Auvik gives you instant, real-time visibility into every device and connection on your network so you can troubleshoot faster, prevent outages, and eliminate guesswork. With automated mapping, lightning-fast cloud deployment, and support for 700+ vendors, Auvik delivers effortless, unified network management for teams of any skill level.
In this episode, we speak with Steve Petryschuk, VP of Product and Market Strategy at Auvik, and discuss the importance of network health and security for businesses. He also shares insights on managing complex networks, the evolution of network monitoring solutions, and the significance of visibility and automated discovery in modern IT environments. We explore the challenges faced by IT professionals, the benefits of integrated network monitoring tools, and the role of Auvik in simplifying network management. The conversation also touches on the impact of trends like AI and distributed networks on IT strategies.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Modern networks are more complex due to hybrid work models.
- Visibility is critical to managing and securing networks.
- Automated discovery prevents blind spots and surprises.
- Visual network maps speed troubleshooting and context.
- Alert fatigue reduces effectiveness without prioritization.
- Configuration changes are a common root cause of outages.
- Tool consolidation helps reduce IT burnout and chaos.
- Integrations should fit existing IT workflows.
- ROI comes from fewer tickets and faster resolutions.
- Focus on fundamentals, not short-lived technology trends.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Network Health and Business Impact
01:25 – How Hybrid Work Reshaped Network Complexity
03:12 – IT Burnout and Constant Reactive Firefighting
04:24 – First-Time Monitoring vs Tool Replacement
05:49 – Common Reasons Teams Switch Monitoring Tools
08:02 – Defining Requirements Before Vendor Selection
09:04 – Why Automated Discovery Is Essential
10:32 – The Value of Visual Network Mapping
11:45 – Understanding Distributed Networks and Users
14:52 – Core Capabilities of Modern Monitoring Tools
18:54 – All-in-One Platforms vs Point Solutions
21:49 – Reducing Alert Noise and Improving Actionability
24:46 – Real-World Example of Proactive Troubleshooting
27:26 – What MSPs Need From Monitoring Platforms
29:54 – Measuring ROI Beyond Features
32:35 – Integrations, APIs, and Workflow Alignment
35:49 – Endpoint Monitoring and User Experience Focus
39:23 – Future-Proofing With Network Fundamentals
42:10 – Free Trial and Next Steps
42:44 – Final Thoughts and Closing Remarks
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:00.696)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Today we’re talking about something that every business these days needs to think about, even if you’re not deep into the tech trenches and that is keeping your network healthy and secure so you can run everything with as little chaos as possible. Ideally zero chaos. To help expand upon this, I’m joined by Steve Petryschuk, the VP of product and market strategy at Auvik.
Now Steve spends his days helping manage service providers and IT teams make sense of the growing maze of devices, apps, remote workers, cloud tools, basically all the things that keep a modern business connected. And his company, Auvik, has built a bit of a reputation for simplifying that mess. They give teams a clearer picture of what’s happening on their networks so problems get solved faster and there’s less unwanted surprises. And really just so that businesses can stay focused on running their business. That’s the main, the most important, crucial task, right?
So in today’s conversation, Steve and I will walk through several of the most important things MSPs and IT pros should think about right now from how to stay ahead of issues to what really matters when choosing tools to the trends shaping the next few years. So a lot to talk about. I’m really excited to have Steve on the show with us. Steve, let’s bring you in. Welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Steve Petryschuk (01:17.482)
Thanks so much for having me on, Beau. It’s great to get a chance to come and talk to you about what I spend, I think, all day, every day talking about, but great to bring this to your audience.
Beau Hamilton (01:25.612)
Yeah, I’m excited to talk with you and learn a few more things about the networking side of things for businesses. Now, I want to maybe see if you can help set the scene here. I know networks over the years have gotten a lot more complex with things like hybrid work. The cloud has really taken off. IoT devices flood at the workplace. I know they’ve taken over my home. How have these shifts changed what IT pros should look for in a modern network monitoring solution?
Steve Petryschuk (01:54.442)
Yeah, it’s a great question. to kick things off, we live in IT where everything’s constantly changing. And that’s one thing that I really love about is that no day is exactly like the previous and year over year, there’s constantly something new to learn and something evolving. It keeps us really interested on our toes. As it pertains to networks that we’ve seen over the past number of years, an outflow from the traditional office network to the fully remote office network, and now transition back to the more of the traditional office network.
But over this time, what we’ve seen is an evolution from a lot of legacy on-premise data centers and complex networks to a simplification of those on-premise networks, a lot of workloads moving to the cloud, a lot of distributed users who have changed how they connect to these enterprise assets. And a lot of the assets they even connect to are changing, right? They’re not necessarily the traditional on-prem, on-premise services that are hosted by the enterprise themselves, but more the cloud-based SaaS services. And so not only how I manage and maintain my own network has changed, but how my users are connecting to the applications that they need to do their job has changed. And as these changes all happen, we need to evolve our network and how we monitor and manage and maintain that network to make sure that we’re keeping up with the reality of how people work today.
Beau Hamilton (03:11.086)
That makes sense, yeah. mean, the tech scene is always changing. And so it makes sense that the network professionals have to constantly keep up with the latest trends. know, generally speaking, obviously, IT professionals, they’re doing a lot behind the scenes to make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to. They’re constantly putting out metaphorical fires, jumping between various tasks, reacting to user requests. In the midst of all this chaos, I know it can be a little bit hard to
even consider maybe a new networking solution, monitoring software. Why wouldn’t IT Pro even be looking at choosing a new piece of software that they’ll maybe have to learn or get set up and running in the first place? It seems like a daunting task.
Steve Petryschuk (03:55.006)
Yeah, it all becomes down to prioritization, right? We’re so busy during our days spending a lot of time on reactive tasks. Annually, AVEC does our IT Trends survey and it continuously, year over year, the rates of burnout are high. The amount of time that I’m spending on reactionary tasks is high. And my ability to sort of like sit there and be proactive is always impacted by these like reactive, you know, metaphorical firefighting. Occasionally the real firefight, but hopefully that doesn’t come up too often. But I think, you know, if I’m looking at
Beau Hamilton (04:20.514)
Right.
Steve Petryschuk (04:24.53)
my tool set, my tool stack, and why I might be looking at a network monitoring solution, I’ll sort of split it into two groups. The first group would be those who have never had a network monitoring platform before. This is a new space, and they’re maybe reactive and firefighting because they don’t have visibility. They don’t know what’s out there. They’re using maybe a…
an end user request, someone calls in and says, hey, the network’s down or my computer is down as their indication that something’s wrong. And so they have this large gap in visibility because they’ve never really had a dedicated network monitoring platform. Then there’s a whole other group who have invested in this space, do use a network monitoring platform today, but are maybe looking at replacing that. It’s something that for whatever reason, they’re looking at replacing it. But I think if we look at the first group, they’re sort of like the,
Beau Hamilton (05:13.475)
Yeah.
Steve Petryschuk (05:17.06)
they’ve become fewer and far between. Most people have solved this problem at some point in past, but we’ll still find a number of folks who a network monitoring solution is still brand new to them.
Beau Hamilton (05:24.546)
Yeah, so you have those that never had a dedicated NMS, network monitoring solution, and then like you’re saying, those that are replacing their current system. I mean, the upside for those without a dedicated system seems pretty clear. So what about the other group, those that have a network monitoring solution and might want to replace it? What would be sort driving that decision?
Steve Petryschuk (05:49.49)
Yeah, there’s a number of reasons that someone might look and say, hey, what I have today isn’t working, right? And that could be something as simple as my needs have changed, right? We just talked about how the network has changed and how things have evolved. And so if your needs have changed, obviously how I monitor and manage that network might have changed. But even if things are sort of the same as they were last year, pretty stable.
What we find in practice is that there’s drivers around tool consolidation. So it might be an overall organizational effort, whether it’s a cost reduction or a simplification of our IT tool stack. Tools consolidation, rationalization is often a driver for replacing a network monitoring solution. So we’re just looking for like an easier to use tool.
Often that comes from when I start a new job or an IT pro starts a new job, they come into an environment, they’re picking up the tools that are there and they may look around and say, I don’t know these tools, I’m not familiar with it, I’m adopting a new network. And so looking for something that’s simple, easy to use to help them get visibility into that environment. Even things like, and this was, think, much more prevalent a couple of years ago, but still we see some now with folks just moving from like a traditional, like, I’ve been…
on-premise server that is my network monitoring server and I don’t want to manage and maintain that anymore. I’m tired of doing the software updates. And so is there something that’s like SaaS delivered or cloud-based that I could use? And I think one of the things that we’ve also seen in this one, you know, sort of a bit tongue in cheek from a vendor is that, you know, oftentimes we’ll see that the commercial contracts or pricing changes create a catalyst, right? Not everything was fine, but then, you know, a price increase comes in from my current vendor. It’s like, well, I guess I was happy, but I’ll go take a look at the market. And so we find that, you know,
One or a combination of these things drive people to say, it’s worth taking a look to make sure that my current tool set is still the best one that meets my needs.
Beau Hamilton (07:31.31)
Yeah, it doesn’t hurt to look and see what the options are available to, you know. But it sounds like there’s a lot of different reasons one might want to look at a new solution. They’re not sort of all created equal. It’s a little bit more complicated than that. The obvious question that comes that I think of next is, is when an IT pro is shopping for a monitoring solution, a monitoring tool, let’s say, what’s the first thing they should be paying attention to?
in terms of maybe setup and visibility.
Steve Petryschuk (08:02.834)
Yes, so I think when, I’m approaching that problem, the first thing that I’m going to do when I look at replacing a network modern solutions, first looking in at my needs, right? What are the key problems that I’m looking to solve with this rather than looking at, well, what does vendor A do or vendor B do? It’s reflective in on my organization. What are my must haves? What are the things that I need the solution to do? And that’s where I have to sort of start identify what are the, my requirements, what are my must haves? What am I nice to haves?
And then I can look and start to test the market and say, what does the market look like? What do all the vendors have and which ones check off all my must haves and how many of my nice to haves do they actually check off? It’ll be nearly impossible to find a solution that does every single must have and every single nice to have, but understanding where you draw that line, what are your non-negotiables, is really important, sort of like internal first step before you go out and start getting influenced by other vendors out in the market.
Beau Hamilton (09:02.144)
Now, one thing I kept seeing when I was researching Avik was this mention of automated discovery. It seems like Avik talks a lot about having a fast automated discovery component to their platform. What does that actually look like in practice compared to maybe some of the kind older tools or solutions out there?
Steve Petryschuk (09:21.698)
Yeah. So I think we’ve all been in IT long enough to probably have heard at some point, you you can’t manage what you can’t see. You can’t monitor what you can’t see. You can’t secure what you can’t see. Some flavor of that sort of, you know, typical statement. And I’m a true believer in that, right? If I don’t know what’s out there, if I don’t know what it is that I’m trying to manage and monitor, I’m going to be surprised by my users, right? Someone calls in and says, hey, I’m having a problem with, you know, such and such a connected to the network in this area or having a problem with this application.
If you didn’t know that that was there, that’s like a really painful process. It’s like, what do you, what do you mean? Like you’re, you know, connecting to the network out at our remote office or using this specific SaaS application. If you don’t know what’s out there, you’re not in a position of strength. When someone calls in and asks for help, you’re instantly in that like reactive firefighting mode. And so the first problem that any network monitoring solution needs to solve for you is it needs to go out there and tell you, Hey, here’s what’s out there. Here’s what’s on your network. Here are the things that you need to monitor and manage and secure and discover.
And that’s an area where, know, Auvik really does differentiate being able to go out there and discover and uncover every single asset that’s connected into the network. That’s really where it starts. If I don’t know what I’m supposed to monitor and protect, then it’s tough to do that.
Beau Hamilton (10:31.544)
Yeah, that makes sense. I really resonate with the fact that visual information is huge. I am a big visual learner. so being able to see actually, see kind of the issues, the alerts and information is one thing. But also just having the system proactively kind of cater the needs in front of me, move things in priority in front of me is very helpful and beneficial. So I can see the benefits there.
I imagine just also being able to see visual information kind of just reduces, saves a lot of time, reduces, I don’t know, things like onboarding, a lot of those moments where you’re just kind of like, I had no idea that this was even on the network in the first place, those kind of moments. Yeah.
Steve Petryschuk (11:19.582)
It’s one thing seeing in a spreadsheet. It’s another thing, like you said, like seeing it visually in a map, in a network map, giving me context about what’s happening around that device or how it might be connected to the network or what other users or devices or applications might be impacted. so all those things, when I can visually see it, help me impact, what is the, or help me assess what is the impact of this issue and sort of drive towards that urgency and how urgent it is to resolve.
Beau Hamilton (11:22.776)
Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (11:45.55)
Totally, yeah, the importance there in the context is key. And I know that as networks continue to get more spread out, that speed really starts to become even more important. And something really have to make sure is still there in the first place. When networks are fragmented or spread out like this, whether it’s on-prem, it’s cloud, you’re dealing with remote workers, another thing that comes up with Auvik is this.
kind of phrase of distributed networks. They talk a lot about distributed networks. How has this shift, if you call it that, changed the way IT teams think about network visibility?
Steve Petryschuk (12:23.69)
Right. So rewind a decade ago, the network was, I have an office building. I have my route infrastructure, my switch infrastructure, my access point infrastructure. I have my data center that has my application infrastructure. And I control it all. I have visibility into it all. In today’s world, what we’re starting to see is kind of like a bimodal distribution. We either have a 80 % plus on-premise group, or I have a 80 % plus remote group. People are either sort of going remote distributed or
or fully on-prem, I think in every business, so there’s some semblance of a distributed user. So if he picks up their laptop and they work somewhere else, that somewhere else could be at home, that somewhere else could be in the coffee shop, that somewhere else could be like in the office or in the meeting room that’s like three steps away from their desk, but they’re not hardwired in, they’re in a different spot, in different location. And as these users are moving around, connecting to the network a different way,
how they’re connecting in, what that experience looks like. That is changing depending on where the user sits and what network they’re on and whether they’re at home or whether they’re traveling for work. And so all these users are what I call the distributed network, right? It’s not just the physical on-premise infrastructure that I’m used to. It’s any user, anywhere that’s connecting to my resources. And so I now need to support and I need to get visibility into these users no matter where they are, no matter how they’re connecting in. So that when, you know,
you were to call me up and say, hey, I’m having problems connecting to my email, I can’t assume that you’re sitting on my network in my office and troubleshoot it that way. I need to get your perspective. I need to understand, well, what network are you connected into? How are you accessing that email? Are you connected into a VPN? Are you connecting wirelessly or wired? And so all of these things have changed what it means to get that network visibility. It’s not just about what are all the switches that I have on site, what are all the access points I have on site. It’s how are you connected into the network?
And what does that experience look like as you’re connected through it?
Beau Hamilton (14:22.584)
That’s so true. Yeah. mean, I don’t even when you’re in the office, you move around different kind of cubicles. Maybe you work in the break room. You go to a different kind of lounge area or you go to a coffee shop, right? You need to, you need a break. so dealing with all these different cloud platforms and moving across offices, working from home, working away from home, just the idea of a single centralized network doesn’t, it just doesn’t really exist anymore. You know? And so I like the way you’ve, phrase that and visualize that.
Steve Petryschuk (14:48.842)
That’s right.
Beau Hamilton (14:52.046)
I know visibility, obviously it’s a huge part of monitoring and it goes deeper than just sort of the is something online or is it down? I’ve always kind of thought of network monitoring to be a lot of just mostly pertaining to those kind of graphs and information alerts, things like that reports, but it’s much more than that it seems. What would you say are the core capabilities that really matter and are important with a modern networking monitoring solution?
Steve Petryschuk (15:22.568)
Yes, so I think I’ll break it down into probably five key considerations that I would look at for any network monitoring platform, things that you need to make sure that as you’re approaching the market, whatever you’re looking at has these. You have your list of, you know, need to haves, you have your list of nice to haves, and on those need to haves, I would suggest there’s sort of five key things. The first is that discovery we’ve already talked about, right? We’ve established that you can’t monitor what you don’t see. And so that is critical to have that discovery and have that visibility of what’s out there.
The next is going to be all around alerting and notifications. You shouldn’t be babysitting your network monitoring solution. You shouldn’t be going in there and saying, hey, is my network still up? Is everything still performing properly? You need to have some sort of framework that builds into your existing workflows that tells you something is wrong. Hey, you’re having a problem at this remote location. You need to send someone there to dispatch it. Or I’m seeing some predictive performance issues. You need to address those before they become a real issue. And so you need to have that alerting framework to be able to support that.
The third is going to be around the configuration of the network and how things are connected and configured. I like to say when something breaks, it’s because something changed. If someone changes a configuration or switches a port from one spot to another, because something changed, that’s when something broke. And so you need to have a configuration visibility, configuration change visibility, so that you know when something outside of your known good state changed. And so that’s number three, is the configuration management.
Four is really about integrating into your existing workflows and ecosystems. Whatever network monitoring solution you look for, should make sure that it integrates into how you work today. You don’t want to adapt your whole workflows and your whole tool set to meet a specific tool. It should be built on how you work, how you’re organized. And so I mean, how does it integrate into the devices you’re monitoring and the assets you need to monitor?
How does it integrate into, we just talked about alerts, like how does it integrate it to your alerting system? So you have a specific system that already tells you when things are down and offline, and how does your network monitoring solution integrate into that? How does it integrate into your IT asset management strategy? So when you do this discovery, do this visibility exercise, once you have all those assets, how do you make sure they’re essentially tracked so that when it comes to audit Cs, then you know where everything is? So integrations, that would be sort of the fourth. And the last is all about
Steve Petryschuk (17:47.242)
making sure that we have visibility into reporting on how your environment is running. And so today, you probably have some metrics of uptime or visibility that you provide to management that says, hey, our network is performing how we expect. And you need to make sure that you continue to provide that visibility through the network monitoring solution you’re going for. And so whether that’s a dedicated reporting solution built in or integrations into how you report today, I always like to think about it in terms of
more like a standardized report. Hey, am I using tools like Power BI or Tableau or something like that? How am I presenting that data? And I need my network monitoring solution to integrate into my operating system and how I present that data today. So do we have the API solutions?
And so those are like, you know, there’s a lot of core competencies that come with a network monitoring solution. But when I think about it, I look at, you know, sort of the couple of higher level things like, can I discover everything? Can I alert? I simply know when things go wrong? Am I monitoring for change in my environment? Can it integrate into my systems that I have today? And can I make sure that at the end of the month, I can look back and say, yep, you know, we had our five nines or whatever it is. And that comes down to the recording.
Beau Hamilton (18:53.282)
Yeah, well said. Lots of valuable information there. And I’m sure you could obviously expand on each of those points. My mind is thinking, so you’ve essentially laid out, I would say, different tools here with those capabilities. And I’m curious, for IT teams listening, IT pros, thinking about those different points and approaching them with, I guess, my question is, should you approach
the networking solution with separate point solutions? Should you approach it separately? Or is it better for you to maybe adopt to a one platform that covers everything, like an all-in-one solution?
Steve Petryschuk (19:35.434)
Yeah, good question. there’s definitely a few, you know, there’s a few of those points where I can start to get very deep into a specific function. you know, discovery is often something that I’ll do on my own and then take that asset inventory and add it into a network monitoring platform or, you know, do my monitoring in one system and then have a configuration management system over here that monitors things in a slightly different way. And so there are organizations that have approached this as different point tools. And that is definitely something that
you can do, but what I would suggest, and when we look back at some of those themes you looked at earlier around overloaded IT teams and always reactive firefighting, I think this is one of those situations where less is more, less tools to manage, less cumbersome tools, it gets you more visibility into the assets you need and less context switching. And so…
If I look back at what my nice to haves were and my need to haves, once I’ve sort of captured all my need to haves, I then have to ask myself, is it worth going after another tool to get maybe one or two of my nice to haves? And that’s then a decision that I think every one of us can make and understand if that’s something that I’m willing to give up in order to have a more simplified, I’ll say simplified life, but really simplified work life.
Beau Hamilton (20:48.428)
Yeah, no, makes sense. It’s like, I like what you said, like less is more. And it kind of comes back to that, that thing we keep talking about of, of, containing the chaos, limiting the chaos, you know? I, know that nobody, nobody wants to juggle, I don’t know, multiple dashboards or, or try to stitch together sort of all these different insights, and, and information like tools manually. And so having, I know having a unified platform,
Kind of simplifies those things like you’re saying but it also just reduces the chance of missing something important, right? Because it lives in a separate system. So having it all in one place Has a lot of value there. I want to talk about alerts now the the thing that I thought was the the main sort of You know driver behind a lot of these monitoring tools When you when you compare different monitoring platforms, what should IT leaders really focus on when it comes to alerts?
And the follow-up question to that is like, do how do IT teams cut down on all the noise and make alerts just more actionable?
Steve Petryschuk (21:49.748)
Yeah, I mean, we talked about not needing to babysit my network monitoring platform. The reality is it should let you know when something’s wrong, right? But it’s like a crying baby. Like if it’s always crying, eventually you become tone deaf to it. it drives you crazy. You can’t pick up what’s actually wrong and what’s not, right? Hey, if you actually need something, let me know when you actually need something. Don’t let me know that you need something all the time. And so if I have an NMS, it’s constantly like alerts, alerts, alerts. Eventually it sort of…
Beau Hamilton (22:12.088)
Sure. Yeah.
Steve Petryschuk (22:19.24)
drowns out the important items. And so we don’t want those important items to get lost. And so what I look for is I look for systems that can help me prioritize those alerts, whether that’s through things like severity levels, helping integrate into maybe some tooling systems that help me tune those alerts on hours versus off hours. Like, hey, let me know when things are really bad when I’m not here, but let me know about some of the more maintenance level tasks while I’m actually working. So controlling some of that time of day notifications.
I also look for things where I can configure and customize. I don’t necessarily want to spend my time setting up all the same default alerts. Obviously, you want to know when something goes offline. Obviously, you want to know when the CPU on a device is pegged. So when I look at a network-oriented solution, I just want those things to work. Just plug it in, have those work. But I have to sort of resolve the fact that there are some devices that maybe have different CPU thresholds or different online offline thresholds. And so adding that configurability is something that’s really important.
And I think even once you sort of get it set up and get it configured, it’s really easy for one incident or a couple of incidents to then flood my help desk with a bunch of alerts and a bunch of noise. And so I’m looking at solutions that have some alert correlation or some intelligence behind those alerts to make sure that when something lands in my inbox, it’s something that should be prioritized, right? And so when I’m in the midst of that firefighting, then I’m focused in on the top priority issue.
and I’m looking at that instead of trying to figure out what that top priority issue is. So you wanna make sure that that’s a, if it’s not on your must have list, that’s at least on your nice to have list.
Beau Hamilton (23:53.462)
Absolutely. Yeah. Context is definitely key there. And yeah, generally you want to go, you want to go from annoying. You don’t want to have just be annoyed with all these alerts. You want them to actually be important and actually actionable. So you’re not just drowning in notifications all the time. And, and, you know, to the point where you’re at, you just, get tone deaf with the, like the crying baby analogy. Now I bet you’ve, you’ve heard a lot of maybe horror stories. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of frustration.
from users using older systems that are considering switching to maybe Auvik. But also, I’m sure you’ve gathered a lot of positive feedback after helping a client make the switch to a more capable monitoring solution. So I want to focus on the latter for this next question. Do you have a favorite story where Auvik helps someone maybe pinpoint a problem way faster than they expected?
Steve Petryschuk (24:46.014)
Yeah, I think, and I’m going to go way back in my archives here. It’s going back a couple of years to pull it in, but I was working with a partner at the time who had one client where they’re in the middle of the business day, their network continuously got sort of rebooted or their network went offline.
Beau Hamilton (24:49.326)
Sure.
Steve Petryschuk (25:02.696)
And it took a long time for them to figure out why that was happening. Eventually they came to Auvik, set us up to monitor their internal network. It was intermittent, right? It was kind of like weeks apart. So it wasn’t correlated to a specific time of day or an ISP incident. There was nothing flagged. And so they deployed us, got Auvik set up within their internal environment there within 20 to 30 minutes. We had all the monitoring done, all those default alerts set up.
And obviously, because it was an intermittent issue, nothing happened right away. But about a week later, they got an alert that said, hey, there’s actually like a high memory utilization on this firewall. And that seems pretty benign, right? OK, high memory utilization. Is it going to come up or go down? But when we looked at the historical data, you could actually see this trend line of this memory going up. And if you fast forward here into the future, what we actually
did is we waited, in this case, the first time, we waited until it went all the way up. Eventually, the device rebooted and dropped back down and then cropped up over time. They got that alert and then it rebooted. And so what they were able to do is use this alert to correlate the fact that, well, there was a memory leak in the device and that specific firmware on this firewall, there was a memory leak and it was leaking over time, ramping up that memory, rebooting that device.
And so we were able to track down an issue that they were invisible to before, right? They didn’t realize the network was going out in the middle of the day because of a poor firmware version, and we were able to isolate it with this sort of like proactive notification. Hey, the memory is creeping up over time. getting that alert to them allowed them to then identify, hey, here’s the trend. Here’s the alert that tells us, now when I have this high memory alert, even though I can’t upgrade the firmware yet, when I get this alert, I know I need to proactively reboot that firewall.
after hours, because the next day it’s going to be a problem. allow them to change this reactive thing into a proactive one and eventually then plan for that firmware upgrade at a time that was more palatable to the client.
Beau Hamilton (26:56.886)
I love that. Yeah. Great example. know it’s all about seeing the right data at the right time and, and, and making that kind of correlation of, of what’s, what’s going on and why this is spiking what following.
Steve Petryschuk (27:07.978)
Maybe I got too technical, right? I’m a technical guy inside. hopefully for the audience, we’re all following along, but it was, it’s cool stuff anyway for a network nerd like me.
Beau Hamilton (27:11.118)
All right.
Well, yeah, I’ll try and generalize it for the general audience out there too. Now, I know needs among different groups change, right? MSPs, their needs are quite different from an internal IT team and their needs. What should MSPs in particular be thinking about when choosing the right tool for their clients?
Steve Petryschuk (27:38.92)
Yeah, I think the most obvious one is one that is sort of technically a multi-tenanted tool, right? I can manage multiple different clients and segment that data, right? Security is always top of mind. So to make sure we put the right data in front of right people and we’re not mixing that client data. I think there’s like a whole conversation around the commercial models to make sure that the network monitoring platform that the MSP selects has a commercial model aligned with how the MSP operates.
But I even think like when you get into the monitoring of individual networks that the profile of a user at an MSP is different than that and an internal IT team if I’m You working. Yeah, you know, I work work here at Auvik. I’m pretty familiar with how Auvik operates I know our IT systems because I’m here every day and I’m working here every day And so I’m really familiar with this if I work in an MSP I’m managing tens hundreds potentially even thousands of clients and there’s no way that I can have all the context
for that entire network environment, the time that I go in to visit that client. And so the level of depth for the visibility and the data that I need as an MSP and as an internal IT team are different. And so just understanding again, like what are the needs that I have and what is the level of depth of monitoring? What are the alert configurations and how do I configure those to meet my needs? And just making sure that the platform I have both is sort of like multi-tenanted, understands my business model from a commercial standpoint.
and then is adaptive to my needs depending on what that level of depth looks like. And so I think like, without getting into specifics, that’s probably how I would think about it if I’m an MSB.
Beau Hamilton (29:14.732)
No, that’s a good way to think about it. I would say some of the specifics might be they’re thinking about scale and maybe repeatability, being able to scale across all the different users that they’re focused with. Because you’re focused on the granular, individual side of things. So they have to think about the bigger picture. Now, I know another thing that I have to think about, which gets me to the business side of things as well, is ROI. So beyond, you know,
maybe shiny, cool new features. I’m curious what business outcomes or RII signals should MSBs look for when evaluating monitoring software.
Steve Petryschuk (29:54.026)
Here I thought we just looked after cool new features. I mean, I always love a good good shiny object. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so Anytime I look at
Beau Hamilton (29:57.426)
Hey, we can talk about that too. That’s coming up next.
Steve Petryschuk (30:05.606)
any solution, right? And I work in both the business context and the technical context. The business context has always been like, how much money does it make me or how much money does it save me? And so when I’m looking at solutions, I’m going to be looking at one of those two things. If I’m an MSP, I’m actually looking at both, right? Hey, how much money is it going to make me and how much money is it going to save me for my business? If I’m an internal IT team, it’s mostly how much money is it going to save me? Right. And that obviously is super simplified. And as you get down into the weeds, how does it save me money? Well, it enables me
discover things automatically. I’m not spending time doing discovery. It allows me to troubleshoot things faster so I can get the business back online faster and spend less of my own time troubleshooting things. It allows me to consolidate or look for things that can consolidate multiple tools into a single platform to save money. So there’s a number of things that I can look for from a more tactical level on how does my network monitoring solution help me save money.
I think for the MSP context, how does it help me drive revenue or grow my business? We can either look at the hard metrics. Hey, do I look at offering a new managed network service powered by my NMS? That would be sort of one extreme. But even, does it help me improve my client relationships? Can I respond to issues faster? Can I respond to issues knowing more context about those clients that can help build a better client relationship?
can help me build better rapport and help me retain that client as well as grow new clients. So those are a little bit tougher to track, but just a few different ways that I think about the ROI.
Beau Hamilton (31:36.974)
Sure, that makes sense. mean, fewer tickets, fewer support tickets, you have maybe fewer onsite visits, and then just generally fewer surprises, you know? And that just has compounding savings and cost savings, obviously.
Steve Petryschuk (31:51.732)
The fewer surprises is key, right? No one likes surprises.
Beau Hamilton (31:53.58)
Yeah, no, no, I’m not a surprise. Nobody surprised me for my birthday or anything like that. I’m not a fan of that. No, I’m curious. So I was thinking of going back to one of the earlier questions where you outlined top five capabilities of a network monitoring solution to be aware of. I believe it was the question number or the fourth pillar, and that was integration.
And so for this next question, I’m just curious, like how well does Aavik play into the rest of the IT stack and the various ticketing systems in use? Do these integrations really matter?
Steve Petryschuk (32:35.432)
Yeah, it’s a question. So whenever I’m switching contexts, I want to make sure that I have easy transitions between tool A and tool B, whether that’s from like an alerting system into my network monitoring solution, or if I’m trying to troubleshoot a network issue and then I realized that, it’s the end device, it’s actually the problem, or I’m starting at the end device. Hey, Steve calls me with a problem, I’m looking at his end device and it’s actually somewhere along the network. So you look to things like, are there native integrations with those tools?
not, there APIs available to then build those integrations? And the organizational ability to, or desire, guess, maybe not even ability, desire to build integrations will vary depending on the IT teams themselves and the organizational needs.
And so I always air to say like, hey, are the integrations that I are in my need to have, they’re available out of the box. And so when I look at things like ticketing systems and endpoint monitoring tools, a solution like Aavec has those things checked off, whether you’re an MSP or an internal IT team, we integrate into the ticketing systems you use, the endpoint monitoring tools you use. But even if it’s one that’s not on those lists, I can still look to say, hey, does this vendor have open APIs to allow me to integrate into those systems?
And so obviously, Auvik has those things. As do a number of other vendors in the space, which I think is becoming increasingly more important as we look more towards this AI-driven network automation, those APIs allowing different tool sets to talk to each other are going to become increasingly more important.
Beau Hamilton (34:04.376)
Yeah, those different protocols, agent to agent. I think, I mean, generally speaking, I know I’ve always kind of considered more integrations the better, right? But at the same time, I know that’s not always the case because it can be kind of overwhelming, right, for MSPs. Is the right integration? I think that’s a good clarification, yeah. Now, how does Auvik help simplify the workflow instead of just becoming essentially one more dashboard?
Steve Petryschuk (34:18.563)
The right integrations, right? The right integrations. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Petryschuk (34:30.07)
I mean, we talked about that a little bit earlier with some of the multiple capabilities that we build within the one tool, right? I’m not having a different, you know, configuration management tool from a monitoring tool. I’m keeping all those items together within sort of one umbrella. It’s not a piecemeal performance monitoring, configuration management, know, NetFlow analyzer. It’s all sort of put together within…
within one tool. And then I would say through the integrations that we have with our partner companies, we’ve definitely helped to develop a streamlined workflow where I can say, hey, here’s all the visibility I have into the network infrastructure and critical endpoint network visibility and critical server asset visibility. And then partnering with RMMs and endpoint management tools to make sure that you have that complete control over every asset.
Beau Hamilton (35:14.924)
Right. Yeah. Nobody wants just another dashboard. There has to be some real actual value there. And I think there is when you talk about and see the core network insights in one place, right? It does kind of help simplify things and not complicate matters more. And it just reduces the chaos. Again, coming back to the chaos. Now, speaking of standout capabilities and kind of coming back to that shiny, cool, new feature statement I mentioned earlier.
Steve Petryschuk (35:34.984)
Yep. Yep. That’s right.
Beau Hamilton (35:43.18)
What’s one shiny cool new feature that really sets Auvik apart from competitors?
Steve Petryschuk (35:48.938)
This is probably my favorite question, something that I might get overly passionate about. So hopefully that comes across. So he talks about this modern distributed work, where people are working anywhere, could be in the office, could be remote. But what is really important to the end users? while we as IT professionals always care, like, hey, is my network up and running, am I asked to take care of this, upgraded? For the user, all they want to do is get their job done. They just want to be able to work.
Beau Hamilton (35:53.848)
Bring it on, bring it on.
Steve Petryschuk (36:16.199)
And often what gets in the way of them doing that in today’s modern connected world is connectivity. Can I connect to the network that I need to to then connect to the assets that I need to? That SaaS application, that Zoom meeting, that Microsoft Teams meeting, that accounting software that SaaS hosted. All of these things require connectivity. And so here at Auvik, we developed an endpoint network monitoring tool that basically sits alongside our traditional network monitoring.
that gives me visibility into every single endpoint and how it’s connecting through to the network. So we’re able to see like, is the wifi in your area giving you problems? Is there like, you know, a low signal, a low wifi signal rate or a high latency?
we’re monitoring the connectivity to critical SaaS applications. So if I’m totally reliant on Salesforce or on Zoom for quality meetings, we can monitor the availability and performance of those. We can check to see like, is the capacity of their internet link? If I’m trying to work on an airplane and on a Zoom meeting, obviously that’s not gonna work all that well, because the pipe is this big and the latency is this high. And so getting that visibility so that the IT team is spending less time trying to track those things down, just quickly see, well, like,
Oh, of course Steve’s having an issue with Zoom. It’s because he’s trying to do it from an airplane. Or, Sora, I can’t help you resolve your network performance problem because your ISP is the problem, right? Being able to quickly isolate where that issue is. And so we’ve been able to uncover a lot of those things with our endpoint network monitoring.
And I think it’s a really cool evolution in how we think about networks and not just say monitor this asset, monitor this device, but think about the entire network in terms of that user experience. And there’s a number of tools that have done that in the enterprise space for forever. But I think that the mid-market where a lot of us, so many of us operate today has been ignored in that space. And it’s really an exciting ad for us.
Beau Hamilton (38:08.044)
Yeah, that is exciting. And I do love to see and hear how passionate you are about it. And again, it comes down to visibility is key and just, I think that’s kind of always been something you strive to try to understand the full context and try to isolate certain issues that are causing the problem. But hearing about some of these, I don’t know, kind of AI related, newer sort of features and technology that allow you to get a better context window.
I think is pretty exciting and unlocks a bunch more value. So yeah, I think it’s only going to get better as time. You’re only going to get more visibility as time goes on and you roll out more features and they continue to work on this platform. looking ahead, I know I mentioned the lovely word acronym AI. There’s a lot of trends coming down the pipeline. mean, we are already here. I mean, we have IoT, we have zero trust, we have AI.
whatever the trend is, mean, should IT teams keep in mind, like which trend is the, or trends are the most important for IT teams to keep in mind and consider when picking a solution that’ll, I don’t know, still make sense five years from now. It’s tough to predict where things are going. So that’s the tough question.
Steve Petryschuk (39:23.137)
So yeah, I mean, I’m not a futurist, maybe depending on, let’s check five years from now whether I have a future in futurism here. Yeah. I think when we start talking about trends, they’re exactly that, There’s always gonna be a new trend. There’s always gonna be something that is trendy. There’s always gonna be a new concept introduced. I mean, a lot of what we’re seeing in the fields of AI, for example, today has been, we saw
Beau Hamilton (39:29.996)
Yeah, we’ll hold you to it.
Steve Petryschuk (39:48.714)
large language models really revolutionize how we interact with AI over the past two years. But the concepts that are driving that have been in the works for quite a while. When I look at sort of a network monitoring platform and how I’m gonna set myself up for success, I’m focused in on sort of like what I know is true for the longer term. And what I know is true for the longer term is that users need to connect to resources to get their job done. If those users are human users, AI agent users,
distributed users, in the office users. Ultimately, there’s users that connect to resources. And underpinning that whole connectivity is the network. And that network comprises of the route infrastructure, the switch infrastructure, depending on the end user, the access point infrastructure. And all those things are now like the critical plumbing that is connecting the users to the applications they need to get their job done. So I would say focus less on the trends that we see in the market.
Obviously, just like any other vendor, Avik is innovating with AI augmentation of our solution and what we’re able to provide. But I’m less focused on that trend and more focused on that, can I continue to support the network needs for longer term? Things like switches and firewalls, they’re not going away. It’s a lot of the basics that we understand today are still going to be true five years from now. So think focusing on the fundamentals and making sure that I’m solving the real problems I have today as opposed to solving a problem I might have one day or where I focus.
Beau Hamilton (40:07.058)
Now, in the age of AI, this lovely AI revolution we’re in, it’s becoming more challenging for new IT pros to enter the field. What advice would you give to new professionals, new IT people, and what would you make, like what makes them you know, successful in the workplace?
Steve Petryschuk (40:21.617)
So we talked earlier about how there’s always change in IT and that this change is what actually keeps me really excited and really passionate about it. so AI is a change that we’re enduring. But if we look at what’s underlying how we do our jobs, really the basics of IT have not changed. What I still do every day is I wake up curious. I wake up wanting to solve a new problem. And that combination of curiosity and
problem solving skills, I think is what’s gonna drive success, would have driven success five, 10 years ago, and will drive success today in today’s AI world. And so I wouldn’t let the scary market dynamics or the job markets, if you’re a really curious individual who’s good at problem solving, you have a future in IT.
Beau Hamilton (40:39.764)
Well said, well said. think that extends beyond just IT, right? you have good problem-solving skills are increasingly harder to come by. think you have these second brains that people are relying on more often than ever. so you’re able to get information, but able to act on it is a whole different sort of task that lot of people haven’t been able to figure out. not to get too doom and gloomy or big picture or get off context, but I am genuinely curious to see how this unfolds, especially for the youngins out there growing up and utilizing this technology more more often. I grew up in the Google age, and there are some of regrets around that I have personally with just relying on Google for searching for information. And the lack of retention, think, is a thing that I kind of struggle with. So these LLMs, and these chatbots and this AI age has its own sort of set of challenges that I think people got to grapple with.
Steve Petryschuk (40:59.32)
Yeah, that challenge and that change is actually what gets me excited about the future of IT, right? Like there’s always change, always a new challenge. And that’s what keeps things interesting. And why I think I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, that’s what drives me to stay involved in the IT industry is that this change, this constant change, this constant new challenges gives you something new. And that’s, think, a good thing for us where we can continue to adapt and to change and to see what’s going be around the corner.
Beau Hamilton (41:20.63)
Yeah, I would totally agree with that. And I think another factor to consider, just like with any business, is the people running it, right? Just hearing from yourself, hearing how passionate you are and knowledgeable about the subject and how genuinely curious you are and how you’re working on implementing a lot of these tools and staying ahead of the latest trends, I think is important. So that’s why I just love having these conversations, right? You kind of see the people behind the scenes.
So I’m hoping that listeners got a lot out of this conversation and learned something new about the network monitoring and Auvik. So for those interested, I’m curious, Steve, where should they go to learn more about Auvik, maybe get in touch with your team? And I hear there might be a free trial too. Is that right?
Steve Petryschuk (42:10.419)
That’s right. So the best way to evaluate, think if you’re in the mind frame of, I’m looking for a new network mining solution, whether you’re one of those, I’ve never had one before and thinking of switching, or sorry, never had one before and thinking of adding it in, or have one and thinking of switching, the best thing to do is to get your hands dirty and to try it out. And so Avik does have a free trial that you can go in, download, download our collector, deploy, see that automated discovery, see how easy it is to set up in under an hour. And so can head to auvik.com/sourceforge and you can pick up a free trial there and start your discovery.
Beau Hamilton (42:43.758)
Awesome. All right, you heard Steve first. Get a 14-day free trial. auvik.com/sourceforge. Link will be in the description to learn more. All right, Steve, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for all the insights. Really appreciate it.
Steve Petryschuk (42:51.7)
Thanks for having me. It’s really fun.
Beau Hamilton (42:53.015)
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software-related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.