Auvik

Avantages

Auvik is great for mapping out your networks. It's really nice to get an overall view of your networked devices and how they all connect to each other. And it's wonderful for troubleshooting outages and connection issues because you can see everything including the actual switch ports being used. But my absolute favorite part of Auvik is the discovery portion. You install the agent and it goes out and sees what networks it can see. And then it starts querying the devices with either the default credentials it has or the ones you put in yourself. And it starts building out your network. It shows you where everything is and guesses at the things, like unmanaged hubs, that it can't see. And then it finds new networks and asks if you want to scan those too and you have your main office and all the branches all in one beautiful picture with different lines indicating Layer2/Layer2/VPN/Wireless and I just find it so enjoyable.

It also is great for MSPs. The billing breakdown is very nice, and it's very easy for us to have access to all our clients but then give our clients access to just their own stuff. And the notifications are easy to setup and very granular.

Inconvénients

Honestly I have very few problems with Auvik. Sometimes it's harder to view really large networks in an easy way. I would like better options for exporting the network map but I honestly might just not understand how to use the options I have now. I would like some more integrations but they are constantly working on that, and they have already announced IT Glue integration, so it's a very small issue.

Avantages

The software is subscription based and only requires that a collector service be installed and running on a windows machine in the network to manage. This makes deployment quite easy and quick to put in motion. The discovery function is pretty straightforward and begins building an inventory and topology right away. Once you get managed devices set up with SNMP and login credentials, the topology starts to shape up and configurations start getting backed up. We integrate this with our PSA system and the ability to do bi-directional ticket creation and closure works quite well. This is a solid product for MSPs and makes the management of multiple customer networks workable. Support is available via chat and they are responsive.

Inconvénients

It takes some work with the network devices to get more complex topologies corrected. Sometimes, no matter if SNMP and login is showing as correct the topology will not show accurately. Although chat is responsive for support, most of the time they will have to create a ticket for more complex items and get back with you. Large networks are hard to view i the limited space, an ability to zoom with the a mouse scroll wheel would be really helpful. Also, when searching for a device on the map, it would be nice to have it zoom into that device.

Avantages

Network discovery and SNMP monitoring. Remote access to network devices without needing to remote into a local computer.

Inconvénients

Too many false alerts on devices being down that aren't down so it has almost gotten to a point we ignore all alerts

Avantages

The mapping, port discovery, configuration backups and overall ease of use are excellent.

Inconvénients

Problems take FOREVER to get resolved (sometimes years). Same with feature requests. We've had many, many requests for basic functionality that never comes. Tickets for things that are supposed to work (like accurate stats for HyperV hosts) stay open with no reported fix coming from engineering. Honestly sick of spending $25k/yr. and not getting what we need. Considering alternatives.

Avantages

I like how easy it is to install, setup, and use. I had it running in about 20 minutes... I really love the searching capabilities they have you can find anything with a simple name or part of a name to help you navigate to any device or link quickly.

Inconvénients

Has a lot of flexibility can get lost in the many different options, but once you get familiar with it is easy to use and take advantage of the advanced features.