Maintaining efficient and reliable network performance is critical for organizations that depend on connectivity to conduct business and serve customers. As network environments grow in complexity with trends like cloud computing, IoT and mobility, having proper monitoring and management tools becomes even more essential.
This is where Auvik comes in as a game-changing network management solution that takes the headache out of overseeing modern network infrastructures.
Introduction to Auvik
Auvik is an integrated network management platform designed to dramatically simplify the challenging tasks of monitoring, managing and troubleshooting network performance and infrastructure.
The core focus of Auvik is to provide network administrators unmatched visibility into the health, traffic patterns and configuration of networks. This is achieved through real-time monitoring, automation, advanced analytics and an elegant user interface that makes complex data both accessible and actionable.
By automating many mundane management tasks like network mapping, device backups and alerting, Auvik reduces the manual effort needed to oversee infrastructure. This allows IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive business value.
Key Features and Benefits of Auvik
Auvik offers an extensive set of capabilities that make it a highly valuable solution for enterprises, MSPs and IT service providers alike.
Comprehensive Network Topology Mapping
Auvik automatically discovers all devices on your network infrastructure and maps out the complete topology visually. This provides immediate understanding of how routers, switches, firewalls and endpoints interconnect.
Granular organization and filtering options allow you drill down to specific sites, buildings, device types or custom tags. Network changes are mapped in near real-time so documentation always stays current.
Powerful Performance and Traffic Monitoring
Gain deep traffic analysis with bandwidth utilization metrics across individual ports, devices or the network level. Customizable performance dashboards spotlight current and historical trends with data points like latency, errors and throughput.
Set thresholds and be alerted about abnormal utilization spikes, oversubscribed links or suspicious traffic volumes indicating issues or security events.
Intelligent Alerting and Event Automation
Configure conditional alerting rules to notify your team immediately if devices go offline, configuration changes unexpectedly, thresholds breach or high-priority events occur.
Automate event handling by triggering notifications, running scripts or generating tickets based on alert triggers. Eliminate manual processes with more than 280+ out-of-the-box workflows.
Data Analysis Reporting
Harness the power of Auvik‘s data repository covering months of granular historical details on network traffic, performance metrics, configurations, alerts and more.
Leverage pre-built reports or create custom reports to analyze bandwidth utilization patterns, track configuration drifts, validate SLAs and share data with stakeholders. Gain insights to optimize network capacity and security.
Automated Device Configuration Backup and Change Tracking
Auvik automatically takes configuration snapshots of network gear like routers, switches and firewalls on a schedule. Quickly roll back devices to previous states in case of misconfiguration or failure.
Review detailed change logs showing exactly what alterations were made, by who and when. This simplifies audits and troubleshooting significantly.
Powerful API and Integrations Ecosystem
Access Auvik‘s data and leverage its automation capabilities across your tech stack by utilizing Auvik‘s API to build custom workflows. Out-of-the-box integrations also allow synchronizing alerts, data and status across popular platforms like Slack, PagerDuty SolarWinds and more.
Use Cases and Industries Served
Auvik provides immense value across industries and organization types that rely on network connectivity and infrastructure – be it to run business systems, manufacturing operations or serve customers digitally.
Empowering Managed Service Providers
MSPs can leverage Auvik to cost-effectively monitor and manage infrastructure of unlimited customers. Key benefits include:
- Automation to reduce grunt work needed per client site
- Visibility into customer networks to troubleshoot remotely
- Centralized monitoring and management across distributed sites
- Packaged reporting to demonstrate SLAs and value
Optimizing Manufacturing Network Uptime
Auvik is critical for industrial environments where network disruptions can halt production lines resulting in steep revenue and productivity losses.
- Map OT infrastructure interconnections to mitigate safety risks
- Get alerts for unexpected configuration changes to critical devices
- Monitor bandwidth utilization patterns to prevent oversubscription issues
- Validate redundancy across links to minimize downtime risks
Securing Financial Institution Networks
Maintaining robust connectivity and security controls is paramount for banks and insurance providers to safeguard sensitive customer data.
- Audit trail showing all changes helps meet compliance controls
- Get immediate alerts in case of DDoS attempts or hacks
- Identify misconfigured devices and firewall rules early
- Reporting to validate SLAs for customer portals
Supporting Education Digital Transformation
Educational institutions with large campuses, distance learning initiatives and BYOD policies require visibility and control across complex, converged networks.
- Single pane of glass for entire campus network infrastructure
- Identify utilization spikes choking virtual learning apps
- Rapid troubleshooting for on-campus WiFi connectivity issues
-Visibility and control over BYOD devices
Comparing Auvik to Leading Alternatives
While Auvik provides an industry-leading network management solution, understanding key competitors and alternatives is important to evaluate what makes the most sense for your environment and use cases.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
SolarWinds NPM focuses more heavily on network bandwidth monitoring, analysis and capacity planning while providing lighter-weight functions for topology documentation, detailed device configurations and advanced automation capabilities.
ManageEngine OpManager
OpManager competes closely with Auvik in capabilities but has been called out for occasional UI clutter and steeper learning curves. It can provide tremendous value at aggressive pricing for mid-market and large enterprises.
Paessler PRTG
PRTG is positioned strongly as an independent network monitor but lacks native support for advanced NMS functions like topology visualization, configuration management and automation workflows.
Other Key Players
alternatOther key players in the network monitoring and management space include options like NetBrain, Kentik, ThousandEyes, NetScout and more – each with unique strengths around specific focus areas like path analysis, internet infrastructure visualization or network forensics.
For most general enterprise network management use cases however, Auvik, SolarWinds NPM and ManageEngine OpManager constitute the primary leaders to evaluate.
Best Practices for Implementing Auvik
While Auvik is designed from the ground up for ease of use, following best practices during onboarding, configuration and daily use sets you up for long-term success in harnessing maximum value.
Strategic Onboarding and Discovery
The onboarding stage during initial setup offers prime opportunity to define organizational hierarchies, naming conventions, tagging strategies and access controls that provide the foundation for usability down the road.
As infrastructure discovery commences, be selective in defining discovery scope by providing IP blocks rather than scanning unconstrained subnets. Scan scheduling, prioritization of critical infrastructure and staging discovery sessions are other key points.
Custom Dashboard Design
One of Auvik‘s prime strengths lies in the ability to create customized dashboards that provide visual insights into network components and metrics tailored to exactly what matters for your environment and different user personas like network engineers, application owners, leadership team members and NOC technicians.
Invest time upfront to organize and present data accordingly to maximize usability for troubleshooting, reporting and day-to-day firefighting.
Actionable Alerting and Notifications
The volume and configuration of alerts play a huge role in determining the signal-to-noise ratio for Auvik users. Set sensible thresholds aligned to your network infrastructure capacity, create meaningful tagging conventions for dynamic device groups and funnel notifications to appropriate slack channels or on-call schedules based on priority and handling requirements.
Automation Workflows
Auvik allows creating powerful workflows that trigger notifications, run scripts and integrate with other systems. While the pre-built templates address many common use cases, the flexibility exists to automate virtually any imaginable scenario from automatically opening tickets when errors exceed allowed frequency over a period to forcing password changes across devices if an employee termination is detected.
Reporting and Analytics
Reporting allows harnessing the rich data within Auvik for purposes like monthly reviews, capacity planning or security audits. Align reporting cadence and content with key organizational processes to build leverage. Maintain consistency in report formatting and delivery mechanisms with stakeholder groups depending on the objective.
For ad-hoc use, maintain familiarity with constructing focused reports around current issues and fire drills using dashboard templates and filters for quick turnarounds.
Integrations
Utilize Auvik‘s native integration capabilities with complementary platforms like service desks, SIEM tools, monitoring systems and productivity suites to synchronize device status, leverage data in external workflows and eliminate swivel chairing across your tech stack.
Customer Success Stories
Leading organizations and managed service providers across healthcare, finance, retail, education and other industries vouch for Auvik‘s capabilities to meet their network management challenges allowing IT to focus on innovation rather than maintenance.
As per G2 Crowd peer reviews, users specially praise Auvik for its excellent dashboard and topology visualization capabilities, strong reporting and pricing model favorable for MSPs serving multiple customer sites.
One MSP mentions "We switched from SolarWinds NPM to Auvik…the dashboard customization is far better and easier to work with. Alerting and reporting are also very flexible and easy to tweak to our needs."
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
In summary, Auvik offers an industry-leading network management solution combining strong core capabilities around interconnection mapping, monitoring, alerting and configuration management with usability optimized for overworked network teams stretched too thin.
The platform scales readily from small installations to environments with thousands of devices and sites by leveraging automation to reduce grunt work. Power users can tap into advanced features like APIs, integrations, automation workflows and custom reporting while novice users come up the learning curve quick due to intuitive interfaces.
If your network team struggles with lack of visibility into complex infrastructure, frequent fire drills, documentation gaps and technology silos – Auvik can prove an invaluable force multiplier towards stability and agility demanded in digital environments constantly evolving and expanding.
