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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
5.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (3rd)
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 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 7.2%, down 8.2% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 13.2% mindshare, down 22.8% since last year.
Event Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus7.2%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management11.7%
OpsRamp9.6%
Other71.5%
Event Monitoring
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud13.2%
Opsgenie9.0%
Rootly6.8%
Other71.0%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

SS
Senior Consultant AWS at Cognizant
Good GUI and accuracy in processing but needs automated incident management
There is a complex setup and configuration process. It requires experience. We've had integration capabilities. We have to assess the specific needs or objectives of the organization, including scaling of deployment, and integration points, before implementation. Then, we need to design the architecture, including server specification networks, configuration, and storage requirements. We also need to consider the environment setup, hardware, projecting, and virtual machines. We need to ensure that network settings, firewalls, and security protocols are configured to allow communication between the components. Once you have all of the requirements laid out, it will only take five to six hours to set up. It does depend on the level of connectivity. If you are connecting remotely, it may take a bit longer. I set it up for three environments: development, testing, and production. One person can set up the solution themselves. If you are doing a NetCool suite of products, it may take two to three resources. You may need to do some maintenance in terms of additional patching or upgrading.
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 useful functions for monitoring purposes with IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus are that it can be automated in many ways, and most importantly, it can communicate with many network components without requiring any medium connectors."
"The most valuable feature is the event management capability."
"OMNIbus is valuable for its compatibility and performance, as I haven't encountered any performance issues."
"Probes are the best feature because they are well written which rarely requires you to write additional rules. These probes monitor activity within your environment."
"It's good for managed systems. The end query on the user interface is good. You can view lots of charts and graphs."
"Offers very good event/alert drill-down and statistical reporting capabilities."
"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."
"The monitoring is the solution's most valuable feature."
"After implementing PagerDuty Operations Cloud's runbook automation, I have reduced the response time from over 20 minutes to less than two minutes, saving approximately 80 to 90 percent of the time and making mean time to resolve significantly faster."
"PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"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."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud positively impacts my organization by helping us win customer trust; when problems occur, the speed of our reaction and involvement with customers is crucial, and PagerDuty Operations Cloud facilitates quick responses to potential issues."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to be immediately paged when a system or service is down, enabling us to quickly respond and provide updates to the organization on issues and their resolution."
"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."
 

Cons

"The web portal and typical event controls are a little outdated."
"The cost of the product is quite high. They should work to adjust their pricing models."
"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."
"They could enhance the visibility to give us a unified view of our entire IT infrastructure."
"The solution needs to invest in the development of a knowledge base and use of AI services for providing event resolution and intervention directions."
"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."
"Its technical support team takes longer to reply."
"The solution has limitations in database integration as it cannot integrate with databases other than IBM DB2."
"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."
"They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product."
"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."
"More analytics can be brought into PagerDuty Operations Cloud; while I know there are some, they still seem basic to me, and having options for user-customized charts would be really helpful, especially in this GenAI world where prompts can yield valuable data."
"Even though PagerDuty Operations Cloud is a strong platform, many things can be improved."
"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."
"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."
 

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."
"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."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"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 solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Performing Arts
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
I would rate the pricing for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus as three, where one is a high price and ten is a low price.
What needs improvement with IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
Based on my experience and my colleagues' feedback, IBM can improve IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus in automation with respect to using AI, as it lacks considerably compared to other tools. The integrat...
What is your primary use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?
My current use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus is for monitoring the networks.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
I purchased PagerDuty Operations Cloud through AWS Marketplace while at Intel, and my experience has been positive regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing. I had around seven users part of it...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
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...
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
I have been working in my current field for over seven years as a DevOps and site reliability engineer, and my primary experience involves managing the reliability of infrastructure platforms hoste...
 

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 Helix, IBM and others in Event Monitoring. Updated: January 2026.
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