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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 (14th), 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 9.2%, up 8.8% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 22.5% mindshare, down 30.5% 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

"Offers very good event/alert drill-down and statistical reporting capabilities."
"IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus supports legacy protocols like CORBA, Huawei, and other telecom protocols, which I find beneficial."
"It's good for managed systems. The end query on the user interface is good. You can view lots of charts and graphs."
"OMNIbus is valuable for its compatibility and performance, as I haven't encountered any performance issues."
"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 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."
"It is an easy-to-use solution."
"The most valuable feature is the event management capability."
"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."
"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 of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"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."
"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."
"Notification is the most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"The web portal and typical event controls are a little outdated."
"The solution needs to invest in the development of a knowledge base and use of AI services for providing event resolution and intervention directions."
"The solution has limitations in database integration as it cannot integrate with databases other than IBM DB2."
"Its technical support team takes longer to reply."
"The cost of the product is quite high. They should work to adjust their pricing models."
"They could enhance the visibility to give us a unified view of our entire IT infrastructure."
"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."
"There should be an easier-to-understand model, more of a flat-structured model rather than different tiers of licenses which complicates licensing."
"PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform."
"The user interface could be more intuitive."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule... It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process."
"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"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 could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a costly 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."
"You have to have the right level of budget to afford this solution."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"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."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"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 price is very high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
17%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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: February 2025.
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