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IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management 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 NetCool OMNIbus
Ranking in Event Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (11th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th), AIOps (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus is 6.5%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is 11.8%, down from 19.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow IT Operations Management11.8%
IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus6.5%
Other81.7%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

RS
EMEA Senior Sales Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Customization and robust network monitoring enhance operational efficiency
The most useful functions for monitoring purposes with IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus are that it can be automated in many ways. Most importantly, it can communicate with many network components without requiring any medium connectors. You can directly integrate it if you have SNMP, which is great. The main benefits that IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus provides are that it's an umbrella tool that can be placed on top of any existing monitoring system. You can monitor the entire network from this tool. The underlying interfaces can be many, but you can keep it as a single tool in IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus and it can manage the load on its own. It negates the need to train the user base with other tools. I can provide this single tool and have hundreds of different tools underlying, but I only need to train one single user base, which is a great advantage.
reviewer2755671 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Significant enhancement in operations with powerful discovery and analytics, yet pricing structure poses challenges
ServiceNow IT Operations Management provides out-of-the-box dashboards. Along with the dashboard, it also provides the Operations Workspace, which is very useful for operations teams. There is a functionality called Performance Analytics, which we are also using to develop some dashboards for the senior leadership and operations team where they can perform trend analysis of alerts and events happening across the infrastructure and application landscape. These dashboards are really useful here. ServiceNow IT Operations Management's biggest plus point is that it is a platform. ITOM is just one module that ServiceNow IT Operations Management offers, but they provide seamless integration of ITOM with their other modules such as ITSM, where we can leverage the AIs for discovery, perform impact analysis, which essentially helps to enhance the overall IT operations and reduce the downtime and MTTR.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The biggest plus points for me are the configurability and scalability of the solution, as well as the multi-tenancy of the platform."
"Very stable tool and good for all types of event integration and automation."
"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 customer-centric; customers can access the event list from their location or desktop and view the event, with 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."
"Difficult to implement ( more resource and timing) but flexibility in implementation."
"This solution is highly scalable; we have hundreds of probes running on more than thousands of devices, gathering millions of alarms and creating thousands of tickets, and yet we have never seen any performance issue."
"The monitoring is the solution's most valuable feature."
"I am impressed with the tool's ability to track information in an easy way."
"The solution is very capable and user friendly."
"The solution allows you to subscribe to the all required ITSM modules, asset discovery and service mapping on a single platform, its guided setup provides easy implementation process and I found these features most valuable."
"The main and best thing about ServiceNow IT Operations Management is that it helps to organize user management tickets in an organized form."
"Before that, if a switch went down, we'd get 600 tickets; now, we get only one."
"Our ROI since implementing ServiceNow ITOM has been significant."
"It is a very stable solution."
"It has been very useful for tracking, it has evolved a lot over time, and there is a single pane of glass where you can track and see everything."
 

Cons

"The cost of the product is quite high. They should work to adjust their pricing models."
"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 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."
"I would like for the next release to be more user-friendly and out of date."
"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 web portal and typical event controls are a little outdated."
"IBM support is a bust; Zenoss support is good."
"The security policies could be increased."
"At times, it got cumbersome from the project management perspective."
"I advise others not to customize a lot while using the solution."
"The tool can be improved by including more detailed information to assist new users."
"At times, it got cumbersome from the project management perspective. It could have been because of the way we were using it. I found Microsoft Project to be more extensive and robust than ITOM."
"In providing for customers, I think that the cost of ServiceNow is quite high."
"There is room for improvement in service mapping within ServiceNow ITOM."
"ServiceNow IT Operations Management is not very affordable. It is affordable for organizations with a minimum of 5,000 users plus."
 

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."
"ServiceNow IT Operations Management is a costly solution. I'd rate the price at ten, on a scale from one to ten with one being the lowest and ten being the highest price. Some clients do have a problem with the price, but most find that the solution is worth the cost."
"It is moderately expensive. The pricing itself and the licensing options are depending on the model and the customization."
"The solution is costly compared to the products offered by its competitors."
"It is expensive. It is around 10 Euros per server per month."
"The cost of ServiceNow is much higher."
"I would rate the product's pricing a five out of ten since there are vendors who are cheaper."
"While not entirely sure, I believe the solution costs at least a million dollars annually."
"We obtained discovery licenses at about seven dollars Australian per unit, which we found to be reasonable and competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
14%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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 Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise27
 

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 ServiceNow IT Operations Management?
It is definitely high-priced compared to other products available in the same domain in the market.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow IT Operations Management?
We don't use the orchestration part of ServiceNow IT Operations Management here. The CMDB part of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is a little bit too complicated, and it is a bit slow at our co...
What is your primary use case for ServiceNow IT Operations Management?
We are customers of ServiceNow IT Operations Management, using it for the ticketing systems and user management and change management. Change management and user management are the major use cases ...
 

Also Known As

Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus
ServiceNow ITOM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Consolidated Communications, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Capgemini
servicenow, TransAlta, NATS, Symantec
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.