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IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud 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 NetCool Impact
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (9th)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (5th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (1st), AIOps (6th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st), Autonomous Operational Resilience (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact and PagerDuty Operations Cloud aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact is designed for Event Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 3.9%, up 2.9% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 11.2% mindshare, down 21.3% since last year.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact3.9%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management9.7%
SCOM9.3%
Other77.1%
Event Monitoring
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud11.2%
Opsgenie7.8%
Rootly6.0%
Other75.0%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Hennie Du Toit - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Specialist Architecture and Governance at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Event management strengthens with automation but needs better event flooding handling
Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal with that. Better root cause correlation and faster processing for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be helpful. If there can be more end-to-end functionality, such as observability tools built in natively, that would be great. With correlation, IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact has many functions, but we've built them custom-built. Functions such as automated logging, automated dispatching, and automated notification of engineers could be native in the tool.
NS
Senior SRE at IBM
Automated incident workflows have transformed on-call operations and improved response times
Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case. The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning curve to understand the platform. With many new members, they need training to set up runbook workflows, event orchestration, and manage complex on-call schedules across 23 services, making it a challenge for new users. Additionally, I feel the web interface requires improvements. I would rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten because the cons include a complex configuration process and high costs for each add-on that I try to obtain, making subscriptions costly, along with limited customization in certain incident workflows. The primary reasons for rating it an eight include the complex configuration which makes it challenging for new users, as well as their difficulty in setting up advanced runbook workflows and managing complex on-call setups. The web user interface also requires improvement. Although I receive alerts via the mobile app, which is beneficial for handling schedule maintenance, the same features should be added to the web interface. Customization issues persist, such as the inability to clone entire schedules as part of the workflows, and I want to keep incidents open for a specified duration, neither of which I can currently customize. Thus, I raised a ticket with PagerDuty Operations Cloud to address these concerns. Furthermore, the cost is high, making it one of the more expensive incident management solutions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability has been very good for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact, rated around eight or nine."
"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."
"The operational views and third party connections to fetch the data and to help engage on more activities are the most valuable aspects of the solution."
"I can recommend Netcool/Impact because it's the perfect solution when it comes to invoking ISPF APA and using ISPF integration throughout the rest of your other products."
"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."
"The solution is great at being able to fetch almost any kind of file."
"The most valuable feature that comes with Netcool/Impact is the ISPF APA support. It is inherent to Netcool/Impact, so I can use the ISPF of any other product, which I can invoke and consume through Impact, and do integrations, which is great. I run the Netcool desktop application so I can integrate with other applications in the ticketing system. It's a great ability being able to invoke ISPF and integrate."
"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."
"A cool feature is that it helps us to understand the flow of the alert. If the alert was coming to the current on-call and he didn't catch the call or didn't notice it for any reason, it starts being escalated automatically, according to the escalation schedule, or to other teammates. You can see the flow very easily on your phone or via the website, if you want to do a post-mortem."
"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."
"The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud helps us monitor systems effectively, and we have not had any escalations to date."
"All of our on-call hand-offs are now fully automated with the scheduling system inside PagerDuty."
"Because of the alert mechanism, our support technicians are prompted about support cases at risk."
"PagerDuty let us set up rosters based on our shifts. We could assign a hierarchy for how the calls should be escalated and the number of times the call will be transferred between people before it is answered. It makes it easy to access an agent via mobile phone."
"It has scaled well for us."
 

Cons

"For improvement, I'd say the dashboard and the overall GUI could use some work. Although, I don't think that there's much improvement that Netcool really needs to achieve in this area, because when we're talking GUI, Impact is able to integrate with any third-party system and it comes with ISPF APA. It's more beneficial than Netcool/OMNIbus in this respect, and it's quite easy to handle."
"IBM is not investing in the development of the on-premise version of this solution."
"Stability-wise, this product needs to be improved."
"The stability of this solution is somewhat less than other similar products that I have used."
"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."
"For improvement, I'd say the dashboard and the overall GUI could use some work."
"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."
"Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal with that."
"There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule... It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process."
"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it."
"I have observed that MTTR is very slow, and wrong escalation sometimes routes alerts to the wrong team rather than the proper team."
"Some of the UX needs some help for better flow of actions - however I can understand the reasoning behind how some of the UI is laid and how you need to go an extra step to trigger actions."
"I rate the platform an 8 out of 10 because, as mentioned, there could be better ways of creating incidents or using a phone number to contact someone who is on call."
"One way PagerDuty Operations Cloud could improve is through the scheduling feature, which can be tricky, especially with complex schedules."
"The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is yearly, and although I'm happy with the pricing I do think it could be better."
"Licensing of IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact depends on the number of nodes on the element that you are monitoring."
"They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"If we wanted phone calls or additional SMSs, we would have to pitch up for those. They give us so many per month per user, then we have to pay extra if it goes over that."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
12%
Retailer
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Performing Arts
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise37
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?
Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal wit...
What is your primary use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact is our event management tool, specifically the umbrella fault management tool set. All of our events across the network correlate the data for us, and we have certain use ...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?
We remain a partner with IBM Tivoli and continue using their products. We use IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact's AIOps functionality. We experienced some skills issues, but currently receive assistance fr...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for PagerDuty Operations Cloud is good and easy to understand.
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
I do not have anything that I dislike about PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Sometimes it hangs and occasionally I am unable to open PagerDuty Operations Cloud, which occurs due to an outage or similar ...
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
The major part of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is for communication and pinging people and engaging them and pulling them into the call.
 

Also Known As

Tivoli NetCool Impact
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Claranet, Consolidated Communications, Telus, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Telekom Srbija, Bendigo Community Telco, Capgemini, Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB)
40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, BMC Helix, IBM and others in Event Monitoring. Updated: March 2026.
891,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.