Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

Real-time performance monitoring

Can easily visualize bottlenecks in database performance tuning with historical graph trends; where as before it would be based upon manually tuning using scripts which are text based. Ability to get email alerts for systems in trouble; where as it would have been manual steps to obtain health-checks on all database servers.

Stability and bugs in the product. There seem to be too many.

3 years

Many problems which were fixed with patches.

Initially yes, but after patching it was stable; but with applying the latest version 12.1.0.3, we seem to be unstable again.

No

Customer Service: Appalling, raised issues with support and that take ages to respond.Technical Support: Appalling; they take far too long to understand the issue, they just simply appear to read scripts; if our problem is not on the script; then they struggle to think.

No

It was a complex installation, in that we have 2 servers as opposed to a single all in one solution; but it was nothing we could not manage.

In-house

Initial set up was approx. 5 days’ worth of DBA’s effort

No

Be prepared for a lot of heartache before it beds in. Get the latest patches for the project, and read up on most common bugs issues before implementation;

The performance monitoring is the most valuable feature. We use it for a lot of performance monitoring. It's a good tool. It works well. We use it on a day-to-day basis.

It reduces our downtime; increases our performance. We get to know of any issues coming up before even the users complain about it. We know what's going on in the system using Enterprise Manager.

If it had more drill-down facilities, that would be great. We found that sometimes, if you drill down into certain views, it's slow and it's very costly, so we avoid doing those kinds of things. They need some improvements in that area; to optimize those drill-downs.

It's pretty stable. Once in a while, we do have agents which hang and we have to reboot the agents. But overall, it's pretty stable.

We use it enterprise-wide, so it's pretty scalable. We haven't had any issues.

Usually my team is not the one that looks after technical support, but I'm not sure. We don't support the tool; we just use it.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Go for it. It's very good. It's pretty user-friendly. You just go with the flow. Just click on what you need to see and take it from there. We don't see any specialized training required to use it.

We integrate it with Oracle E-Business Suite and it works fine.

I'm very happy with it.

You can monitor your database thoroughly. Some valuable features of this product are checking your SQL executions and how the SQLs are progressing in terms of any blocks or contention in the database. In other words, you can monitor the entire progress of your database per millisecond.

It benefits our organization by identifying the problem immediately and rectifying it. So, the user doesn't have to bear any sort of impact.

Some of the features that need improvement are increased monitoring at the operating system and storage levels, without having a plugin. At the Oracle level, improvements can be done by providing minute details in regards to SQLs.

The product is stable 99.9% of the time, but there are a few issues that need to be improved. I have noted that these issues are generally updated in a later version of the product, as and when it is released.

Oracle does provide some plugins. However, if these can be provided with the Oracle Enterprise Manager software itself, there is a scope for scalability. In addition, increased monitoring at the storage level and the OS level can really help.

The technical support is not always 100% up to the mark or sometimes not as we expect it to be.

At times, they (the customer support team) take more time to respond or we don't get the desired response/solution from their end and then we have to keep tracking them.

We have always been using this product.

The setup is simple and not complex. I find that it has improved with later versions that are being released.

The setup process used to take much longer than it does now and I hope that this will be enhanced in the future.

We have not evaluated any other product besides Oracle, as it suits our product best.

Stability and responsiveness are the two major factors while choosing a product. Right now, response time is the most critical aspect for our organization and that is what we need.

If you database scalability is more or if your infrastructure is as big as the product we have, Oracle is the only solution out there. There are other competitors, but they are all NoSQL database tools. Thus, Oracle stands out.

We haven't fully utilized it yet on a day-to-day basis, but we will put more into it. We do see patching is going to be a big improvement. Day to day, I think we are at 20 percent for now, but that number will increase.

Support definitely can be improved; documentation and support. The documentation is convoluted, very confusing.

I have been using it for four years.

It's stable, so far.

So far, it's okay; it scales.

The support is not good for this product. The enterprise system that I have is kind of complex. Support is very basic; they don't have someone who really is savvy.

Initial setup is okay. It's 50/50.

My company choose to use this product because I can see that it's going to be more aligned with the technology, with the cloud. It's more robust, and we can see it's going to be an essential product for IT.

When I’m deciding whether to work with a vendor such as Oracle, I look for kind of a mix that includes reliability and strategic too: How does it fit into the enterprise system?

I recommend Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single pane of control that gives you the visibility to see all Oracle products, plus the non-Oracle products; hardware, software, middleware. It covers it all.

The benefits to my organization are with administration, plus it centralizes your control.

There are a lot of plugins. I would like to see more and more plugins for different software. Most of them are third-party software. If Oracle Enterprise Manager could provide a standard web service to interface with any application, that would be ideal.

I don't think anybody can walk on water. Software is buggy and that's the nature of the beast.

Stability is excellent now; not so much, before.

Scalability is endless because you can use Oracle technology to expand the back end and also use Oracle technology to expand the front end.

Technical support is very helpful. They were efficient. Usually, Oracle support is very good.

We previously used vendor-specific monitoring or control systems to administer different type of resources; hardware, software. OEM gives me the ability to expand that by putting everything under one control console.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was pretty straightforward. Over the years, they have even simplified a lot of processes. Before, you had to install this and that, but now it's just one single installation that does it all.

For me, choosing this solution was a no-brainer because we are an Oracle shop. From having all different types of vendors for hardware and software, we are gradually becoming an Oracle shop.

Try to understand what OEM can do for you. Exploit it and its feature set. For example, I can modify the back-end storage through OEM. I don't have to go to my ZS4 console to see how much space I have, how to administer it, or how to allocate storage space to a particular project. I can do that through OEM. That's the power of having a single pane for control.

When I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle, support is the most important criteria. Over the years, Oracle product has improved the stability, so that the most important thing now is how fast they can provide solutions when I need their help. That's the most important thing.

What makes it valuable is that we have one single pane that we can access to get all of our information and be proactive, whether it's Oracle Database, SQL Server, MySQL, or whatever, even host related.

Every release, they seem to move the navigation and you have to retrain your entire DBA staff. Maybe the user interface could be more consistent between releases. For every minor and major release, it usually jumps around all over the place.

We've been using it for quite a while, probably since 11g and a little bit before that; so, for 6, 7 years or more.

I think it’s stable. Every once in a while, it's kind of buggy, but for what it is, it's pretty good.

So far, it has been scalable. I think it's going to meet our needs moving forward.

For the most part, depending on who you get, technical support usually is good. Sometimes, it's hit or miss, but it depends on who you get those first few times.

For initial setup, you actually have to have some experience. If you don't, it can get a little tricky. I got a lot of gotchas. Even if you read the instruction manuals, the documentation, there are still things that you need to be looking out for.

I think it provides value for the money. It definitely helps us be proactive in our database administrating. We don't have to spend time reacting to everything. We can find out where the problem is before our customer even realizes they have a problem.

Look into OEM, especially if you have a lot of databases that you want to monitor, or other products. It provides a single pane of information that you can use, and drill down capabilities to find exact problems.

When I select a vendor such as Oracle to work with, I look for them to be reliable, provide value and so on.

The most valuable feature is the automation of the alerting. We can be proactive when we use that program instead of being called in the middle of the night because something’s wrong. You get the alert and the warning before. You can customize every threshold to meet your needs, and have different settings for different database groups.

The company spends less money over time because we are not working overtime hours at the office.

I would like to see better support for Oracle GoldenGate. Right now, it doesn't work well with Oracle GoldenGate. You still have to use GoldenGate monitor if you want to take advantage of the product.

There are some bugs and often we cannot debug the product right there and we have to reconfigure some things. It does the job, as long as you don't encounter a bug.

The stability's not so bad. It's a stable product, a mature product. When we change versions, there are some problems there.

Scalability's good. We went from two databases to over 250. It's working fine.

We have used technical support many times; it is very bad. We often had to dig down ourselves into the source code to find out why it’s not working on our platform. Every time we conferred about that, it became a little more complicated. Their answer is often to just delete the target, rediscover it and it should be fine.

We were pretty much doing our own thing with an in-house script. Since we were growing fast, we could not continue like that.

Out of the box, initial setup is pretty straightforward: You install it, you discover your target and it monitors them. If you want to go further and do custom monitoring, for example, it can become quite complicated. On the other hand, it's very flexible. That's good.

It's been a long time, so I don't remember which other products we were considering. Probably from the beginning, we were considering Oracle because they let us experiment with it first and we saw that it worked. Also, because we kind of expect our versioning to follow the version of the database.

Go only with the out-of-the-box configuration first. Let it run for a while like that to learn the product. Learn a few things before trying to configure everything in it.

When I’m selecting a vendor, price is a big factor. Licensing is a big factor. It has to do the job we need it for. Those are the most important criteria.

I like the performance tuning features, particularly since it gives me a good glimpse of what has been happening. We maintain the data for 31 days, so I can graphically go back and see what exactly happened during that time. I can drill down to the user level or the SQL level and see what was happening at any point in time. That's a pretty good feature, and because it's more graphical, I don't have to analyze a whole bunch of rows.

In terms of the user response time, if I were to do a lot of queries, and analyze it, we can quickly provide the result to the end user or the developers, and then quickly come back to solving a lot of performance problems.

With any Oracle protocol, and Enterprise Manager is one of them, as far as the interface is concerned, it's not good and is still pretty ugly. I would like to see a decent UI because there are a lot of tools on the market that also give good drill-down capabilities. For example, with Enterprise Manager's drill down to database blocking logs, you can no longer see that in the UI, whereas other tools allow that. I need to be able to do this type of drill-down in one tool without having to manage different tools that do different things.

I've been using Oracle products for 22 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

You should go with the latest version as it's more stable, and that's one of the reasons I like it. It's a pretty stable platform.

We have a pretty good number of database with Oracle Enterprise Manager. You can scale it as much as you want. We have about 1,200 databases that we manage using it.

I have not used technical support because I am not the one who administer it. Technical support is good, I've heard.

If you're using one or two databases, Enterprise Manager is not something you want to use because Oracle has other products that can make it simpler. But ff you are using more than five or six databases, Enterprise Manager is the way to go.