Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
14th
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 (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager is 3.4%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 9.1%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SCOM9.1%
IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager3.4%
Other87.5%
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

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the efficiency."
"The solution primarily drives system information, and I believe it works fine."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.​"
"We have found the scalability capabilities to be okay."
"SCOM's most valuable features are the network path feature, reporting, and integration with business intelligence."
"The solution is used for monitoring the hardware inventory. For instance, it helps with the whole operational monitoring view for the company's infrastructure."
"The product has helped our organization with in-depth monitoring."
"It's easy to use."
"This is a product that does more generally than any of the competing solutions."
 

Cons

"This application should be made easier to use because it usually needs training and it is not easy to operate."
"They could provide better dashboards, detailed logs, and reports crucial for monitoring services in real-time."
"SCOM needs to improve its usability."
"Third-party tools have had to be created to make SCOM management pack creation more efficient and effective. However, this weighs down the application as it just adds a resource requirement, which is ballooning the size of the necessary storage and all that for essentially substandard components."
"System Center just provided upgrade and update features for Windows clients, and Windows systems, and did not support Linux, Android, or iOS, and other operating systems. They need to provide better integration with other operating systems if they don't already."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"It lacks certain details that other products do better, like granular access and better application monitoring."
"The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved."
"SCOM is not as straightforward in terms of user interface or general experience, which could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"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."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"The platform is cost-effective due to our existing Microsoft support."
"SCOM's pricing is average."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Event Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

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 do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
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...
 

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: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.