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IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager vs SCOM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

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 Business Service...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SCOM
Ranking in Event Monitoring
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager is 4.9%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 9.6%, up from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM9.6%
IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager4.9%
Other85.5%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer847356 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Good technical support, and efficient for working with business data
We use this solution for working with data. The most valuable feature of this solution is the efficiency. This application should be made easier to use because it usually needs training and it is not easy to operate. We have been using this solution for fourteen years. The stability of this…
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"TBSM is a rock, and our house would have crumbled without it."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the efficiency."
"SCOM should be a good choice for fresh IT environments based on Windows servers or switching from open-source monitoring tools."
"The solution is used for monitoring the hardware inventory. For instance, it helps with the whole operational monitoring view for the company's infrastructure."
"Setting up SCOM is straightforward and takes about an hour as long as you have all your firewalls and DNS settings in place."
"It discovers the components automatically, which is a fantastic thing."
"SCOM will allow you to go from firefighting mode to a more proactive stance when finding issues."
"SCOM provides alerting capabilities and threshold settings, which are helpful for monitoring."
"We were supporting a bank infrastructure using SCOM, and their application availability improved a lot as we had the real time monitoring of the applications due to which application issues were fixed before the end user comes up and complains."
"The System Center 2012 R2 is really powerful, all products work great together, is not so expensive anymore, easy to license, and can cover from end to end (Networking, Hardware layer, OS, App and services, ports, etc.)."
 

Cons

"This application should be made easier to use because it usually needs training and it is not easy to operate."
"Yes, Event Storms and other less traumatic triggers the JVM to hang requiring recycles."
"The solution’s initial setup is difficult."
"Areas for improvement in my opinion are the resource footprint of the SCOM infrastructure side, the web console (drop Silverlight please!) and a few of the management packs."
"The console is a point to improve, because it is very heavy and a web console should be in HTML5."
"Almost always, these alert storms can put IT managers and operators off the product and give the impression that everything is broken or not working properly, so making them easier to work with will help SCOM administrators (especially if they are new to SCOM) manage and understand what the product is showing them."
"SCOM needs to improve its usability."
"The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department."
"Monitoring non Microsoft products and 3rd party applications."
"The management of the servers could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"SCOM's pricing is average."
"It is more expensive than the competition."
"If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"Two customers bought the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and paid for Software Assurance. But few customers don't buy it for Software Assurance. They just buy it and deploy it, and they think that we will be using it for the next five years."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
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908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
What is your primary use case for SCOM?
My usual use case for SCOM is as an administrator role where I create reports and provide system configuration for Linux and installation of the SCOM agent. I handle deploying and upgrading the age...
 

Also Known As

Tivoli Business Service Manager, BSM
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SSGC
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.