Auvik vs. CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)

Auvik is well suited for managed service customers and small-scale SMB customers who do not have enough technical resource to manage and monitor their network. Also for customer who has distributed networks spreaded across worldwide or nation wide, Auvik is well suited since it does not need any on-premise setup at each site except for a collector. For customer who has already adopted and used cloud network and hosting services, Auvik is better as Auvik is also fully cloud based offering

Incentivized

It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.

Incentivized

• Auvik is the big pic tool of choice for network diagramming, helps layout of our network infrastructure, and we'll know immediately the status of the devices that are successfully communicating, and those that may have, for example, credentials issues.
• Auvik's "Traffic Insights" are key accelerators for intuitively isolating and resolving traffic-related issues quickly and easily, and the historical information makes it simpler to deduce what aspects may need replacement, capacity improvement, or possibly even re-architecture.
• Auvik integration tools are excellent solution enhancers - that are of particular interest to our company, as we make use of MS Teams and Connectwise products; we would like to see some features to integrate to ServiceNow as well.

Incentivized

• ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
• Change orders.
• Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.

Incentivized

• The map is not easy to quickly zoom in and out of or pan around. Usually requires a lot of filter toggling. Keyboard shortcuts for this would be nice.
• Better global settings that can be pushed to multiple client organizations
• Security groups/RBAC for user permissions across multiple clients
• Ability to change the URL

Incentivized

• The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind.
• It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly.
• It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed.

Incentivized

Because it's an amazing product.

Incentivized

The program can be a bit unwieldy at times, however the majority of information is displayed in a readable and friendly way. The maps and popup information box from the bottom can be harder to use on a smaller screen but on a 1080p+ display tends to work fine.

Incentivized

We have never had a major outage or impact that was noticeable.

Incentivized

Pages can be slow to load on larger sites but tends to be fine for most clients.

Incentivized

Fast response and knowledgeable. If the technician does not know, they will look for the information and get back to you.

Incentivized

We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.

Incentivized

Auvik can stand up against any of the big network management and monitoring solutions on the market. I've implemented and used SolarWinds at many organizations for over 15 years. The paradigm that SolarWinds, PRTG, Prime, etc., work under is completely different than Auvik. It's apparent that Auvik was aiming to solve a different problem and built that solution from the ground up. For any organization responsible for multiple other organizations' infrastructure, Auvik is invaluable in comparison to the other products listed.

I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to ServiceNow. The user interface on ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With ServiceNow, the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.

Incentivized

Auvik has worked on sites with 15+ offices connected with VPN's and we have not encountered any issues with the monitoring. On larger sites the map can be a bit cumbersome to read however it can be cleaned up easily with device filters.

Incentivized

• the ROI for Auvik comes from the time it saves in updating documentation and onboarding, new clients. We no longer have to spend a day investigating a network and documenting it, this is life and up to date so you always have true information for reporting and troubleshooting.

Incentivized

• It helped make us an ITIL shop.
• It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues.
• Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk.

Incentivized