Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use it for monitoring network infrastructure and network servers.

Auvik monitors things that other tools don't monitor. It can monitor VMware, and Linux platforms. In addition, the automatic backup of network switches and changes to them is essential. It has positively affected the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. We can get into Auvik and see throughout the network. We can do discovery and see things that we can't see with other tools. And when the network is too stressed, we get notified. Out of all the tools out there, it's probably number two or number three among those we use. It's very critical for us.

The alerts go to our high-end guys because it's not monitoring desktops. It's notifying us of issues with equipment that only the engineers know how to operate, manage, and deal with. It's very handy for us and very important for us to prioritize which alerts are coming through to which people, so that the right people get them.

In terms of keeping device inventories up to date, it finds equipment that some of our customers never even tell us about. We have one customer with oodles of stuff but they had no idea what they had. They are a district utility and they have stuff everywhere. We know more about their network than they do, through Auvik.

The amount of time it saves us on setup management is significant. We used to have another tool that was good, but it was a nightmare to configure. Now, for every new customer, it probably saves us a minimum of 10 to 20 hours of work or more, depending on the size of the customer. On average, it's saving us about 10 hours.

It has also reduced our mean time to resolution because it's better at alerting us in the middle of the night when there is anything that looks more critical. It's quicker than other platforms. We see things before they happen, such as a hard drive failing inside of a RAID set, or a problem inside a VMware system before there is a bigger problem. We can be more proactive than we could be with the other tools that we have. I've seen some minor issue alerts from other tools, but a lot of time they can't see anything in a RAID set, but Auvik does.

Among the most valuable features are the 

• remote browser
• remote terminal
• remote tunneling.

Those features ease getting into our customer sites, especially ones that are a little more locked down. Instead of having to go through a VPN, log in to a system and do this or that to the platform, we can get to everything right through Auvik. It gives us immediate access to different things.

We have a single platform through Auvik, but it also integrates with all our RMM and management tools. Having a single integrated platform is extremely important. It does everything we need it to do within a single platform. Auvik doesn't do remote management monitoring, but it does everything else that our RMM cannot do and it's crucial. With it, we can see some pretty detailed information.

And while we haven't used Auvik extensively as an automation tool, we do use it to alert us and create tickets automatically. That saves us time.

When it comes to the management side, the navigation is a little bit difficult, going back and forth. It is a little bit cumbersome. The ease of movement is a little bit harder than it should be. If I go to one device and I look at an interface, I can't just go back to the device and that makes it a pain to navigate. If they could improve the navigation, that would be wonderful. It's a great tool but the interface is not great at times.

And Auvik is okay for helping visualize the network mapping and the topology for your organization, but it's not great.

Finally, reporting on alerts could be a lot easier.

We have been using Auvik for about three years.

The stability of Auvik is good. They do a lot of maintenance. They've had some issues over the years, but it is pretty stable. Out of 10, the stability is 9.5.

In terms of scalability, it does everything we need it to do. We have some pretty large environments and it does just fine.

It's a multi-tenant platform. We're a managed service provider. Our managed service customers range from a company that has about 400 or 500 devices to one that has over 1,000, and all the way down to customers that only have about 10.

I really haven't had a lot of interaction with their tech support. I've only had two or three questions and they answered them.

Positive

I used to use WhatsUp Gold when we were a much smaller company, but that product just did not scale with what we were doing. WhatsUp Gold was too difficult to use. I had to have VPNs for everybody and that didn't make any sense.

The initial setup of Auvik is pretty straightforward. We deploy it all the time now. We just onboarded another customer, the fifth in the last two months. We are able to use it very quickly after deployment, out-of-the-box; within hours. We only need two people involved in a setup.

If I compare the implementation time, alone, of our previous solution and Auvik, even for a small customer our old solution would take 10 to 15 hours. And if I had had to use the old platform for our largest customer, that would have taken me 80 to 100 hours. I only put in about five or six hours to get Auvik running for that customer.

We haven't had much training on it at all. We've had to discover a lot, but it works very well.

We deploy it on all our new customers and it is of tremendous value. I can see interfaces going up and down. I'm getting alerts on disconnects and that helps me troubleshoot spanning tree issues that are happening inside the network.

SNMP is critical because I can actually see inside VMware servers. With other platforms, that is very hard to find. I can see through a RAID set. The value is from the in-depth monitoring and the ability to see inside the hardware, rather than just if it is available or not. And in a Microsoft domain, it will tell me if there are any replication issues between domain controllers. It will tell me if there is a status issue. It's very handy.

The billing is excellent. The way they bill it, in most environments, it's not that expensive. The billing is very cost-effective.

I looked at a couple of other solutions. One of them was WhatsUp Gold, which we had been using. It's a great product, although it took forever to configure. Its navigation was great, but it took someone with high-end skills to understand how to do what needed to be done. 

Auvik makes it easy. It automatically finds things for you. I don't have to train someone for hundreds of hours to learn how to use it. The primary reason I wanted Auvik was SNMP. It discovers all the MIBs and pulls them. That's how it can monitor the things that other platforms don't. That's one of the features that make it a good product. I wanted it because we needed to see all the way down inside a device. For example, on a RAID set has a drive failed, or is there a problem with the NIC, or is there a problem with something inside the hardware? I didn't want to just know if it was available or not.

It's important to me that Auvik is cloud-based as opposed to an on-prem network monitoring solution. I have removed all my on-prem stuff, period, for security purposes. We're a security-focused company. Also, we're not that large, we're only 10 people, and we have enough work to do for our customers without having to maintain internal platforms. We just don't have time to do that. We had an on-prem solution for monitoring, but we went to Auvik in the cloud so that we don't have to maintain all that. It's one less thing we have to maintain.

My advice is to use this solution because it finds more detailed, granular information than other products, out-of-the-box.

We use it as our network management tool and configuration backup utility.

It's made us a lot more aware of the network side. A lot of MSPs traditionally have been more server/workstation oriented, with some firewall-related activities, but when you bring in the network, it allows you to bring all that full circle and troubleshoot network issues more easily. And in the same way that a backup is important for a server, a backup is important for a switch or a firewall. If you lose one of those, you don't want to have to rebuild from scratch. Auvik provides that configuration backup.

The configuration backup has helped reduce repetitive tasks. With network, there's not as much daily touch as there is with PCs. The automation has primarily been around backing up devices and alerting on down devices.

It has also helped with visibility into remote distributed networks. As an MSP, most of our customers are remote networks for us. Auvik allows us to manage their networks, whether they're local or in the UK or anywhere else. We're able to manage those networks much better via this tool. It helps our network engineers focus on those networks.

In addition, it helps keep device inventories up to date. That aspect helps a lot because people don't have to always worry about whether somebody added a switch or an access point. It scans each day and sees new devices. While that doesn't save us time on a recurring basis, whenever we need to provide a report, we don't have to manually gather the information. We're able to print it out and provide it, rather than having to do manual counts. But that's on-demand and not frequent.

We have absolutely seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution for network issues, using Auvik. For instance, if an alert comes through that a server is down, and we're also getting information that a switch or a firewall is down as part of that, we immediately know we don't need to troubleshoot the server. The server is down because those network devices are down. It allows us to get right to where the problem is, versus having to work our way back and that cuts out a lot of troubleshooting time.

If we get an alert that an AP is down and a firewall is also down, it may just be that the AP is not able to report back because the firewall is not up to allow it to. That's where it saves us a lot of time. It allows us to look at root cause better. When you're looking at that map and you see three things with red alert banners on them, you know which one is the closest point out to the internet and that you need to look there first, versus what's behind it.

The network management piece has been the most advantageous. First, it alerts us about network devices that are under duress or having issues. Second, it has historical data. That allows us to go back, if, for instance, a switch is having problems, and see if it is something that trends at a certain time of the day or a certain day of the week.

For what we use it for, Auvik provides us with a single integrated platform because it ties into their ticketing system. That is very important. The more touchpoints that people have to interact with, the less likely they are to interact. Trying to get it down to as few panes of glass as possible becomes an important piece. We previously used multiple applications for managing our network, and switching to Auvik has saved our organization a good bit of time, day-to-day. It has saved us the equivalent of half an FTE.

It's also the best that we have found for helping to visualize network mapping/topology. It does a great job of that, hands-down. The mechanism that it uses to learn about the network seems to be more robust than some of the others. The interface is very clean and sleek. It discovers devices well and the relationships between them, and the general aesthetic of the portal presents that information. It gathers more data than most and it presents it wrapped up in a really pretty way. Others can draw out a diagram, but they're just not as elegant as Auvik.

The network visualization is intuitive. It classifies devices accurately and presents the links and the relationships well. Plus, if something isn't discovered the way you think it should be, it gives you the ability to manually adjust it. For example, sometimes wireless bridges don't really present well. They don't show a link between them. You have the ability to go in and make that association manually so that it presents correctly on the map.

I've been using Auvik for a little over three years.

The stability is strong. They announce maintenance well in advance and it's not frequent. We haven't had many issues. I don't recall that it just went down all of a sudden. Typically, it's only down around maintenance windows.

It scales well. We've put large networks on it.

The solution's technical support is good. We didn't have to interact with it a lot, but when we did, they were able to answer the questions.

Positive

We used PRTG from a German company called Paessler, but it did not provide configuration backup, so we used a different application to provide the configuration backup. We had to use two products to do that function before. That was part of the reason we switched to Auvik. Bringing everything into one application, and that application being able to integrate with our ticketing system, were the two big reasons.

The initial setup was very straightforward. If you have intermediate networking skills you will be comfortable doing it.

We were able to implement Auvik out-of-the-box, meaning it was immediately available for use without intervention. When we signed up, we were able to download the agents to put on each remote site and begin scanning and gathering data. Once we decided to go with Auvik, we were instantly able to go with it. Within 15 minutes, after the Auvik code was implemented, our network mapping began to populate. 

Within about an hour or two, depending on the size of the network, the map was pretty well displayed. For larger networks—we have some networks that are 1,000 nodes—it might take several hours for it to scan, discover, and learn the relationships. It asks you to authorize networks that it finds. You may initially tell it to scan a network, but based on that network being scanned and the devices on it, it learns that there are other subnets out there. You have to approve those for it to scan them as well. That's why larger networks could take several hours and up to a day or so.

We did it all in-house and it required three people. They were primarily split up between

• networking components: switchers, routers, and wireless infrastructure
• server/workstation infrastructure
• integrations, such as ticketing.

Auvik helps us, but as I mentioned, it's a lot more for point-in-time needs. If a switch is down and we need to get information on the alert and possibly pull the backup to put on a replacement device, or if somebody needs an inventory, we can pull a report. Those are very moment-oriented. 

I can't talk about time-to-value over days, months, or years, but once you set it up, it takes care of itself. It scans the network for new devices. Once you stand the product up and have it connected to your ticketing system, it's just a matter of using it when you need to use it.

Auvik is not cheap. They've done a great job, it's a developed product, but you pay for it. When you compare, it's definitely in the upper tier of pricing.

Auvik has two price points. One is their Essentials license, and the other is their Performance license which includes flow data. 

For example, you may have a network with 10 switches and a firewall, and you really only want flow data going through the firewall. Auvik requires you not only to put the device you want under a Performance license, but all of the other network devices that are billable devices have to go to that same Performance license. It gets expensive in a hurry, so we haven't taken a Performance license with them for that main reason. If we need to do flow data, we'll use a different product. I wish they allowed you to only license the devices you needed to have Performance.

We looked at Traverse Network from Kaseya. It was very similar to Auvik in terms of capabilities, but we thought Auvik was more polished. It seemed to be further down the road as far as how well it had been implemented.

And Auvik's cloud-based solution, when compared with on-prem network monitoring solutions, is better. It's hard to monitor something on the network locally because if you lose your internet connection, it can't report out, which is pretty important. That's why we like it more than on-premises solutions.

It's an easy user interface to work with. They've done a good job with the GUI and how to navigate it. That's not of huge importance to us because a lot of us have been doing network management for close to two decades. That means we've used a lot of tools and we are very familiar with them. But for entry-level techs, it's easier because they can do some things without knowing a lot of what we've had two decades to learn. It makes people with less experience much more comfortable using it.

The solution's automation hasn't had that much of an impact because a lot of our frontline people don't have to interact with it on a daily basis. They use it for point-in-time troubleshooting. It's not a huge help on that side. It's mainly the networking engineers, who would have to do things through other systems manually, whose time is saved.

From a product perspective, it's a 10 out of 10. It's just that you pay for the product. It costs a lot compared to others.

The biggest issue is that if you need NetFlow, where you can actually see more information about the packets that are traversing the network, you probably need to work through your cost model first. Auvik is not going to be the cheapest out there, not even close. It's going to be, by far, the more expensive solution. If that is a strong need of yours, it may not be the best solution. It does NetFlow really well, just like everything else it does. It presents it well. But the pricing model makes it a very expensive proposition to do the Performance licenses.

I use Auvik for managing my two most complex networks with multiple locations and diverse routing.

Initially, I implemented Auvik to address routing and switching issues. It helped pinpoint and solve those problems. Over time, its bigger value became evident in its ability to efficiently document and discover every device on the network. Auvik has significantly reduced my mean time to resolution. 

It provides crucial visibility into complex switching setups, allowing me to quickly identify which devices are connected to specific switch ports - a task that was challenging with other tools.

In terms of improvement, Auvik could include more customization options and the ability to efficiently manage additional features like printer monitoring.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

Auvik is fairly stable.

Auvik has been scalable in my experience with simple networks, I haven't encountered any limitations. My use cases haven't tested its full capabilities.

Before Auvik, I briefly used Kaseya's Network Glue, which I considered a less sophisticated option. However, Auvik stood out as the best-in-class solution when I compared alternatives. I had known about Auvik for several years before using it and recognized its value in network mapping and documentation, and later appreciating its real-time monitoring and discovery features.

While Auvik offers an intuitive interface, there is a slight learning curve during setup. Once you are familiar with the process, it becomes easier to navigate and manage network issues. Getting started with Auvik requires a fair amount of setup, especially in new environments. Setting up SNMP credentials for each device is time-consuming, particularly in networks with varied configurations. Auvik has a hybrid deployment model, utilizing an on-premise detector. I was involved in the initial deployment, and it was a gradual process over several weeks, addressing switches, routers, servers, printers, and other devices with SNMP.  Maintenance for Auvik is minimal. The main task involves adding new devices, like printers, and ensuring SNMP settings are configured correctly. It becomes more challenging in co-managed IT situations when changes are made independently by the customer.

It is hard to measure the return on investment for Auvik regarding direct revenue. However, it significantly benefits me by speeding up problem resolution and enhancing efficiency.

The pricing of Auvik seems reasonable, especially for setups with complex networks. In cases where networks are more straightforward, it may not be necessary. However, considering the growing importance of compliance standards like PCI and CMMC, having Auvik everywhere could become essential for comprehensive network discovery and cybersecurity.

Auvik provides a network map and dashboard for a real-time view of my network. However, due to the complexity of my setup, the map becomes cluttered and less useful. While it looks nice, the intelligent scaling makes it impractical for anything beyond simple networks. 

Auvik's network map and dashboard attempt full visibility, but they cram too much into a small space. It becomes impractical and buries useful information in the noise. It is unnecessary for simple setups. 

Auvik doesn't charge for monitoring critical devices like printers, servers, and access points. Its primary value lies in monitoring and managing switches and routers, the devices for which they charge. For other devices, redundant monitoring systems are already in place.

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

Auvik is primarily for monitoring network devices to see which ones have gone down. Another use case is tracking bandwidth utilization on the interfaces.

Auvik has improved visibility across our entire network. We don't want to wait until a user calls to tell us a switch is down. Auvik enables us to be proactive, not reactive. We realized the benefits almost instantaneously. 

The solution speeds up our resolution time. When we're troubleshooting, it's easier to see if a device is down or the utilization is too high. That is helpful. It makes the whole process faster. If I didn't have this solution, I would only see whether the network was up or down. 

I couldn't, for example, see that the bandwidth utilization is 100 percent. Auvik sends notifications when the bandwidth utilization passes 80-85 percent. We get an alert telling us that it's something we should look into. Otherwise, I would need to rely on customers and application owners complaining that sessions are dropping. 

I appreciate Auvik's traffic insights. The network map provides solid visibility in real time.

Some things about the interface were a little hard to set up, and it was difficult to figure out where to find information. The Auvik team did a great job helping us get started. If I had to figure it out by myself, I would have probably gotten frustrated. You need to go on the device first to enable it. If you don't, then traffic insights won't start working. It's pretty intuitive for most stuff, but some things are tricky if you don't have someone tell you how it works. 

I have used Auvik for roughly a year.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10 overall. 

Auvik is easy to scale. It covers thousands of servers. 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. I can't complain. They solved my problem quickly. 

Positive

Setting up Auvik was pretty easy. It was a little tricky to get some of the things set up correctly and working, but it was fairly straightforward overall. Deployment took about a month or two because we have more than a thousand locations.

We did it in-house with Auvik's help. They assigned a team to us, and they did a great job. When we had questions or issues and needed help, they assisted us almost immediately. Four departments were involved. After deployment, Auvik doesn't require much maintenance on our end unless there are significant changes to our environment. 

My boss makes the purchasing decisions, but we're happy with Auvik's overall pricing. We had some issues with the licensing. You need to pay for premium to use NetFlow, and we had a problem with them counting the same device multiple times for licensing purposes. It was a little frustrating because the Auvik database in the background didn't see it as a single device even though it came from the same critical hardware and only had one serial number. However, it was in different groups, so it was counted two or three times. It took a while to work with the accounting team to get that sorted.

We looked at a few different solutions. We went with Auvik because it was the best fit for our requirements, security standards, and budget. The security department didn't approve some of the alternatives.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10 overall. We had a few hiccups here and there that we couldn't fix easily without help. With Auvik's assistance, we got everything fixed. 

We manually use Auvik for network monitoring, configuration backups, and syslogs.

We implemented Auvik because we wanted to have a redundant monitoring solution that has a cloud component.

Auvik utilizes a cloud component that centralizes all data collection and aggregation. Additionally, we employ multiple on-premises collectors to gather data from individual devices. Therefore, our deployment will have a collector at each site, supplemented by a secondary collector at our main site. This configuration ensures redundancy and seamless data transmission to the Auvik cloud.

Auvik's intuitive interface is easy to use. The intuitive interface helps accelerate our troubleshooting of network issues due to how the information is presented.

Auvik's network map and dashboard provide a real-time picture of our network.

The network map and dashboard provide easy access to real-time visibility, with alerts and other information conveniently displayed. Clicking "Advanced" allows further exploration of specific alerts and other relevant details. While the display can become crowded when monitoring numerous items, the filtering capabilities effectively manage information overload.

The network map provides full visibility into everything we are monitoring with it and that is extremely important for us.

Auvik empowers our low-level techs to solve more tickets on their own. This has saved our senior techs time to focus on other tasks. The overall number of tickets has been reduced.

It has helped reduce our mean time to resolution.

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

The traffic insights and the configuration management are the most valuable features. 

The traffic insights are presented effectively, and I appreciate that the analysis runs in the cloud, avoiding the need to overload any specific on-premise hardware. Additionally, the configuration backups appear to be straightforward, facilitating the comparison and refresh of new images on existing devices.

One main feature I would like to see in Auvik is the ability to generate alerts based on specific events appearing in syslog messages.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

Auvik is stable.

The scalability of Auvik is excellent and it scales easily.

The technical support is quite fast and accurate. We only encountered one major issue, but they were able to resolve it promptly. While it took a little longer due to the unusual nature of the problem, it was effectively addressed within a week.

Positive

Previously, we used SolarWinds. However, the configuration and maintenance overhead for Auvik is significantly lower, and Auvik itself is much faster.

The initial deployment was straightforward. We had three people for the deployment but it could be done with one person.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Compared to Auvik's competitors, its pricing is largely in line with SolarWinds. However, the exact cost may be slightly lower or higher depending on how the software is used.

Auvik does not charge for server monitoring, which is a significant cost advantage. If we had to pay for each server individually, the cost would become quite high, depending on the size and complexity of our server environment.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of ten.

Minimal maintenance is required to keep the collector devices up to date.

Before implementing Auvik, organizations should confirm that all devices they intend to monitor are compatible with Auvik's capabilities. This is particularly important for web-based devices, as Auvik may have limitations in monitoring such systems.

I am an MSP and I use Auvik to monitor my client's networks.

When we experienced network issues, we simply lacked the visibility to understand the underlying causes. Auvik provided us with much-needed visibility into our network, enabling us to effectively diagnose and resolve problems.

We are using Auvik's SaaS platform with an on-premises connector.

Auvik provides an intuitive interface that is easy to use. The user-friendly interface is helpful when troubleshooting network issues. Auvik alerts me if something being monitored goes offline, allowing me to track it down. Additionally, there are various locations where I can access different pieces of information, enabling me to review audit logs or alerts. This feature is quite helpful.

Auvik's network map and dashboard give us real-time visibility into our network.

Utilizing the network map and dashboard provides a straightforward approach to gaining real-time visibility into our network. While the network map may contain a wealth of information that necessitates further exploration, the ability to visualize the network in real time without the need for Visio development is helpful. With the proper configuration, the network map dashboard provides full network visibility.

Auvik helps minimize blind spots and provides an additional resource for monitoring and tracking network performance. Proactive alerting is crucial, as it's often preferable to have a system notify me of issues before users do. While not always possible, Auvik enables me to be proactive in addressing network problems.

Auvik has helped reduce our mean time to resolution by 50 percent.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on resolution.

The most advantageous feature is the ability to back up the configuration settings on switches and routers. This has been immensely helpful, and I am proficient in utilizing Auvik's premium network monitoring service, Traffic Insight. It provides comprehensive network visibility. Furthermore, I appreciate its integration with my ticketing system, Autotask.

I'd like to see some enhancements to Auvik's network map, including the ability to focus on specific areas without viewing the entire map. This would allow for more granular analysis and troubleshooting. Additionally, introducing security-related features would be beneficial. For instance, implementing abnormal traffic detection would alert us to unusual network activity, potentially indicating a security breach. Furthermore, incorporating baseline snapshots would enable us to compare current network behavior against a standard reference point, facilitating the identification of anomalies. This could be achieved through simple checkbox controls.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

I would rate the stability of Auvik nine out of ten.

I use Auvik for small businesses, and it scales to meet my needs.

The technical support is good.

Positive

We had been using ConnectWise, but it did not meet our needs. When we informed ConnectWise support that we were switching to Auvik, they acknowledged that Auvik was a more suitable solution.

The deployment wasn't as straightforward as I had anticipated, but it wasn't overly difficult either. It required careful attention to the instructions and a thorough understanding of the installation process, making it somewhat more complex than initially envisioned. I would rate the complexity of the deployment five out of ten. I completed the deployment myself and it took a few days.

Auvik's pricing is generally reasonable. However, I have occasionally encountered discrepancies between my expected and actual billing amounts. I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact cause of these variations, but I'm unsure whether they stem from additional service inclusions or unexpected price increases. The lack of clarity regarding my consumption compared to the pricing structure has been an issue. Despite not making any perceived changes, my pricing has fluctuated, and the company has denied any alterations. This has left me perplexed about the underlying factors.

I would rate Auvik ten out of ten.

I have Auvik deployed for multiple of my small to medium clients.

Occasionally, Auvik's automated agent upgrades malfunction, requiring my assistance. Maintenance is minimal.

I recommend Auvik.

We utilize Auvik for monitoring our clients' environments. 

It plays a highly critical part in our operations. A part of the product that we sell to our clients involves a service level agreement that we will respond to within X amount of time, and we'll monitor their environment for them. Because of that, this plays an absolutely critical function.

The collectors that they use are constantly connecting to Auvik to make sure that you're aware that it's active, it's running. You would think all of the other monitoring solutions out there do the same thing, and many do claim that, but most can't deliver that, whereas Auvik can. There have been many times when some of our other tools that are also monitoring things should be reporting that there's an outage at a location or a server is down or something like that, but that's just not the case. With those other tools, it doesn't even blip on their radar that the system is completely hard down and it's a big issue, whereas, with Auvik, the moment a collector disconnects, and it has been disconnected for the amount of time that we defined, it immediately alerts us and says, "We can't communicate with this machine." It's really handy. You can sell the feature all day long, but if that feature doesn't work, it's not a real feature. Auvik works. It's very reliable, at least from our experiences so far.

I enjoy it when it comes to visualizing the network mapping/topology for the organization. It doesn't just provide a network map. It gives us a global view, an actual Earth view, and it allows us to see where the devices are physically located, which is very handy. Especially if we need to dispatch something or if we need to compare a power outage to maybe a storm that's passing by, it gives us the map and visual of where a device is located. When you drill down into it, you can click on the actual nodes that are on the map and go down as granular as you want. You can see the actual network topology of the environment. It does a pretty good job of figuring out how it's all laid out. You've got a collector from Auvik that's sitting there, and it explores and discovers the devices. So far, I haven't seen an instance where it couldn't figure out the exact network topology. There's always this rare case where something gets kind of wonky in regard to how your server is set up. You might have multiple connections coming in or whatever, but so far, it has been able to define all that. That's something that a lot of people don't realize is normally a manual task. You have to break out Visio and start dragging and dropping a lot of icons, name it yourself, define the IPs, etc. Auvik does it automatically, which is just cool.

Our client environments are not a single vendor product. There are multiple vendors coming in from different directions. We deal in data systems, which is the industrial automation type of stuff that deals with wastewater treatment plants, water treatment plants, etc. Due to the nature of our business, being able to have an accurate inventory of what's at what site, what's the IP address, or what are the specs on a server is super important.

It provides an integrated platform for a few brands. It doesn't provide a fully integrated platform for all the brands and manufacturers out there. It's probably a little bit more skewed toward Cisco products, which we don't use a lot. It would be nice if they had full integration into Dell's tools, as well as VMware for Hypervisor and things like that. Having a single integrated platform would save us a lot of time across the board. Currently, we have to use Auvik for monitoring. It's probably the most reliable one that we have so far. We've used quite a few in the past, including Ninja, some Microsoft options, and several others. Everyone promises it, but far and few can truly deliver a single pane of glass experience. The Auvik tool gives us a single pane of glass for all of the monitoring needs, and then, if we need to drill into on a system-by-system basis and remotely manage the system and remote into a machine, we have to use other tools for that.

My favorite feature so far is the alerts section. We've got our main company at the top, and then all of our customers are underneath that. We can either filter by a single customer or one of their sites specifically, or look at it from the top down and see the whole picture. It's an easy way for me to be able to have a high-level overview. I can see the status of all of our sites simultaneously without having to really dig in and get super granular unless I want to. It gives that ability too, which is cool.

The functionality on a PC is definitely better than in a mobile environment. If you are logging in to Auvik on your phone or on a tablet, it's a little janky at times, but on a PC, it's fantastic.

If I could make a wish list of things that I would like to see from Auvik, I would definitely love to see more vendor integration with specific manufacturers. They've got that integration with Cisco, but it would be awesome to also have that with other major brands, such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. It should have integration with more vendors, and in general, being able to quickly and easily access vendor-specific tools from the portal would be amazing. A real-life case scenario would be that we know that Dell servers have iDRAC cards on them, which allows for remote control and a remote KVM keyboard, video, and mouse functionality. It would be nice to be able to have the direct link baked in and be able to quickly just say, "I need to remotely manage this machine," and then you can just click, and you're in. In regards to VMware, VMware is one of the top three hypervisors for virtualization. It would be awesome to be able to quickly and easily identify that this is the VMware cluster, this is the ESXi server, and this is a vCenter. We should be able to quickly and easily log into consoles and remotely manage things as needed from there. This kind of functionality for the Cisco products is baked into Auvik right now, but it doesn't exist for other manufacturers. It's one of those things that will happen as time goes by. They need to make sure that it's embedded and done properly and that they're working with the manufacturers directly, instead of trying to duct tape a solution.

The other improvement would be more on the software side of things in terms of understanding that patch management happens and vulnerabilities are security patched all the time. There should be more direct integration with Microsoft updates. Pretty much everyone uses Windows, and being able to easily identify that there's a patch pending, and maybe even be able to push it, would be awesome.

My direct experience with Auvik has been since August.

In terms of full stability, which also includes their response to security issues, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

The sky's the limit. There don't seem to be any actual limits on the number of collectors that you're able to deploy. We started out at 40, and we're at 63 right now. It scales easily and effortlessly. So, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

It's decent. It's a little difficult to get a hold of them sometimes, but, overall, it's not bad. Comparing it to the big three computer manufacturers, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, they fall in Dell's mid-tier level support. It's pretty decent.

Positive

We use multiple tools. We went for Auvik because of its dependability. We have to have a reliable report as to what's up and what's down. Ninja is great on a surface level, but it doesn't update live. It has a periodic updating process. You don't really know when it's going to update next. You would expect it to be live, but it's not. Having accurate, live information was the reason why we started with Auvik.

This isn't just a one-application show for us. We've got Auvik. We've got Ninja, and we've got several other tools that we use for monitoring to cover redundancy and any spillover situation. By far, Auvik is the cleanest. It's the most up-to-date. It's the most accurate. Ninja, for example, is a decent competitor against Auvik's platform. Ninja reports things, but the information is very clustered up and very hard to read and discern. Once you get used to it, you're okay, but on your first experience with Ninja, it's horrible. Auvik is very clean. It has that modern look and feel to it. Anybody who uses modern apps and web apps is going to be able to quickly and easily figure out his or her way through it.

The most important thing when comparing Auvik versus other competitors is that we have found Auvik to be the most reliable. It will report when things are out. It will report everything based on how we have it set up and defined. This reliability is very important. Ninja is great, and as a team, when we were using only Ninja, and we weren't utilizing Auvik at all, Ninja would report things, but it wouldn't always report that live, up-to-date view of what's going on. You might have alerts saying, "Oh, it's out." You're like, "No. No, we cleared that alert. Why is it still showing that?" There's no real easy way to discern how to clear the alerts if it just doesn't detect it automatically, whereas Auvik is always up to date. It's always communicating, and if it ever drops that communication, it immediately notifies you, which is awesome.

The alerts that are provided to us correspond and correlate directly to the SLAs that we are selling and promising to our clients. So, in the event of a full outage or whatever, it gives us the ability to quickly and easily identify that there is an outage at this site, and it's this device that is currently causing the problem, or we haven't had any communication for X amount of time to this IP address. We are then able to say, "Okay, this is a high priority because it's affecting outage, and it's affecting the service for our client," whereas, something like when disk-based utilization is 80% has a high priority, but it's not a major issue. Auvik allows us to quickly and easily prioritize types of incidents, for example, outage versus 80% storage. It allows us to clarify whether something is an incident or not.

I was not involved with the setup, but I was involved in the sourcing and options. That was me working with the company, before I actually worked with the company directly, and looking at all the different options that were out there. Auvik seems to be the one that made the most sense. In regards to the setup process, I can see that the general setup itself as an administrator is not difficult. It takes 15 to 30 minutes on average. You can add in some videos to watch if you want to figure out how to do something or whatever, and you're probably going to be up and running within about two hours.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It does that itself. It updates its own collectors. You have to just install the collector. Once that's installed, it'll update itself. Outside of that, it's a web or cloud tool. It's software as a service. So, they handle all the maintenance and things like that on the backend from there.

Being a cloud solution, the always-on communication between Auvik and its collectors gives you that real-time status, and it's amazing. With an on-prem solution, if something goes wrong with your equipment, that's going to cause issues. If you're doing it even in your own private spot or even public cloud or whatever, you're having to control that kind of infrastructure, environment, and things like that. It's one of those things that annoys people when they see that there's going to be an outage for a tool because of updates, maintenance, and things like that, but Auvik has been always on the spot making sure that we're aware, "Hey, heads up on this date at this time, maintenance on these machines is going to be happening. These are the things that will either function or non-function. These are things that are going to be changing and so on, so forth." I've also seen several instances where they responded to a security threat, and they did that really quickly. Our outage time on that from Auvik was measured in minutes. If we were doing that and hosting it ourselves, even though we have a decently-sized team, we don't have the time to do all that kind of work. Monitoring and maintaining all that is amazing with the whole cloud option.

It's hard to measure what it's providing. However, considering the cost that we are paying in regards to what we're getting out of it, it has easily paid for itself within the first few months just based on our current deployment environment. We have to have accurate information. We have to know when something is up and down, and if it's not, we break SLA, our service level agreement, with our clients. If we do that, we have to pay money to our clients because we broke contracts. One broken contract is going to cost us five grand, and this prevents us from losing that, so it's awesome.

There is a reduction in our mean time to resolution. When we were using just Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware that there was an issue until Ninja just had an update. Now, we're aware within the timeframe that we assigned, which is 15 minutes, that communication has been lost. We give it a couple of minutes to make sure that it's not just an internet blip or whatever, and then we're able to quickly attack it. With Ninja, we wouldn't even be aware until a customer calls us to say something is broken. It's time lost in regards to the fact that we should have been aware of it before the customer even had a chance to pick up the phone and do that.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about price, I would say that it's the cost of doing business. It's just the fact that it's going to cost something. The amount of money that you're spending on these tools is a fraction of what you would be paying for an individual to be doing the same thing live as a person. I believe that our bill is somewhere around the $600 range per month. We're monitoring about 63 machines. Most of them are servers. So, $10 to monitor it for an entire month is amazing. You couldn't get somebody in India for that cheap.

We definitely evaluated other options. We use Ninja in-house, so it was one of the first things that we originally evaluated. We also evaluated ConnectWise and a few others. It was not very difficult to pull up a list of the competitors and look at them all. We originally had decided on Ninja because it was something that most people knew about, but then we're like, "Yeah, it's great when it works, but it doesn't always work." That's when we started looking at the other options, and we landed on Auvik.

It's a newer company on the horizon. They're still developing features. You can tell that. So, if a feature that you are wanting isn't available, give it time. It'll probably come.

It takes a little bit of time to get used to. When I first started, back in August of this year, I was getting my feet wet with Auvik as a tool. I had heard of it, but I never really personally used it and experienced it. I've been in my IT field for well over 16 years, so it's not like I'm not capable of understanding how to use something. One of the things that come into play is understanding that the default view that you see is like a zoomed-out version. Being able to traverse that, being able to go back and forward, and understanding where you're at in the tree takes a little bit of time to get used to and follow.

On top of that, there's the reporting functionality below it, where it's reporting alerts and things like that. At first glance, you're like, "Oh, everything's fine. There are no alerts," but then you realize that you are only looking at the last 15 minutes or the last three hours or whatever. You need to understand that there's that little date field midway on the right side and of purple color that you choose to select the date range that you're looking at. It will automatically redraw and redo things based on the selected range, and you can drill down into whatever system you're connected to, which is really cool.

We haven't experienced much automation so far. Right now, we're using it just as a reporting tool, but it's something that we're looking at doing. Outside of that, it's just reporting and doing the network discovery and watching for outages and any types of alerts. The process of doing that is kind of pseudo automation just in the fact that that's what Auvik sells as their core option or whatever. As a reporting tool, it's great, but so far, we haven't really dug into many of the integrations or functionalities past that.

It hasn't helped our team focus on high-value tasks while delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because, in our environment, we're all equal peers. We all have our own specialties, per se, such as networking versus storage or VMware versus Hyper-V, but, in general, we're all of the equal stances.

As a solution for monitoring and things like that, it's awesome, and I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We manage IT infrastructure for 400 companies, and Auvik allows us to monitor it remotely. We have a portal to monitor these companies' servers, devices, routers, and APs constantly so we know when something is down and needs to be repaired in real-time. It's nice. We have it implemented in our Autotask and service desk portal, so it can automatically open and close tickets.

Auvik has improved our company's operation tenfold. It allows us to do real-time network monitoring down to a printer connected to the network. 

We can also automate and streamline fixes for recurring issues. We can determine an ongoing problem and find a real-time fix for it. We monitor and log different events. Once we have enough cases, we create an automated fix for that issue and cross it off our list, so we don't have to worry about it again. It's been overwhelmingly successful in our company.

Previously, we had various managed portals and a list of URLs to check. We went to a client company to see what portals they used. It was an absolute nightmare. Credentials would change constantly, so we couldn't log in. It was horrible.

Auvik has saved us a lot of time. Much of the solution is automated and monitors by itself, letting us know when critical issues occur. We no longer need a dedicated technician to log into every network. It gives us real-time monitoring, so we don't need someone to check every network first thing in the morning to see if any issues require a response. 

When I click on one of the 400 companies we monitor,  Auvik will give me a spanned view of everything on their network, from their DMZ to their servers, switches, firewalls, printers, and PCs. It opens a tree view, so you can go down the list from top to bottom, which makes troubleshooting things much easier. We get a much broader view. In addition to monitoring endpoints for threats and performance, Auvik lets us see the topology of the entire network, which is perfect for our purposes.

The intuitiveness of the network visualization is amazing. Several times, it's picked things up that I've missed. I look back and ask, "Why is Auvik alerting me about this? I know that's not an issue." I'll dig deeper into it; they've noticed something I didn't even see, saving me time and energy.

Without Auvik, our technicians would spend countless hours troubleshooting things unnecessarily. When you get a call from a client with network issues, Auvik can pinpoint precisely where the problem lies. Otherwise, you'll blindly go through every device, trying to figure out what's happening, which could take hours. 

It has freed up a lot of time for our technicians to work on new projects or get certifications. We have 25 technicians, and Auvik has freed up around 24 to 48 hours of additional time for our technicians to do other tasks. Auvik has also enabled us to utilize junior staff better. The GUI interface is easy for a low-level tech to learn. After three or four days of training, they can understand how Auvik works and become accustomed to using it more often. 

I would not want to work at an MSP without a networking monitoring tool. It would be a step back to a point where you struggle to get one ticket done when you could have done eight because you don't have the necessary information. That's what Auvik does for you.

Without the updated real-time information Auvik's device inventories supply, we're not giving the customer the reliability and performance they request. These monitoring tools allow us to be proactive and see things before the customer realizes a problem. That's our reputation. That's what Auvik has given us. Any updated information will save us time. We can't use bad information when we try to fix the issue. 

I like the way everything can be integrated. Auvik uses SNMP and various protocols to ensure we can monitor any device on the network.

Auvik has issues with collecting information from some devices. I don't know if this is an issue on Auvik's end or if the device isn't compatible. We have noticed that some clients have been unable to add their devices to Auvik due to compatibility, but devices are fickle. I think it's a device issue and not an Auvik issue.

I've seen Auvik resolve these issues. They will create the ticket and tell us the issue is resolved. For example, maybe the customer restarted the modem, or the ISP got it running. They'll go ahead and close that ticket. The automation there is so nice that it will keep us updated if something's happening automatically.

I started using Auvik about a year ago. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for stability.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for scalability 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. We've had to reach out to them a few times for custom things or issues with devices not connecting. They've always been very helpful.

Positive

We previously didn't have a managed or automated solution like Auvik. It was a list of URLs and an Excel spreadsheet for each company with all their networking and login information. After we got the pitch and went through the evaluation process, we realized what it could do for us as an IT company couldn't say "No."

Setting up Auvik can be tricky, but I think setting up any of these systems can be difficult initially. It's a piece of cake once you have the baseline down and your systems in there monitoring it. Our deployment was complex because we have 400 different companies, and each has various equipment with varying ages. 

I don't think using Auvik was complex per se. It was just the complexity we were trying to add to it. For a few small companies, we had to work with Auvik to set up custom APIs to get some things to work, but it went smoothly for the most part. 

After implementing the collectors, the network map started to populate within minutes. I think it's attributable to Auvik's ability to work the way it does and the protocols it enables to push this information over the network. We already have the credentials set up in the Auvik portal, so it has the permissions it needs. It can scrape that device for as much information as possible.

We've freed up a lot of extra employee time because of Auvik. It automated many tasks that required a dedicated technician to spend four hours each day checking every company's network. Auvik does that all the time, so it saves our employees a lot of energy and time.

It all depends on the scale of your implementation. It would be pricier for a smaller company ranging out for a few remote locations. It's cheaper if you're using lots of licensing. My advice is to try different solutions and see what works best for you. For us, that was Auvik. I think Auvik's current price is competitive and works for our business environment

We did look at a few other options, including Kaseya and SolarWinds. Auvik was the best option for pricing and features we were looking for in a product. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you plan to use old devices, verify that SNMP is an option. We had a lot of issues with a device that was 25 years old.