive into each of our client's networks, and we have quite a few. I don't know precisely how many we have. It's fewer than a hundred, but it's too many to do LAN diagrams in Visio. 

The solution has reduced repetitive low-priority tasks because it collects the SNMP information for us and alerts us when servers go offline. We can see connectivity in the network from a bird's eye view without the need to dive into the firewalls and switches. Auvik saves us from having to create manual diagrams, and I can export all the data about a client's network, so I don't have to gather all of that myself.

Given our number of clients, we would probably need another full-time engineer if someone had to keep track of all of this on their own. It's roughly equivalent to a human working full-time for an entire year. That's one less person we need for all that, and Auvik reduces human error. 

The visibility Auvik provides is critical because it's part of our onboarding process, giving us a high-level overview so long as the client doesn't change the SNMP default values. We can immediately see what a new client is working with as soon as we get off again into their network.

Auvik has improved the team's availability by about 75 percent. Before Auvik, we used a different tool to scan, but it provided only a one-time snapshot of the network, whereas Auvik provides mapping in real-time. 

It's probably one of the first tools we introduce to new hires in our network operations center. Auvik is intuitive and offers hints. You can type a vendor name or an IP, and it's immediately accessible at a high level. Of course, there's depth to the product that takes time to develop. Junior engineers can quickly get a look at it, start learning how SNMP works, or configure it on devices and watch them appear in Auvik.

We use Auvik when we're doing strategic planning for clients. It helps us find servers, hosts switches, correct serial numbers, etc., so we can do warranty lookups and that sort of thing. It's important. We primarily use it for information gathering to see a visual network diagram mapping and get tickets.

It's hard to say that one feature is my favorite, but I like Auvik's ability to map networks using SNMP. It maps the network, so I can look at all the devices and set them to provide alerts or automatically create tickets when outages occur. If clients need it, I can export all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

The monitoring and management functions are easy to use. The network visualization is also intuitive. Ease of use is crucial because many of our help desk specialists and entry-level people need to navigate the solution, so it's vital to have simplicity in standard high-level searching. A single integrated platform is essential to stay in line with our best practices.

The search could be slightly more intelligent. If I type in "Dell" and put an extra "L," Auvik doesn't give a suggestion, "Did you mean 'Dell?'" I have to fix that. That's a minor thing.

Also, if I select a specific device and apply it as a search filter, it shows me the device, and I have to click on it to see it at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, it just stays on the discovery. When I close the device, it remains on the switch displaying the diagram. I have to click the home dashboard to get back to the way it was.

When I remove the filter, it should take me back to the home dashboard. After I add a filter, select a device, and apply it as a search filter, I think it should pop up if there's only one. When there's only one device in the filter, I find it somewhat annoying to need to click it to dive into that device. If I remove the filter, I would prefer it return to the home dashboard. It's a minor irritation at times.

I've used Auvik for more than five years, close to eight. 

Auvik is solid. I have never experienced an outage. Auvik has downtime, but they provide notice well in advance. The maintenance window tends to be at times that won't impact me. The most recent maintenance window was on Dec. 3 at 7:00 AM Eastern, which is 4:00 AM Pacific, so it didn't affect me at all.

I don't see a limitation to the scalability.

Before the company adopted Auvik, I used Visio to create my online diagrams by hand.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but deploying the collectors is easy. Another person handles the onboarding process, but the network maps are populated within a day or so. I've never heard anyone say, "Hey, it's taking a long time for Auvik to get going." They say Auvik is up, and I see the map is there. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10.

We mainly needed a tool for managing or monitoring our firewalls and switches. We do have other tools for general server environment monitoring and applications monitoring, but they are not as good for managing and monitoring firewalls and switches. We specifically needed monitoring and management of firewalls and switches for our data center environment.

It provided the ability to track down the changes in the firewall and the ability to have centralized visibility into our networking stack. We are able to compare and correlate functions from one environment with another environment, which is helpful when we upgrade the code or the framework in one location. We can compare how the stats were previously, and we get to know whether the new code is doing anything funky or if we are seeing any issues. It allows us to compare sizes that are running on the older code and sizes that are running on a newer code. We can see if there is any difference in the CPU usage, RAM usage, or the utilization of the firewalls themselves.

It's a single pane of view. There is a single dashboard, and you can add multiple sites and multiple users to it. You install collectors in different areas, but the management is from a single location. Everything is cloud-based. So, you can access and do monitoring from pretty much anywhere. The beauty of it is that if you have multiple physical locations across the continent, you can see the networking stack on one single page. This single integrated platform is very important for us. The most important factor for us was that this platform is cloud-based. If we were hosting it in a single physical location, it would have been hard to be accessible by other locations. Having it in the cloud and being able to see everything in a centralized location was super important for us because in the case of the old or other tools that we had in the past, or we still have, we need to log into a different tool or different console to see the information, and it's hard to correlate all of them in a single location. Auvik gives that ability. We can compare the states and the information from a firewall located in the east of the US and a firewall located in the west of the US, which is super helpful.

It is nice to be able to visualize the network mapping/topology for the organization. You don't have to do anything. You add the subnets and the VLANs you want to be scanned. As long as the collector can access those subnets, it is done fairly quickly. It depends on how complex your network is, but it can take less than 30 minutes to map everything and give you a visualization, which is pretty nice. Otherwise, it could take you hours to stay up-to-date with the charts of your networking topology because the topology changes from time to time. With Auvik, you can see every node, every switch, and every firewall. You can see how they are connected. You can visually see how your network is and what you have. The best part is that it adjusts on the fly. If I add a new switch, the topology would adjust, and the new switch will be there. If I take out a switch or create a new branch, it will automatically show that. It's really nice and easy for the day-to-day understanding of where you are, but it's also very important when you have a new network admin, and you need to get them up to the speed of your network. In the past, we had to pull out various diagrams and explain what we have and then figure out whether all the diagrams were up-to-date, whereas now, we can just show the dashboard, and they would understand that. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of the overall intuitiveness of the network visualization. It's really intuitive. From what I was able to see, everything was correct. It's not that you get raw data and some visualization and then you need to work with it or adjust it. It connects everything. From what I was able to see, everything was pretty correct in the diagrams.

It has helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. Previously, we were doing daily backups of the firewalls, but now, we don't have to do that part. That has been a help. The automation of the backups was helpful. 

It has significantly improved the visibility into the networking topology. It can see the access points, and it can see pretty much everything on the network. It can detect servers and physical hardware as well. It has significantly improved our visibility. This visibility is not the most important aspect, but it's definitely important and significant to have this visibility and know what you have in the topology.

It keeps device inventories up-to-date. We can quickly search and find out the devices we have or check what we have. That part has been really helpful. Instead of tracking in an Excel spreadsheet, we can search the inventory in Auvik.

It has definitely saved time to do other tasks. Some of the daily tasks that we had to do are now done by Auvik. With Auvik, our team spends less time checking things, getting dashboards, and pulling up reports.

We have multiple applications and tools to manage and monitor various aspects of the networks. Auvik has saved us a few hours a week. When you have three or four different tools, you need to take information from each of those tools and then get some insights out. With Auvik, we log into a single location, and we get all the information. It has been time-saving for sure.

Few of the features are valuable. One feature that is the most valuable for me is that after we added all of our firewalls, every time we make any configuration change in the firewall, it creates a backup and retains the change history for months. We can see and find out when a change was done and what was the change. The best part is that if we want to compare the current config with the config from two weeks ago, the tool pulls up both config files and tells us what the difference is. If something is not working today, instead of asking around who made the change, what was changed, and how things were two weeks ago when everything was working, we can just pull both configs, check them out, and know what exactly the problem is and investigate.

Auvik is a cloud-based solution, and it definitely has advantages over on-prem network monitoring solutions. We don't have to manage anything on-prem, and we don't have to patch the backend. We don't have to allocate resources for the management console to work, and it's accessible from anywhere. We don't have to back up the virtual machine or the appliance because everything is managed by Auvik. We really like that part. You definitely need internet connectivity to send all the logs and data to Auvik. If your internet goes down, then technically, you don't have visibility at that time, but then, you likely have a bigger problem than being able to get the data.

It takes significantly less time and effort to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solutions. With the previous solutions, we needed to get somebody trained. Somebody had to go and watch tons of videos to understand how to deploy the solution and how to properly install and configure it. With Auvik, we just provide the executables to somebody, and they just install it. We then go to the console and the data starts to come there. It's way easier and faster to set it up.

They can improve its monitoring capabilities for the physical servers or operating systems. At the moment, they do have some visibility. Even though you don't buy Auvik for monitoring your servers, and it is more for network monitoring, it would be nice if they can do end-to-end monitoring so that you don't have to use a different tool for operating system monitoring. You can get all the information from Auvik.

I have been using Auvik for about three months.

It has been very stable so far. I don't see any issues. I'm not concerned about its stability.

It can scale. I don't see that as an issue.

We have various firewalls and switches in HA. We have various models and vendors. We have a three-layer topology. We have a core layer, a distribution layer, and an access layer. All that is visible and monitored from Auvik.

Their technical support has been good. They come up with solutions, and they are there to help. I'm happy with the experience so far. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

We used PRTG, and we used Nagios. We used these two recently. They were more for monitoring. They didn't have the capabilities of management. They weren't keeping backups, and they weren't alerting us where there was a new firmware update. They also did not have the topology visualization.

Both of them were on-prem solutions. So, we had to have a system or VM to install them. We installed PRTG on Windows. We needed a dedicated box to run it. They weren't cloud-based, and they weren't highly available.

I deployed it, and I worked with my network engineers to set it up properly. I started the initial deployment or initial installation of the collectors, and then my team took over. I worked with them to deploy it in multiple locations. It was straightforward and pretty easy to deploy. You need to do some configurations to add everything, but the initial configuration is straightforward.

We just downloaded the out-of-the-box solution and just clicked on next, next, and next. We haven't done any customization. It took about 30 minutes initially because I added a few subnets. It took 20 to 30 minutes to get the diagram. Initially, you get some data depending on your network. We have a fairly large network, so it took about 30 minutes. It is awesome to get that information in 30 minutes.

It was pretty straightforward and easy to use for firewalls. You set up a connection to the firewall, and then everything pretty much works on its own. Some tools require you to learn for weeks before you figure out how to deploy. Auvik, in that regard, is pretty easy. We had a little bit of a challenge adding the switches just because we have specific switches, and they communicate with the firewall on a specific protocol. There was an API or a way to add them up, but we just didn't know how to add them up out of the box. Auvik's support was able to help us out fairly quickly, and overall, it was an easy and smooth deployment.

We did it ourselves. I don't see a need for an integrator to do it because it's straightforward.

It doesn't require any day-to-day maintenance from our side. Everything is managed by Auvik. They run the updates and the patches. The only thing that you need to do is that when you add a new device, you need to provide a new password, or if you change the password, you need to update that in Auvik. Other than that, there is no maintenance.

I would like it to be more cost-effective or affordable. It's not the most expensive one, but it's also not the cheapest solution out there. You pay month to month. It is what it is. It is not for everyone, but it depends on what you're looking for in your budget.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that Auvik is not the cheapest solution out there. You pay per device you monitor, but there is value in it. If you monitor the key systems and components, then you can make it cost-effective. If you want to monitor every single switch in your environment, it certainly won't be a cheap solution. You need to evaluate what you need to monitor. Do you need to have every switch? You can have maybe the top-tier switches and get all the information from those. You don't necessarily need to have every switch monitored because it doesn't really distinguish. You pay the same price whether you are monitoring your core switch or your access switch. To make it more cost-effective, you need to pick and choose what you want to monitor.

We've evaluated FortiMonitor from Fortinet, but it wasn't a good fit for us. We also evaluated LiveAction. That was also not a good fit for us.

I would advise giving it a try in the trial period, adding all the devices you have on the network, and seeing what value you are getting. I would also advise assessing what you need to monitor and what you don't need to monitor because you pay per monitored device.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use Auvik to map out networks and to view device health, meaning not just if it's up or down but also if there are any system-generated errors that can be listed via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

It saves me from having to log into each device through whatever login they may have available to them. It's a single interface for the devices.

It has greatly increased our speed. We don't have to check individual device-specific interfaces for monitoring. It also handles real-time monitoring, as opposed to a daily or hourly check. In some cases, it also allows us to find a device that's in trouble and directly connect to it from the interface. It's a huge time saver, and it does save us a fair amount of leg work.

It has helped to reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation, such as checking on a device and opening and closing tickets for the devices that are in.

We now have a lot more visibility into the networks than we did before. This visibility is very important for our IT teams. The IT team would have a fairly difficult job checking all these different devices manually. In some cases, the work just wouldn't get done if it wasn't being done automatically.

A simple site view with the associated devices populating as things to add to or remove from the network is valuable. It's also nice to have it integrated with our ticketing system to create tickets in certain cases for devices that go down or have some high-level alerts, such as high CPU or overtemperature.

It's pretty easy to use its monitoring and management functions. There's a wizard that's involved when you first start it up and then you can pick. The initial network sets itself up and then you can add networks if they are available to the devices being monitored. Its ease of use is fairly important. There are some other monitoring tools that we have available to us, but they're agent-based. We can't load an agent on a switch or a router or something like that. We need some sort of SNMP interface to detect those errors. Otherwise, they would go unnoticed.

It's pretty intuitive. As soon as you pull up the site, the map comes right up. You can expand or contract different device types. In many cases, it will attempt to interrogate the device and find out what device type it is, but sometimes, you may have to set it yourself.

For the most part, it's great for visualizing the network mapping/topology for our organization. However, when complex VLAN networks are involved, sometimes, the picture can get a little cloudy. It would definitely be nice if there was some way of choosing a VLAN to view or something like that. They should definitely improve the handling of multiple networks and VLANs. I do know that the information has been gathered, and I know it's possible to give different looks. There could be a layered approach to the VLANs where you can take the default VLAN or you can toggle a switch and show, for example, a security camera VLAN or a voice-over IP VLAN. It would be nice to be able to have it pull up the information relevant to a particular network. 

The GUI map view could potentially be adjusted so that we can manipulate it without necessarily having it resize every time we adjust the screen. There should be a single focused view. Currently, it resizes every time I move this bar that has the information underneath it. Sometimes, that's after me zooming in on a particular piece, which makes it difficult to find my place again.

I have been using Auvik for at least a year. I'm a senior engineer for an MSP, and I use the Auvik system on a daily basis. 

Auvik's stability is great. They do run regular maintenance, and they always have an announcement about the maintenance ahead of time.

Its scalability is great. You're not limited to a number of devices, etc. Your only limitation is whether or not it can see the networks that you're trying to track. Because this is a cloud-based solution, it wouldn't be good for somebody who has an isolated network or something that's not on the internet. Other than that, whether you've got 5 workstations on the small network with 1 switch and 1 router, or if you've got 6 switches, 30 telephones, 7 printers, and 18 access points, it shows them all irrespective of whether it's a big one or a small one. The pricing on it is based on the devices. A small network is going to have a smaller cost than a larger organization.

It's deployed across multiple clients that we have. Each one of our nine different sites is a different client. Of those clients, none of them has two sites. So, it's not necessary that we have multiple site issues. We have nine sites and nine clients.

Normally, we have been just speaking to the sales team. So, contacting the sales rep is something that we've done, but there is a knowledge base that is fairly fantastic. They have it set up for a bunch of different device types from different manufacturers. You can see how to configure them so that they're sending the right information to Auvik. Each one of them gives step-by-step guides on how to integrate that device with Auvik.

There is obviously technical support, but I have not had to use it, which is great. The support is available right from the interface. You just go to the website, and they give you the phone number, and there you go. It would be fairly easy. You can do it through a message or through their phone number.

Their sales support is fairly techy. They are not just managers. They know their devices and their software. I would rate the support provided by their sales engineers at least an eight out of ten. They were easily able to answer any of my questions. However, not a whole lot of questions came up because the product pretty much runs itself. There are how-to guides on adding the capabilities of new devices. If there's a router, a firewall, or something else, there are instructions on how to configure it to connect to Auvik.

Positive

I have, but they belonged to certain ticketing systems, such as HP OpenView, etc. HP OpenView comes into play if you only have one network to manage. Currently, I've got nine different networks under Auvik, and for me, it's a switch between them. It's as simple as just dropping down a box and looking at the next one. However, because it's integrated with my ticketing API, I don't necessarily have to drill down into it. I'll receive tickets for certain devices that are having issues.

It was very straightforward. There was some hand-holding that they needed to do for us in order to integrate it with our ticketing system, but so far, setting up Auvik, starting a new site, and having that site inventoried and discovered has been mostly wizard-based. So, it's not difficult. You probably don't even need to be familiar with the technology to set it up.

We implemented it out of the box, but there are checkpoints where you authorize networks to be scanned. There is a stop there, but it's not too big a deal.

It probably took about two hours to set everything up for the first client, and then after that, each additional client would be about half an hour.

Auvik had a sales team that assisted us in the initial setup. In terms of the staff involved, I and the owner of my franchise company were there. He didn't need to be there. He just wanted to be there.

It doesn't require any maintenance from our side.

It saves me time on a daily basis. So, there's a great time-to-value. A fair amount of my time has been spared using this tool.

Its licensing is very fair. The devices that stand to gain the most benefit from this product are the ones that are billed. In the case of routers, switches, and firewalls, I won't necessarily have the ability to put a management agent on them to gather errors and activity logs. This type of solution is a requirement for me to properly monitor and manage these devices. The devices that aren't being billed are workstation servers, etc. For those devices, I can put agents on them to monitor their health. It has a fair billing structure. Additionally, the billing seems to only happen for devices that I have linked to my ticketing API, in such a way that I could stand a benefit from it.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that when comparing with other applications, they need to check if the other solutions are able to integrate with their ticketing system APIs. They also need to check how many device types they expect to log into during any one of their days, in order to get a true look at the device health of the networks that they have under them.

I did know of one other option available, but we did not evaluate or entertain any others before we went with Auvik. It was presented to us as a trial, and we were simply impressed.

The best advice is to make sure that all the devices that you want to come up in the map view have been properly configured to send their SNMP data to the collector.

Auvik helps to keep device inventory up to date, but typically, we do device inventory in a different way. It's nice to be able to validate the inventory, but in most cases, inventories are handled by different tasks. Auvik is invaluable for taking the initial inventory for a new client, but normally, we would go with a different inventory process, and we would use this to validate that going forward. It helps with the building of the inventory, and it helps to validate the inventory as it progresses.

I would rate Auvik at least an eight out of ten.

We use it for our clients that have managed network services. We monitor their networks to see if there are any anomalies or unknown devices, and we use it for troubleshooting as needed.

One of the benefits is the insights into the network. We had one client that was having tons of issues. We put Auvik on there and we were able to isolate the problem to one device, remove it, and everything is now working well.

It has helped with visibility into remote and distributed networks, globally. For those clients that pay for the service, it allows us to see their networks, see what's going on, and sometimes even see an issue before the client knows and calls us, and that is what we want.

We have also seen a reduction in mean time to resolution, of about 10 to 20 percent, depending on what the issue is.

I like the traffic insights. That really helps to see what's using your bandwidth.

The monitoring and management functions, while there is a little bit of a learning curve, are pretty easy. Once you get it, it's straightforward and easy to go forward with. That's very important because we don't have time to sit around and try to figure out how to use it, looking at tutorials. It's pretty intuitive and their support is really great too if we have any issues.

And the fact that it provides a single, integrated platform for our organization is important as well. Having 50 different accounts to log into would make things difficult at times.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization is great. It makes it easy to see everything and easy to follow and pinpoint what's going on.

The visualization of network mapping is good. The only complaint would be that VLANs don't necessarily show up as a regular LAN does. They do show up, but there is some manual tuning you have to do to make that look perfect. That's kind of the nature of how VLANs work, so I don't think there's anything they can really do to help make that better. Still, it does at least pick up devices that are on there, and tries to connect it all, but it doesn't always do a good job.

Also, it doesn't help keep device inventories up to date. It doesn't have any updating features.

It has been three years since I started using Auvik.

It's reliable. We haven't had any issues with it. We haven't had any downtime because the server wasn't available, or anything like that. It's definitely worth it.

It seems to scale really well. When we first started, we just had three clients in there. Now we have it on all 35 of our clients, and some of them have multiple sites. They're not all fully configured, but at least we have the agent on them and we're getting data already. I just need to go into each one and set up the SSH and SNMP settings, but that's no big deal.

It's deployed into our managed network clients who have anywhere from three workstations all the way up to over 300 devices on the multiple VLANs.

Their technical support is a 10 out of 10. They have direct support within the platform via a chat and they'll walk you through anything and give you the guidance you need. And their email support is great as well, if you have to escalate something. They'll even do a Zoom call with you if they're not able to resolve it by email or chat. They don't leave you hanging.

Positive

We didn't use any solution previously. We just used an ad hoc network scan to try to find issues, but that doesn't really give you a great view of everything.

I'm the one who does the deployments. The setup is straightforward. It's complex in the sense that you have to connect each device and configure its SNMP or SSH settings, but it's pretty straightforward overall.

Depending on the network, within 30 seconds to two minutes, max, the network mapping starts to populate after implementing the collector. It's pretty quick.

It doesn't require much maintenance. Once you get everything set up, unless you introduce new devices, you don't really have to mess with anything.

We did our initial implementation with the Auvik trainer. He helped us onboard clients and gave us training. Our experience with him was good. He was really knowledgeable and helped us out as we needed it.

Initially, it was me and our CEO involved in the implementation, but he passed it off to me after the first couple. And of course, we have had Auvik's help with it as well.

Time-to-value from Auvik has been the troubleshooting of that one client I mentioned, just by itself. We spent countless hours onsite trying to figure out what was going on, doing our own tests with freeware, but we weren't able to isolate the issue until we installed Auvik. If we had done that from day one, it would have taken three hours for the setup, instead of that ticket taking 22 hours of work. It's a big benefit.

Auvik's pretty good in terms of pricing. It can get pricey if you have multiple managed devices, but if it's just a simple network with only one or two firewall walls and smart switches, it's reasonable.

The one client that we had issues with has 15 managed devices. That client is pretty expensive, but it's worth it.

Our eyes were set on Auvik, based on reviews from peers.

It's not really replacing any tasks. Rather, it's a good tool to see if the network is down. We have others that do the same thing, but Auvik is more for investigating issues.

My advice is to take your time. Make sure that the credentials are correct when you input them. Go through their guide on setting up WMI for Windows workstations to get better results. Just don't rush it and get good data.