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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (6th), 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 3.5%, up 2.6% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 14.8% mindshare, down 23.5% since last year.
Event Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact3.5%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management12.8%
OpsRamp10.7%
Other73.0%
Event Monitoring
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud14.8%
Opsgenie9.4%
Rootly7.2%
Other68.6%
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

"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."
"The solution is great at being able to fetch almost any kind of file."
"The stability has been very good for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact, rated around eight or nine."
"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."
"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."
"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"The alerts are immediate in this solution, which allows us to respond to errors quickly."
"It has scaled well for us."
"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."
"PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable."
"PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted my organization by helping in faster incident detection and resolution with less downtime."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to be immediately paged when a system or service is down, enabling us to quickly respond and provide updates to the organization on issues and their resolution."
 

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."
"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."
"IBM is not investing in the development of the on-premise version of this solution."
"I would suggest that the calling service could be adjusted since if a system goes down, the user receives continuous calls, which can be overwhelming."
"I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"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."
"PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically. Our other rules continue to work once they're configured, but the roster must be added manually."
"Even though PagerDuty Operations Cloud is a strong platform, many things can be improved."
 

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 price is very high."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"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."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"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."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
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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 Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise26
 

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?
There was no relationship between setup cost and other factors.
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
The system is very smooth right now.
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
We receive a notification if there are any failed jobs or operations. We have some Bamboo agents working, so if one of the jobs fails on one of these servers, PagerDuty Operations Cloud creates an ...
 

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, OpsRamp and others in Event Monitoring. Updated: January 2026.
880,954 professionals have used our research since 2012.