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IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus 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 OMNIbus
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (3rd)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (13th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (1st), AIOps (9th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus and PagerDuty Operations Cloud aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus is designed for Event Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 9.5%, up 8.7% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 22.1% mindshare, down 30.1% since last year.
Event Monitoring
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Salman - PeerSpot reviewer
Aids in network performance monitoring and management
I am working as a customer, mainly using IntelliQ and another product, IBM NetCool, Watson AI. These products are used for monitoring network performance and management.  The primary use case involves network performance monitoring, and it is compatible only with IBM DB2 IBM Tivoli NetCool…
JeremyEmmett - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized alert management with customizable routing and superior scheduling
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability to build customized modules would be advantageous, allowing organizations to define their own integration modules. It would be useful to have a way to define all configurations in code that is similar to how Terraform operates.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"OMNIbus is valuable for its compatibility and performance, as I haven't encountered any performance issues."
"The monitoring is the solution's most valuable feature."
"It is customer-centric. Customers can access the event list from their location or desktop and view the event. There is no need to go and connect to any other server and run events to have a view of all the events happening in the environment. We get a good response from customers about this feature and the main architecture of NetCool. Its processing is very good. Deduplication and correlation functionalities are good in this solution as compared to other solutions. A big advantage of NetCool is that it also supports multi-layered protocols. We can receive multiple events from different protocols like UDP, HTTP, and those events can be captured in NetCool."
"IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus supports legacy protocols like CORBA, Huawei, and other telecom protocols, which I find beneficial."
"The most valuable feature is the event management capability."
"It's good for managed systems. The end query on the user interface is good. You can view lots of charts and graphs."
"The biggest plus points for me are the configurability and scalability of the solution, as well as the multi-tenancy of the platform."
"It is an easy-to-use solution."
"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"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."
"It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise."
"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."
"The alerts are immediate in this solution, which allows us to respond to errors quickly."
"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"PagerDuty's notification process is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the phone app that allows us to send notifications without the additional fees when sending by SMS or phone calls."
 

Cons

"There should be an easier-to-understand model, more of a flat-structured model rather than different tiers of licenses which complicates licensing."
"Areas that could be better include the fact that the solution is only on-premises, lacks AI capabilities, and support response times could be quicker."
"The solution needs to invest in the development of a knowledge base and use of AI services for providing event resolution and intervention directions."
"They could enhance the visibility to give us a unified view of our entire IT infrastructure."
"The web portal and typical event controls are a little outdated."
"Its integration could be better. They should provide an easier integration for all the monitoring stuff, and it will make things easier for us. Currently, there is a complexity in integrating it with a vendor application, and we have to use another tool to integrate it with a vendor application. To integrate some applications with NetCool, I need to install an IBM tool on top of it. It would be good if they can provide an API or any kind of interface that we can leverage while developing a new protocol interface or application. We should be able to use an API or interface with NetCool. Its GUI can also be better. As compared to other tools, it is not user friendly, and it is not easy to do stuff through GUI. Whenever we do anything on the GUI, it takes time. They need to focus on the GUI part, especially the dashboard. They should focus on how users can effectively drill down from one box to another. The visual appeal of the dashboard is as important as the data and functionality."
"I would like for the next release to be more user-friendly and out of date. The next release should focus on the cloud, AI, and ML technologies."
"The solution has limitations in database integration as it cannot integrate with databases other than IBM DB2."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"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."
"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."
"The user interface could be more intuitive."
"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a costly solution."
"You have to have the right level of budget to afford this solution."
"Its license cost is a little bit more than other solutions. Our customers expect a standard market price that is comparative to other products. For each and every NetCool OMNIbus component, we have to purchase a separate license. These components are not free with the product."
"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."
"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 pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"The price is very high."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"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."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
18%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
The biggest plus points for me are the configurability and scalability of the solution, as well as the multi-tenancy of the platform.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
If the various HW elements are from the same vendor, a monitoring solution provided by that vendor or its partners will potentially result in lower licensing and operational costs. Moreover, for ve...
What needs improvement with IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
IBM is working on converting NetCool to NetCool Operations Insight, which runs on Watson AI. There were areas needing improvement in terms of AI, however, they have migrated the entire NetCool suit...
What do you like most about PagerDuty?
The product easily integrates with other solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
The solution was expensive, but if all its features were utilized, it was considered worth the cost. The tier-based pricing model was cumbersome, and there was a desire for a service-based catalog ...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability...
 

Also Known As

Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Consolidated Communications, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Capgemini
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, IBM and others in Event Monitoring. Updated: April 2025.
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