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IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus 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 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
SCOM
Ranking in Event Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (13th)
 

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 SCOM is 9.1%, up from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus6.5%
SCOM9.1%
Other84.4%
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.
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

"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 also offers us everything we need in terms of features and functionality."
"It is an easy-to-use solution."
"Difficult to implement ( more resource and timing) but flexibility in implementation."
"Offers very good event/alert drill-down and statistical reporting capabilities."
"Overall, this is a great tool and one that I recommend but it depends on the cost."
"The most valuable feature is the event management capability."
"This is an amazing product and you will fall in love with it."
"It's a lot more powerful than people realize, and I believe people become dissatisfied with it because of the complicated setup, but once it's up and running, it's pretty amazing at what it can do."
"This is the main monitoring system for our company; we use it for monitoring, reporting, and analytics."
"We've had outages at two am and three am that was automatically resolved by SCOM saving us time and money."
"The solution's reporting engine has given me detailed information on which applications or services I've either failed or about to fail in terms of the predictive makeup on Azure cloud."
"SCOM provided end-to-end monitoring for all aspects of the infrastructure, including web sites, network devices, databases and applications."
"We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool, preventing various problems and resolving issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, which assists our department in being pro-active in resolving issues with servers and services rather than reactive."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of Windows and Linux servers."
"SCOM is capable of providing full-featured infrastructure monitoring, alerting and reporting, especially for Windows-centric production environments."
 

Cons

"The cost of the product is quite high. They should work to adjust their pricing models."
"I would like for the next release to be more user-friendly and out of date."
"The web portal and typical event controls are a little outdated."
"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."
"There should be an easier-to-understand model, more of a flat-structured model rather than different tiers of licenses which complicates licensing."
"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 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."
"Yes often problems appear after resolving a previous one."
"It would be nice to see the old MP Designer come back as you could quickly design and build a MP without a deep understanding of the XML code behind it."
"The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department."
"The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface."
"In a future release, they should add email notification alerts."
"Then there is also an issue with capacity and limited space. That is something that needs to be improved."
"Reporting could be improved, you get many reports out-of-box but they can be difficult to interpret and drill down into."
"Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement."
"I would like to see better support for monitoring Unix-based systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You have to have the right level of budget to afford this solution."
"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."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"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."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
14%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing 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 Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

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 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 NetCool OMNIbus
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Consolidated Communications, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Capgemini
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.