IBM Tivoli NetCool Reviews

Tivoli Netcool is being used for monitoring network and data center IT infrastructure.  

Currently, I am working on a contract for a customer with an on-premises solution using Netcool. I'm a contractor, so I work with various customers.  

Some of the things that I think are most valuable in this solution are:  

• The scalability in terms of the amount of monitoring it can handle.  
• The breadth in terms of the different applications, devices, protocols, et cetera, that it can monitor.  
• The scale, in terms of the number of monitoring events that it can handle.  
• The flexibility in terms of how you can tailor the solution to the particular requirements of the customer.  

The Netcool family of products features a lot of components for which the integration between them requires a considerable amount of expertise and time. From a customer perspective, it is quite an expensive solution to initially implement and then support.  

The product pricing itself is relatively competitive. It is more the skills that the user company needs to employ that run up the actual cost. In order to be able to implement it and maintain it properly, they need resources in terms of expertise, consultants, or very experienced permanent staff.  

There are many capabilities included in the wider product set but it seems that not much has really been developed or enhanced recently. Something I would like to see, and that should be possible, is allowing an easy way to model business services and show the health of business services. Netcool is already very good at monitoring individual components to look at the performance and availability of components, but it is not very easy to model complex business services that have multiple relationships or dependencies.  

We have been using the product for approximately 13 years now.  

There are always bugs and there are many fix packs released for the various components. But in general terms, I would say it is a fairly stable product. Some of the newer features around analytics have proved to have many bugs, but these features have been improved over the last couple of years. The base functionality is generally very stable, indeed.  

The product is easily scaled. In our current level of usage, we probably have anywhere up to 50 users in the system at any given time.  

The users are predominantly either in a sort of IT service desk capacity or in a sort of IT administrator category. Roles can vary.  

I have had experience contacting technical support for some issues. Once you get to level two and level three in IBM the support team, I find their level of expertise to be very good. Support can be problematic, though, if you find yourself predominantly dealing with the first level of technical support. It can take some time in order to get complex issues escalated. Once they are escalated, the issues are handled very well.  

Within the environment where I am doing the deployment, I would not know if they had been using another solution. I believe the current customer has used solutions in the past, but it is not something that I would have ever touched. The reason for the switch is that the company determined they needed a different solution to meet their needs.  

The basic installation is moderately complex, but all the further customization and integration that you need to do to make it fit your needs is very complex. It is not a product that somebody could easily pick up without any prior training or experience.  

This product is better installed with the help of integrators or consultants.  

I was brought in on this project for the implementation once the decision had already been made to adopt the Netcool solution. I am not aware of which products they chose to evaluate.  

My general advice to people considering or adopting this solution would be to ensure that the company defines and understands all of the requirements that are expected of the product at the outset before even choosing a solution. Without knowing what the actual requirements are, it may lead to choosing the wrong product. It is always best to start with considering the base functionality and then build up any customizations from there.  

Also, always try to ensure that you make the minimum number of customizations required for the product to ensure that it is as easy to support in the future as possible. Customizations may not always be compatible with future upgrades.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Netcool from IBM as about a seven-and-a-half versus other competing software products. If I had to choose a round number, it would be an eight.  

On-premises

Full featured - event/fault management, performance management, topology map, discovery, RCA, event enrichment, Proviso will chart data from almost any source with a variety of aggregation options. Very flexible and scalable.

Web interface isn't on par with the rest of the major BSM suites. Some functions need to be accomplished by each module because they weren't designed as a system, they were integrated from components acquired. New features and upgrades come slowly and are usually delivered very late.

This is another one of those suites glued together from a myriad of acquisitions and it shows once you get under the hood. Not my first choice.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring. We're using a Tivoli stack.

The solution has very good integration capabilities.

The solution is too expensive.

The product isn't the easiest to use. There's a lot of complexity and it isn't easy to manage.

The initial setup is not straightforward.

The product needs to provide better documentation to the users.

I've been using the solution for a while at this point. It's been about five years or so.

There are always a few bugs here and there. However, the main thing is that IBM is no longer investing in the solution anymore. Therefore, no bug fixes will be coming for those that still exist.

We have about 50 users on the solution currently. 

As IBM is no longer investing in the solution, we won't be expanding usage.

IBM could improve its technical support in general. Their response times are pretty slow. I would say that we aren't fully satisfied with the level of service provided to us as users.

We didn't find the initial setup to be straightforward. It was rather complex, in fact. The documentation was just not that good and it made the process challenging.

The deployment process took a year. It wasn't too fast.

We have two engineers that assist in the maintenance of the solution currently.

The product is pretty costly. It's definitely not the least expensive option. We find the price to be too high.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with IBM.

I wouldn't necessarily suggest this product to others. There are other products right now that may be lighter in deployment and a lot less expensive.

Overall, I would rate the solution six out of ten. I'd rate it higher if they offered more integration potential, or, alternatively, if they create done cohesive product and offered more monitoring software without some many other parts.

On-premises

NetCool automates methodologies that are of best practice, collection of contexts from data stores and tools that exist which are directed into incident tickets and events, and prioritizes events based on commitment of SLA and the highest cost of downtime. It also drives runbook operations automatically.Critical performance indicators are accessed in real time and corrective actions from incident views and events are launched and displayed.It improves customer satisfaction, deploy-ability, adaptability, flexibility, scalability, and reduces cost of operation.

Due to its complexity, I had to learn every feature of NetCool so that I could configure it to achieve maximum productivity. Once I got the skills, it was very easy to use.It was a bit expensive to purchase but the benefits outweigh all the cons by far.

IBM’s NetCool is a program used to automate, manage, and monitor networks in real time.False alarms, events that do not affect services, and maintenance events are suppressed, thereby reducing incident and event volumes drastically. It also reduces the volume by correlating several events into one. Escalation, notification, and resolution procedures are streamlined and effectiveness of staff as well as decision making processes are greatly improved. It is mainly used by service providers and has never let me down.