Having proactive monitoring and alerting is necessary to maintain the stability of your environment. There are many choices available to do this, and NavNet’s monitoring tool of choice for our and our Managed Services clients’ networks is Auvik. Their platform allows our technical team the ability to view all managed networks from a centralized dashboard and provides us invaluable insight and information.
The deployment of Auvik involves a straight-forward setup, which our team has managed successfully numerous times. There are no applications or SQL databases that need to be installed, and the Auvik collector can be run on an existing or new Windows Server as a service, or even on an Ubuntu OS. There are a few more things needed to make it fully functional, such as adding SSH credentials, SNMP community strings, and configuring your network devices to send NetFlow and syslog data to the collectors.
Before you get started
A decision needs to be made regarding whether the Auvik instance will manage each physical location as its own individual site, or alternatively your whole environment as a single site. As you might imagine, each option comes with both pros and cons. Setting up your environment as individual sites in Auvik will allow more granular control of the available settings, though it also means that configuration needs to be done for each site separately and you’ll only see information about that one site at a time. That is neither good or bad, per se, but may not work best for your environment. If you choose to have only a single site, settings will be applied to all devices during configuration. This allows a quicker setup, though it of course also means everything will be monitored from a single site which can seem a bit more complex.
Deploying Collectors
Once it’s been decided how your site will be monitored, the Auvik Collectors will need to be deployed (we recommend at least 2 collectors be deployed into your environment for redundancy). This machine will scan your networks and receive information such as NetFlow, syslog, and SNMP. As previously mentioned, the collector will run on either a Windows Server or Ubuntu as part of your virtualized environment (Figure 1). If you are running VMware, the collector can be deployed with the OVA file, in which case we would recommend running the collector on its own physical hardware (Figure 2). A benefit of this setup is that the collector will be able to monitor the rest of your network even if your virtualized environment is down – and as a bonus, Tiny PCs like the Intel NUC are a great option as they are low cost!
Networks
Now that the collectors have been installed, a scan of any available subnets can be initiated in Auvik. Devices will be associated with the subnet in which it was discovered, and we recommend that the list of discovered networks be reviewed and labeled within Auvik. Alternatively, specific networks can be added to Auvik manually. If all available subnets have been scanned, we recommend that any networks that don’t need to be monitored should be deleted to maintain a clean environment; this will both reduce the number of devices that Auvik sees and allow a clearer picture of your critical infrastructure, as well as reduce unnecessary noise from alerts on devices that won’t be actioned upon. For example, any subnets dedicated to end user devices should be removed, unless proper credentials for each those devices will be added into Auvik; without those credentials Auvik will be limited in what useful information it can provide.
Device Setup
To fully take advantage of Auvik, credentials will need to be set up for all network devices. Whether SNMP v2/v3 or SSH is being used, it will need to be set up on all devices and added to Auvik. Certain devices (like Cisco) will need SSH credentials to pull running configurations into Auvik and allow you to access the CLI directly from Auvik.
Additional setup is required for NetFlow and syslog, which can vary depending on your needs. Configuring syslog requires logs to be pointed to the collectors and then approved in Auvik. NetFlow configuration is a bit more complex. Typically NetFlow would only be configured on the firewalls, routers, and core switches, though there are some device models which are not supported.
Final Thoughts
With proper setup, Auvik can be a powerful tool for monitoring and managing your network infrastructure. Auvik provides real-time visibility, streamlined troubleshooting, and powerful automation — all designed to reduce downtime, boost efficiency, and give you back control of your network.
If you are interested in taking the next step — whether that’s starting a trial, scheduling a personalized demo, or simply reaching out to ask questions — NavNet is here to help you! We would be happy to work with your team to deploy Auvik and make management of your network simpler, smarter, and more proactive.
