IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud comparison

The compared IBM and PagerDuty solutions aren't in the same category. IBM is ranked #5 in EM , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 10.2% mindshare in the category. PagerDuty is ranked #1 in IMS , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 20.5% mindshare. Additionally, 78% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of PagerDuty users who would recommend it.

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

Read 14 IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus reviews

1,129 Views
383 Comparison Views

78% willing to recommend

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Read 37 PagerDuty Operations Cloud reviews

2,249 Views
1,385 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus and PagerDuty Operations Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, BMC, OpsRamp and others in Event Monitoring.

To learn more, read our detailed Event Monitoring Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Event Monitoring

May 2025

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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

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Event Monitoring (5th)

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (13th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (1st), AIOps (9th), 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 10.2%, up 8.6% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 20.5% mindshare, down 29.9% since last year.

Event Monitoring

IT Alerting and Incident Management

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Salman

Performance & Monitoring Supervisor at Saudi Telecom Company

Aids in network performance monitoring and management

I am working as a customer, mainly using IntelliQ and another product, IBM NetCool, Watson AI. These products are used for monitoring network performance and management. The primary use case involves network performance monitoring, and it is compatible only with IBM DB2 IBM Tivoli NetCool…

Read full review

JeremyEmmett

Sr Director - Global Support APJ at HashiCorp

Centralized alert management with customizable routing and superior scheduling

Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability to build customized modules would be advantageous, allowing organizations to define their own integration modules. It would be useful to have a way to define all configurations in code that is similar to how Terraform operates.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus supports legacy protocols like CORBA, Huawei, and other telecom protocols, which I find beneficial."

"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."

"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 monitoring is the solution's most valuable feature."

"The biggest plus points for me are the configurability and scalability of the solution, as well as the multi-tenancy of the platform."

"It is an easy-to-use solution."

"OMNIbus is valuable for its compatibility and performance, as I haven't encountered any performance issues."

More IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus pros

"PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable."

"A cool feature is that it helps us to understand the flow of the alert. If the alert was coming to the current on-call and he didn't catch the call or didn't notice it for any reason, it starts being escalated automatically, according to the escalation schedule, or to other teammates. You can see the flow very easily on your phone or via the website, if you want to do a post-mortem."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The initial setup is a simple process."

"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."

"The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO, the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting."

"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."

"PagerDuty's best features are the dedicated application that allows me to reach my engineers immediately and the ability to directly assign specific tasks to individuals and have them report back."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud pros

Cons

"Its technical support team takes longer to reply."

"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."

"The cost of the product is quite high. They should work to adjust their pricing models."

"The web portal and typical event controls are a little outdated."

"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."

"There should be an easier-to-understand model, more of a flat-structured model rather than different tiers of licenses which complicates licensing."

"They could enhance the visibility to give us a unified view of our entire IT infrastructure."

"The solution has limitations in database integration as it cannot integrate with databases other than IBM DB2."

More IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus cons

"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."

"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."

"The On-Call Teams feature could be better in terms of levels of conditions related to which team or member should get the responsibility of handling a matter or incident."

"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."

"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."

"Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it."

"There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule... It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process."

"I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is a costly solution."

"You have to have the right level of budget to afford this solution."

"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."

"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."

"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."

"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."

"The cost is based on the package you select."

"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 solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."

"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

18%

Energy/Utilities Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?

If the various HW elements are from the same vendor, a monitoring solution provided by that vendor or its partners will potentially result in lower licensing and operational costs. Moreover, for ve...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?

IBM is working on converting NetCool to NetCool Operations Insight, which runs on Watson AI. There were areas needing improvement in terms of AI, however, they have migrated the entire NetCool suit...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus?

OMNIbus is used for alert processing and deduplication of alarms. It is used for performing certain actions on any alarm processed through NetCool. It serves as a core component for action triggers...

See all answers

What do you like most about PagerDuty?

The product easily integrates with other solutions.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?

The solution was expensive, but if all its features were utilized, it was considered worth the cost. The tier-based pricing model was cumbersome, and there was a desire for a service-based catalog ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PagerDuty?

See all answers

Comparisons

ServiceNow IT Operations Management vs IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

Compared 29% of the time

IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact vs IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

Compared 17% of the time

ScienceLogic vs IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

Compared 11% of the time

SCOM vs IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

Compared 10% of the time

BigPanda vs IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

Compared 9% of the time

More IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus Competitors

Opsgenie vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 20% of the time

Rootly vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 18% of the time

Everbridge IT Alerting vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 9% of the time

BigPanda vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

June 2025

Download IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus product report

Buyer's Guide

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

May 2025

Download PagerDuty Operations Cloud product report

Also Known As

Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus

No data available

Overview

Tivoli Netcool OMNIbus provides near real-time service assurance for business infrastructure, applications, servers, network devices and protocols, Internet protocols, storage and security devices.

IBM

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the platform for mission-critical, time-critical operations work in the modern enterprise. Through the power of AI and automation, it detects and diagnoses disruptive events, mobilizes the right team members to respond, and streamlines infrastructure and workflows across your digital operations. The Operations Cloud is essential infrastructure for revolutionizing digital operations to compete and win as a modern digital business.

PagerDuty Features

PagerDuty has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

650+ integrations
Alerting
Native apps with push notifications
On-call duty scheduling
Automatic escalation of alerts
Reliable, distributed architecture
Incident reporting
Real-time monitoring
Network analysis
Issue tracking
Access controls/permissions
Service Level Agreement (SLA) management

PagerDuty Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing PagerDuty. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Ideal for developers: With the PagerDuty solution, developers can spend more time focused on code. The solution’s powerful automation and noise reduction capabilities minimize interruptions and mobilize the right team in seconds.

Security incident response: Because of its integration ecosystem, PagerDuty enables you to respond to threats faster, tighten up security vulnerabilities, and get better cross-team visibility.

Critical event management: The solution makes it possible for your organization to get your crisis management team up and running quickly, keep all your business leaders and stakeholders informed in critical moments, and limit any disruptions that could impact your reputation or core business.

Service ownership: PagerDuty’s service ownership allows you to give everyone more autonomy, boost accountability, and minimize the impact of issues by quickly pulling in the right responder every time.

CollabOps: With this solution, you can integrate with chat and video tools like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Doing so makes it easier to contain incidents quickly, avoid manual errors, and streamline work across DevOps, CSOps, BizOps, and ITOps organizations.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the PagerDuty solution.

Brandon J., Director of engineering at a wellness & fitness company, says, "The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."

PeerSpot reviewer Pramodh M., DevSecOps Consultant at a tech services company, comments, “The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable. There is a flexible and easy way of integrating with monitoring tools. It allows us to configure the integration with APIs and plugins as well.”

Syed Mohammad A., Vice President - Operations and Client Services at a financial services firm, mentions, "PagerDuty let us set up rosters based on our shifts. We could assign a hierarchy for how the calls should be escalated and the number of times the call will be transferred between people before it is answered. It makes it easy to access an agent via mobile phone."

A Principal Architect at an energy/utilities company states, “The most important feature that is used is call scheduling. We are also able to actually call IT folks in the case of an emergency.”

PagerDuty

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

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