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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

"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 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 solution is great at being able to fetch almost any kind of file."
"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."
"The solution's most valuable features are that it adds each alert as a service, has good scheduling capabilities, and includes the ability to write logic based on texts."
"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"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 ensuring that our banking applications, which operate 24/7, remain functional and efficient, contributing to better service availability."
"Now, we don't have to think about it; we can simply set it up in PagerDuty and it works, with the escalation and everything still functioning reliably based on the configuration we set up six months to one year ago."
"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 most valuable feature is definitely the flexibility of the schedule. The mobile app is quite also good for what we do: for receiving alerts, acknowledging, assigning, adding new responders. It has rich features for our needs."
"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."
 

Cons

"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."
"Stability-wise, this product needs to be improved."
"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."
"PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."
"Even though PagerDuty Operations Cloud is a strong platform, many things can be improved."
"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."
"It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system."
"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."
"One suggestion for improving PagerDuty Operations Cloud is to provide more insights about incidents, such as root cause analysis or additional information, which could assist SRE teams in reducing remediation time and incident detection before jumping on a call."
 

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."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"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."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"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."
"The price is very high."
"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."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
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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: December 2025.
880,255 professionals have used our research since 2012.