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IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server 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
4th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus is 7.0%, down from 9.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 3.9%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus7.0%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server3.9%
Other89.1%
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.
reviewer2317098 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers effective monitoring of resources but lacks the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.
We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes We've set up alerts to notify us when performance deviates from the baseline we've configured for each resource. So, whenever that happens, we get an alert and can investigate immediately. So,…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's good for managed systems. The end query on the user interface is good. You can view lots of charts and graphs."
"The biggest plus points for me are the configurability and scalability of the solution, as well as the multi-tenancy of the platform."
"OMNIbus is valuable for its compatibility and performance, as I haven't encountered any performance issues."
"It also offers us everything we need in terms of features and functionality."
"Difficult to implement ( more resource and timing) but flexibility in implementation."
"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."
"Offers very good event/alert drill-down and statistical reporting capabilities."
"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."
"Baselining our SQL Servers has made a huge impact."
"We're able to diagnose issues prior to their actually becoming issues. Without the alerting, we wouldn't have a clue as to what was going to happen. With the alerting, it gives us a heads-up that a specific threshold has been met, and we need to take specific action."
"The ability to go back and look at historical data is the most valuable feature."
"Overall, it has allowed us to do more with database management and run more databases on a given server, because we're able to isolate issues quicker and take the proactive steps necessary to correct them."
"Ability to identify bottlenecks, deadlocks and slow running queries and run monthly and daily reports."
"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."
"The best part of SQL DM is the ability to customize alerts and counters. This allows our team to find an issue then alert on the issue at a granular level."
"The most valuable features are disk space projections for planning, and also the Snapshotting ability, to look back in time, to see what was going on the server at a particular time. It's basically the output of an sp_who2."
 

Cons

"I would like for the next release to be more user-friendly and out of date. The next release should focus on the cloud, AI, and ML technologies."
"They could enhance the visibility to give us a unified view of our entire IT infrastructure."
"IBM support is a bust; Zenoss support is good."
"A lot can be improved in this product considering the performance."
"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."
"Its technical support team takes longer to reply."
"There should be an easier-to-understand model, more of a flat-structured model rather than different tiers of licenses which complicates licensing."
"The solution needs to invest in the development of a knowledge base and use of AI services for providing event resolution and intervention directions."
"Tech support has been okay, not that great, but they made sure that we got what we were looking for."
"Scalability is what I mentioned earlier, regarding room for improvement. It doesn't seem to scale out to an environment as large as ours, with just a single monitoring server."
"I'm going to do an upgrade which may resolve my issues, but one area for improvement is its ability to handle the amount of data that we collect with it. We're likely one of the largest installations, with over 300 servers being collected with this product, and sometimes there are gaps. That would really be my only concern, in terms of how the data is collected and stored, for consistency."
"Some more granularity in alerting."
"We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better. Also, in terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing."
"The initial setup gives too many user rights to the server, so you have to put a user that is part administrator's group - that's the preferred way - on each server, which is kind of a risk. You want to do least privilege and you're not doing that."
"They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task."
"Reporting and overall analysis of data gathered from SQL Server."
 

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 pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."
"We were upgraded to Premium Support without their actually asking us, when we were quoted. Then I asked for Standard Support and that they had to re-quote us that. But they don't do that by default. They upcharge you by default, which I didn't think was very nice, without even asking."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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 Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
 

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.
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Also Known As

Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus
IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Consolidated Communications, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Capgemini
Padnos, University of Notre Dame, D4, Infeon Technologies, Chevron, LC Waikiki, Sisters of Saint Francis Health Services, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CVE, Colorado State University, St. Charles, Chaucer PLC, 1-800-Flowers, Ancoris, Money Management, National Opinion Research Center, California Department of Health, Plexus; Aviva, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CBS, Comcast, Google, Merck, Regions Financial, Schneider Electric, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon Communications, Zurich Financial Services
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,942 professionals have used our research since 2012.