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IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager vs SCOM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Tivoli Business Service...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SCOM
Ranking in Event Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 7.4%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

RH
The most valuable feature for my team is the ability to taken event feeds from all/any source tool and put them in a single pane of glass. It's being replaced for our work by another Tivoli tool.
TBSM is being replaced for our work by another Tivoli tool - DASH. This replacement will address the biggest area of improvement. We need the most commonly leveraged real-time metric trends from the source tools in the same pane of glass as the event stream is presenting, and DASH gives a way to do that with logical grouping by type & app.
MarcMermuys - PeerSpot reviewer
Has efficient monitoring with robust integration capabilities
We use SCOM to configure different monitors using several management packs. It integrates systems like Active Directory and correlates them, and it is used for monitoring and managing systems SCOM allows integration of several systems, providing correlation between different systems such as…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the efficiency."
"I like the historical reporting of observer metrics."
"Because it's Windows-based, it actually reports quite well. It reports everything you can think of on the Windows server and allows you to monitor anything. It's excellent for those in the Windows world as it's very good at it."
"I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time."
"The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location."
"We have found the scalability capabilities to be okay."
"SCOM provides alerting capabilities and threshold settings, which are helpful for monitoring."
"It works better than other products I’ve used – namely SolarWinds, which is cumbersome and error prone for web app monitoring. SCOM is not."
"SCOM has improved our organization by simplifying the monitoring process. The system tells you what the bi-weekly or monthly usage was and that enables us to report this information to the manager. It shows if there was a connectivity issue that needs to be fixed and it's easier to concentrate on what needs to get fixed. System errors, therefore, get fixed faster."
 

Cons

"This application should be made easier to use because it usually needs training and it is not easy to operate."
"Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement."
"They can focus more on cloud monitoring instead of on-premise monitoring. We should be able to monitor cloud-related applications. They can include this feature in the next release. If it is in the cloud, we can have scalability by using Kubernetes. The container is containerized, packaged, and managed using Kubernetes. This feature is not there in SCOM. Going forward, if they can focus on that, it will be great."
"The GI is difficult to work with and the reporting servers are also difficult."
"I would like more customized reports. People should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately."
"I would like to see more standard libraries for the market solutions, out of the box, that you don't need to do a lot of work on."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"The configurations could be better. There are multiple tests where you can do something, but they can be a trigger as well. The overriding methodologies are not that easy. The configurations are difficult. The configuration and thorough day-to-day operations to get them to the level you want takes some time. It's very difficult."
"It could use some system enhancements, such as better dashboards."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is more expensive than the competition."
"I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"Two customers bought the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and paid for Software Assurance. But few customers don't buy it for Software Assurance. They just buy it and deploy it, and they think that we will be using it for the next five years."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"SCOM's pricing is average."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
SCOM is not as straightforward in terms of user interface or general experience, which could be improved. Additionally, I would like to see a software-as-a-service version in Azure to eliminate the...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Tivoli Business Service Manager, BSM
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

SSGC
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.