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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
7.1
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (5th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (1st), AIOps (7th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
 

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 3.8%, up 2.8% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 13.1% mindshare, down 21.7% since last year.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact3.8%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management11.8%
OpsRamp9.4%
Other75.0%
Event Monitoring
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud13.1%
Opsgenie9.1%
Rootly7.1%
Other70.7%
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

"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."
"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."
"The stability has been very good for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact, rated around eight or nine."
"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."
"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."
"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."
"PagerDuty's best features are the dedicated application that allows me to reach my engineers immediately and the ability to directly assign specific tasks to individuals and have them report back."
"Alert deduplication and noise reduction for alerts are the major features that I found useful."
"The valuable and useful features of PagerDuty Operations Cloud were reliable alert notifications, it was good for on-call scheduling, and the integration part was also quite very good with this application."
"After implementing PagerDuty Operations Cloud's runbook automation, I have reduced the response time from over 20 minutes to less than two minutes, saving approximately 80 to 90 percent of the time and making mean time to resolve significantly faster."
"Just the ability to be able to respond quicker to the issues that are coming up gives the company a better mean times resolution resolution, which is going to improve upon the return on investment for what we spend on PagerDuty."
"The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO, the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting."
"Because of the alert mechanism, our support technicians are prompted about support cases at risk."
"The best features that PagerDuty Operations Cloud offers are that it is user-friendly, the design is scalable, and it is quite easy to use for a newbie as well."
 

Cons

"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."
"Stability-wise, this product needs to be improved."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."
"IBM is not investing in the development of the on-premise version of this solution."
"The stability of this solution is somewhat less than other similar products that I have used."
"However, I hear from my manager that the pricing is very high for PagerDuty Operations Cloud, and only a few of us have the main business tier accounts."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"Smartphone App can be flaky sometimes."
"If I can avoid the 2 AM phone calls that would be perfect but I know that's not possible."
"I think the view on the website regarding how we see the chart and graph of who is on-call at what time could be improved."
"PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
"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 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."
 

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."
"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."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"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 solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Performing Arts
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise32
 

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?
Regarding pricing for PagerDuty Operations Cloud, I am currently a software engineer and a senior software engineer, so I do not handle the pricing aspect. However, I hear from my manager that the ...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be improved by adding more features. Whatever manual work is there could be automated using scripting. Then it would be more efficient. When we receive a call, it has...
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is used to understand whether there are false positives or false alerts because it is integrated into a system where there would be a phone number, such as anyone from th...
 

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.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.