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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
55
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 solution is great at being able to fetch almost any kind of file."
"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."
"The stability has been very good for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact, rated around eight or nine."
"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."
"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."
"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."
"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."
"It is stable, it is rapidly growing, and all the features are being built in a stable way for the users to work with."
"Obviously, scheduling the calls is a valuable feature."
"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted our organization by accelerating incident response and reducing MTTR by up to 27%, and we are also integrating AI and ML into PagerDuty Operations Cloud."
"The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"PagerDuty integrates well with many other monitoring applications, it provides us with a centralized view of what can be configured in terms of escalations, and who's on call."
"Afterwards, we didn't want to get rid of it."
 

Cons

"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."
"The stability of this solution is somewhat less than other similar products that I have used."
"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."
"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."
"It is a very non-customizable product, so you cannot add things like root cause analysis or the classification of incidents based on the area where you are getting more incidents. For example, if you're getting a lot of database issues, that may be an are you want to probe."
"PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically."
"They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"The solution's analytics are okay. I don't think the features, at this point, give you a lot of insights. We have actually been trying to get insights from it but it hasn't really given us a lot of extra points to explore. We were looking at the number of alerts to see where many of the alerts were coming from. We never managed to get many insights on this."
"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."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing of IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact depends on the number of nodes on the element that you are monitoring."
"The licensing is yearly, and although I'm happy with the pricing I do think it could be better."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"The price is very high."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
Retailer
10%
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 Business16
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise36
 

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?
Using GenAI, PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be very much helpful. If the noise of alerting can be reduced, that is something which I believe was impacting so much. That is one of the things I reall...
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
My main use case of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is in incident management . If there was any issue that occurred, I used to be the point of contact to resolve that particular issue, and in some case...
 

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.
886,576 professionals have used our research since 2012.