Monitoring and managing all the devices on your network is not easy, and this is where network management software is useful. These software platforms monitor, control, and manage the different devices and infrastructure components on your network. More importantly, these software platforms empower administrators with the necessary information and troubleshooting tools to ensure that their networks are running efficiently.
One such network management software is Auvik. Read on to learn Auvik's salient features and their benefits to your organization. We'll also touch on the limitations of this tool as well as its pricing to help you decide if this is the best fit for your needs.
Auvik Features
Auvik is a cloud-based network management software that monitors the different components and devices in your network and reports any issues associated with them. Below is a detailed look into its capabilities.
Automated Network Discovery
Auvik can map your complete network within minutes, so you're up-to-date on the network's current state. More importantly, it saves time and effort while providing complete control and visibility as your network expands and evolves.
Essentially, Auvik gathers data from sources like CDP and forwarding tables to create layer 1 of a network diagram. Next, it uses information from ARP tables and IP assignments to build layers 2 and 3 to show how the different devices are connected to your network.
With this tool, you no longer have to trace wires, map ports, and reverse engineer network connections. At the same time, you're in complete knowledge and control over the existing network protocols and the many devices that connect to your network.
Hardware Lifecycle Data
Auvik identifies devices and pulls information from them automatically. Based on this information, it tells you if the devices are on current or expired support contracts. Also, it generates a report on the current versions and if there are any later software updates or versions available. Using this data, you can decide if you should upgrade the devices to their later versions.
Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is a central feature of Auvik, as it continuously monitors the different devices and their performance. Auvik comes with more than 50 pre-configured alerts that are based on industry best practices and compares the performance of devices against these established thresholds. If you're wondering, you can always tweak or change these configurations to meet your specific needs.
In case of any issues or anomalies from the established values, Auvik will send notifications to the configured person.
Real-time Data
Auvik provides information about your network in real-time, so you're on top of changes as they happen. It's also constantly monitoring and polling your network to ensure that no event is missed out in your network. Alongside the real-time data, Auvik also stores network data for many years and displays this archived data to you on demand. Using this historical data, you can identify the trends and plan for the future accordingly.
Root Cause Detection
Finding the root cause of a problem often requires running through multiple logs spread across devices. Auvik greatly eases your work as it centralizes the logs of your network devices. You can even view the contents of these logs directly from your dashboard to get more context of an issue. When all these logs are in a central location, you can also easily search through them to quickly drill down to the root cause.
VPN Monitoring
With Auvik, VPNs don't have to be a blind spot for you. When you enable SSL VPN monitoring in the firewall, Auvik tells you how many VPN sessions are in use, what's the current rate of capacity you're using, and other relevant information. Armed with this data, you can better plan your network capacity. It'll also help you to ensure there are no unauthorized connections to your network.
Internet Connection Checks
Often, it's hard to pinpoint the cause of low or no Internet connection. Auvik gives you a hand in such situations, as it can quickly tell you if your ISP is experiencing jitters or latency. Also, this tool will notify you when your primary Internet connection has failed or if it can't reach your site's default gateway. With this information, you can iron out connectivity issues quickly, so there's little to no impact on your employees' productivity.
Managing Configurations
Configurations have a huge bearing on your network's performance and efficiency. This is why Auvik scans your network devices once for 60 minutes to look for configuration changes. In case of any change, the new details are automatically backed up while the older ones are versioned. The advantage of this indexing is that you can always compare the current configuration with previous ones to identify issues or even reset it to earlier values. If you choose to restore, all that you have to do is click the restore button and the corresponding values are automatically applied.
Network Traffic Analysis
Auvik works well with multiple flow streams to gather data about the devices on your network, what they do, and the resulting traffic patterns. It can even handle encrypted data, so the information provided by Auvik is authentic.
Its TrafficInsights algorithm uses machine learning and traffic classification to identify the applications that can take up the bulk of your bandwidth, so you can adjust your organizational policies accordingly. This information can even help you decide if you need to invest in additional bandwidth. The source and destination of data packets are depicted on a world map for easy inference. In particular, if you need more information about the data flow of any particular device, you can dig into them as well through the dashboard.
Remote Management
Auvik offers three ways to remotely connect to a device for further troubleshooting:
- In-app terminal
- Remote browser
- Remote tunnel
With the in-app terminal, you can securely connect to any SSH or Telnet-enabled device, while the remote browser enables you to connect to the web interface of any device using HTTP or HTTPS. Lastly, Auvik uses the collector to create a tunnel between your device and the remote device, so you have the flexibility to run any protocol or access any service through it. The method depends on what you want to do on the remote device.
Regardless of which method you choose, you can monitor and troubleshoot remote devices with Auvik.
Distributed Network Management
Auvik makes it easy to manage your entire network that's spread across the entire globe. You can standardize the management of multiple sites and administer custom or uniform policies across them all through a single pane. With Auvik, you can grow across regions and, still, stay on top of each of these sites. There's no limit on the number of sites you can add.
In addition, Auvik provides complete control and visibility of all the sites. They are displayed on a map and you can click any region at any time to see what's happening in that network. Managing a distributed network doesn't get easier than this!
The above features are impressive and provide all that you need to keep the network up and running efficiently. Plus, the timely alerts and notifications help you to take a proactive approach to troubleshooting, so you can identify and fix issues before they impact the wider organization.
Next, let's see how these features translate into benefits for your organization.
Benefits of Auvik
Auvik helps businesses monitor and manage their network infrastructure with features like automated network discovery, network mapping, device monitoring, and alerting. It even provides three ways to connect to remote devices and troubleshoot them as if you're working on an onsite device. Plus, Auvik supports the monitoring of distributed sites, and all these aspects make it conducive for growing and established companies that are looking to expand to new markets and geographies.
One of the key benefits of Auvik is its ability to automatically discover and map devices on a network, which can save a significant amount of time and effort for you. It also provides detailed device monitoring, including real-time performance metrics and historical data to help you quickly identify and troubleshoot issues on your network. In this sense, Auvik empowers you to take a proactive approach to network monitoring and management, so you can fix issues before they impact your organization in a big way.
Another benefit of Auvik is its alerting system, which can notify you of potential issues or outages, so you can take action right away. It also stores and backs up your configuration, so you can restore the older versions at any time. Both these features can speed up troubleshooting and reduce the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). This platform can work efficiently for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as well.
Auvik also integrates well with other tools in your infrastructure, including ticketing systems and service desks to streamline the complete process of incident management. Though the number of integrations is much lesser than its competitors, still, Auvik can provide a seamless experience if you use the popular tools.
Furthermore, Auvik generates detailed reports on network activity, including device performance metrics and historical data, that can come in handy for identifying trends and patterns that may indicate potential issues. These reports also provide a snapshot of your network's current performance and resource utilization and can lay the foundation for informed capacity planning measures.
Additionally, Auvik has many security features that can protect your network infrastructure. For example, its firewall management feature allows you to configure and manage firewalls on your network. In turn, this can prevent unauthorized access and other potential security threats.
Its other powerful features like Remote Office Management save time and money in today's work-from-anywhere culture, while its many automation capabilities can make your admin team more productive, as they can now focus on critical issues.
Auvik also offers a mobile app that allows you to remotely manage your network and receive alerts on the go.
All these features can improve the overall productivity of your employees and the efficiency of your network administration and incident management processes. Undoubtedly, its many features can save time, effort, and money for your organization.
However, like any piece of software, Auvik also comes with its share of limitations. Knowing these drawbacks is essential to make an informed decision, and this is why we'll look into them next.
Limitations of Auvik
Though Auvik is a powerful network management tool with many capabilities, still, it's not ideal for all situations or organizations. Some of its limitations are:
- Auvik doesn't integrate well with many popular third-party tools, which, in turn, can make it difficult to manage a large ecosystem.
- Works better for small and medium businesses.
- May require technical expertise to set up Auvik in a complex network.
- The reporting features can be better.
- Auvik's customer support is limited.
It merits noting that some of these limitations might be addressed in future updates.
Finally, let's head to pricing to determine if Auvik is worth the cost.
Pricing
Auvik offers two broad plans: Essentials and Performance.
In general, both plans offer unlimited users, network sites, endpoints, and support. Plus, there are no maintenance fees either. Out of the two, the Performance plan has more advanced features than Essentials, including network flow monitoring and analytics, geo IP tracking, forensic traffic data, centralized Syslog collection, machine learning-powered analytics, and more.
You will have to contact the support team for a custom quote for both plans. However, you can get started for free to evaluate the platform and its fit for your organization.
Final Thoughts
Network management software is essential to have comprehensive control and visibility over your network, especially if your company is growing and expanding to new regions. Auvik is a good choice as it provides out-of-the-box monitoring and management capabilities that can suit organizations of all sizes. Plus, its many features reduce the time and effort needed for monitoring, so you can focus on the more important aspects of your business.
In all, Auvik can maintain the stability and integrity of your network and is an essential tool in any administrator's arsenal.
