Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

This is a very good Oracle tool which enables us to incorporate all the databases throughout our environment, set up several rules and even monitor from there. We can perform a lot of operations. If you have small databases you can plug into the OEM, and you can perform any sort of operation with one click of a button. That makes it more convenient and makes life easier than logging into each database separately.

You can set the rules so that every time you have several maintenance activities you don't need to go to each database and do the same work again and again. Instead you can create jobs in the OEM and you can also create groups, like production, development, performance and environment. All these environments you can club together so that you can perform several operations based on environment-specific criteria.

When you need to perform activities like purging and archiving, this can be done easily and you can even do backups which is a tedious activity. If you have the right description monitor, just click on the buttons in the OEM so that you can fire up the backups everyday at a specific time. It can even alert us by email if by any chance the backup fails and you can just log in to a particular mission and check why it failed.

It's a very easy way of maintaining all the databases instead of wasting time on the regular day to day tasks. You can use your time productively, instead of investing time on these mundane tasks. That way it helps us a lot.

It could improve in some areas like the screen. It's not so clear for the novice, when a new person looks at the screen he/she may not really understand where to start first. They could make that process a little easier, so that even a novice who starts using it can at least have the basic idea what to do.

We've been using the product for almost six years.

It is stable of course, it's from Oracle.

It's scalable depending on the way you build it. From the base configuration itself the server capacity and the installation, you have a number of targets, say 0-10, 10-250, 250-1000. Based on your company's requirement you have to install and configure those so that it will be scalable throughout that time period. You will also require enough memory, CPU cards for supporting those targets.

I would rate the support as 8/10. Once they start responding on the tickets, they'll definitely take you to the solution.

I would recommend it. There are a lot of people who like to write scripts and stuff. If they are comfortable writing scripts then definitely they could use it. But many things can be done which cannot be done through scripting. I would recommend you give it a try. Definitely once you give it a try you will like using it.

The most valuable feature is the performance monitoring. This is one single-point dashboard, which presents the health of the database, at a particular point in real time. It helps you see which queries are running, and the top file sessions that are running. That helps you accurately identify what is bogging down the system.

That top session, which is chewing up CPU resources and memory, helps you see if it is doing the right thing, using the right indexes, using the best EXPLAIN PLAN. If everything is all good, maybe that tells you the box’s resources is not enough. However, 90% of the time, there are bad queries, rogue queries; it provides ample opportunities to queue.

Thanks to this tool, it helps us drill down, get to the bottom of the problem really quickly. Quick identification of a problem is key. Once the problem is identified, then you have other tools to figure out how to make this query run fast.

There are nice features like the hash report and AWR codes. At the click of a button, on the fly, you can generate these reports, which tell you exactly at the time of the clicking the health of the database; how well or how bad it is running. That is what the business is looking at from the DB. DB is like a doctor. They want the cure. They want to know what is the problem for the disease. This helps us identify the health of the database in real time, fast.

The main benefit is the quickness; the speed at which you identify, diagnose and resolve problems. The old-fashioned way depends on the DBA’s manual skills. It would take him forever, if we were to go the legacy route. This is nice, like a MRI scan. That helps. It is very fast; the queries are faster, the work gets done faster, you generate the reports faster, you are able to deliver how well the company's doing faster.

You can talk about the different features in IT, but at the end of the day, what it boils down to, what matters to management when they come into the office is that they want to look at the reports. They want to see how well their business is doing. These tools help make sure these queries are done well, so that you generate more reports, more quickly, so that management knows about the health of their company early and fast. That helps them slice and dice this information, and arrive at meaningful, logical conclusions to how well they want to run their business.

As it is, this product has so many features. We have yet to explore its full potential. There is one feature that tells you how long the query has been running. It would be nice if they could introduce a GUI feature in the performance monitoring section that shows when the query will finish. We can see when it started by looking at the session history. People are looking at you to tell them when will it finish. It would be nice if there is a GUI feature that tells you the start and the finish times. That way you can set the right expectations.

The product is very stable and doesn't take up a lot of resources. We have seen products that work well in the short-term, but that cause more harm. What was supposed to be a small footprint, ends up chewing up all the box’s resources, whereas that's not the case with this product.

There are times when you have to troubleshoot during the height of a crisis, when the box is already busy, and the chances are you are inflicting more pain. Nonetheless, this product still works very well, despite how busy the box is, because of the small footprint. Meaning, it doesn't take up a lot of resources. With fewer resources, it strives to get the job done.

Technical support is excellent. They get back to us really fast, if there is an issue. Also, there are tons of material out there on the Oracle support website. 90% of the time, you can get the answers very simply, without the need to reach a physical person to guide you to resolve your issues.

We had other solutions such as Toad and Spotlight, but once we saw this, there was no going back. It was pretty good. It's a one-point destination; one umbrella. It has so much to offer. Basically, if someone were to start using this product, they will not deviate. It has so much potential, honestly.

Initial setup is very straightforward. It is very easy to install and configure. It is also easy to migrate to different platforms. It is easy to fix if it is broken. It's not rocket science. I have seen other products where, once it is broken, it is broken; you have to do it properly from scratch. That's not the case here. With simple fixes, you can be back in business and running.

We were considering going with Quest Central and couple of other vendors, but being a big Oracle shop, it made sense. Sticking with one vendor made sense, so that we can get a better offer on the pricing. Considering Oracle is the database, it is no wonder the product has more insight into the database functioning. That's why we chose this solution.

My high rating reflects its ease of use and that it contains a host of features, anything and everything a database administrator would want it to perform; all the way from creating a database to adding space, to performance monitoring, to back up and recovery, to exports and imports, and security. You name it, they have it.

Cloud is the big buzzword. The reason why companies are moving from on-prem to cloud is cost-cutting. IT companies knowingly or unknowingly have spent top dollars on IT, but the thought process is changing. It all boils down to cost-cutting. Basically, the IT companies want to continue to do the same great stuff but with low costs, so that they can pass the benefit to the investors. I would say, cost. At the end of the day, cost is the most important criteria when I am considering working with a vendor. If you can bring down the cost, there is nothing else like that.

I strongly recommend using this product. This is going to make your life easy, so that you can use whatever time you save for better things in life.

For us, the most valuable feature is really the ability to monitor. We're using Enterprise Manager to monitor our database infrastructure. Whenever we create a database, we'll apply those templates, and it will monitor. Database will send alerts and create instances that will allow our team to be both reactive and proactive and use some of the warnings that it brings us. We're using it a lot for that -- the ability to do performance tuning, using the OEM, the ability to create different reporting, the ability to be able to get some suggestions from the OEM, in terms of the database performance.

The tool also gives us the ability to create reports for a set of databases, or a set of applications, such that we can create a daily report, weekly report, monthly report, whatever you want, to know about the performance utilization of that group of databases or specific databases.

That's really the key advantage of Enterprise Manager. Although we're using it for Database, the tool has enhancements to provide benefits to an entire IT shop in terms of monitoring and managing the entire IT infrastructure.

As with any organization, before we embark on anything, we have to look at the ROI as well as the ability of a particular tool. Enterprise Manager gives us a tool that's fast and reliable for monitoring and managing our whole IT infrastructure. We're a mutual fund company, so speed is really key in providing satisfactory customer service. The performance and functionality of Enterprise Manager has been huge for us.

The latest release, 13c, which I think came out in December, has additional enhancements in the areas of security, management, creation of users, and different level of functionality. It's much better than before, which was very limited and the majority of users created with the tool were forced to have more privilege than they should have. We're currently working on upgrading to 13c, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether that will apply for our environment.

Deployment has been fine. There have been no issues.

With Enterprise Manager, you've got a tool that's providing end-to-end administration and monitoring of your IT infrastructure. The tool, therefore, has to have a very smooth way to configuring so that it is highly available. This, of course, plays a very important role in functionality because you don't want the tool to be a single point of failure.

So Oracle has claimed that they've enhanced that part of Enterprise Manager. For me, that's important because as a data architect, I play a lot of roles and I've been able to configure the tool to have four nines of High Availability. If you have a tool that you depend on for monitoring and administrating your entire IT infrastructure, the last thing you want is for it to have an level of unavailability.

It's scaled to our needs.

We have premier support from Oracle, so we have a very good relationship with technical support.

Right now, the only complexity is setting up our environment for High Availability so that we can scale it and have it highly available not just within the same data center but spanning to multiple, different locations. That's the only tricky part because it involves additional products from other companies, like Cisco and F5. So for us, setting up a standalone, vanilla Oracle Enterprise Manager is a very, very small part. It's because we have to set up the large, diverse environment with maximum-availability architecture that it's been a challenge for us.

One piece of advice is just why, if you don’t have Oracle Enterprise Manager, you aren't taking advantage of it. I assume your DBA's might be spending extra hours and off hours, and if you set up and deploy Enterprise Manager the right way, you will see at least a 50% decrease in unnecessary, mundane work.

I work on whatever development projects I get with Oracle Enterprise Manager in my company.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a very user-friendly tool. I find Oracle Enterprise Manager to be a complete tool because it has options like SQL Scratchpad, Oracle Migration Workbench, etc.

Oracle Enterprise Manager's scalability is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

In the future releases of Oracle Enterprise Manager, I would like to see the product offer the ability to its users to scale up the solution whenever required.

I have been using Oracle Enterprise Manager for around ten years. I work as an Oracle consultant.

It is a stable solution.

Though Oracle Enterprise Manager is a scalable product, it may not be as scalable as Oracle Big Data. You can scale up Oracle Big Data to any number, but it may be difficult to do so when it comes to Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Around 10 to 50 people in my company use Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of the product is easy.

The product's installation phase may take up to a maximum of 30 minutes.

The product's installation phase can be taken care of by one person.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Usually, I use Oracle Enterprise Manager for development purposes, and I can say that the development part is very easy with Oracle.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for monitoring and reporting and emailing those back to the client.

When it comes to Enterprise Manager, we use single instances and price management. We install these in every installation of Oracle and then we manage them specifically for individual databases. We are looking to consolidate everything. 

I have found the uptime of all of our systems to be most valuable with this solution. This is important because we need to guarantee specific uptime and preventive maintenance. We need to know upfront if there are going to be any issues on the database so we can proactively solve those.

My opinion is that this solution needs to improve consolidation. That is what our business needs the most right now.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

My impression is that the stability of this solution is quite good. We've never had any issues and we've been doing prevention maintenance. 

I would rate the scalability of this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Our business is doing consultancy for different types of companies and I was looking for an RMM system to manage all of these systems.

My impression is that the initial setup is quite straightforward and easy. However, I have more than 15 years of experience with Oracle.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

It's a good product for Oracle management and monitoring. This solution is deployed on-premises, and we are using the latest version.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring because it's very useful for checking and troubleshooting compared with other products, like Nagios for example, that have some interaction with Oracle. Enterprise Manager is good for a DB administrator to troubleshoot and check monitoring.

The interface could be more friendly for basic users.

I have been using this solution for one year. 

I haven't used Oracle technical support for this product. But we have used them for other products, like Oracle Server or Oracle Appliance, for example. For Oracle Appliance, I don't have good feedback because recently we had some issues with Exadata, and they were taking too much time with giving us a solution, so the case was still open for weeks.

Technical support is responsive, but the problem is that there are some other customers that we are managing, and there is not good feedback because every now and then, there are issues for which we open a case, and the same issues are continuously appearing. We are experiencing issues with the same hardware, and we never get a fix.

This is for Oracle Private Cloud Appliance and for Oracle Exadata. For Oracle software, we have good feedback about the quality of the support. But as far as the hardware, I cannot say the same.

Setup wasn't very complex, but usually Oracle products are not easy to install. It's normal for there to be some complexity because Oracle products are not "plug and play" like other products.

For monitoring issues, I compared Oracle Enterprise Manager to Nagios. There was a monitoring need that Nagios could not provide but Enterprise Manager could.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

I was previously using it for my own personal use.

I didn't need much. I was using it to connect a database. I connected the database, and then the Linux host. I also wanted to test various remote hosts. Unfortunately, since I was installing on a machine that didn't have enough resources, I was not able to connect it to deploy those agents. For me to have done that, I needed a platform that had adequate resources like RAM and storage. After installing it, it just consumed everything that I had. I only have 16GB RAM. It was not enough for me to try others. I was basically using it to test how it would be able to run. I managed to run it by deploying the database that I was using it to run the EM. That is the only thing that I managed to acquire.

It's more effective to use command-line interface than using the GO setup.

One of the great things about that EM is that you are able to connect to Oracle Support. This will make your work easier due to the fact that it will help you identify if your database is to be upgraded or if you are experiencing any issues. It can help you quickly identify issues instead of having to raise them in a service report. It's much more efficient.

There are a number of different user interfaces you can choose from.

The solution is pretty interactive and user-friendly.

Sometimes the solution can be quite difficult in terms of when you want to deploy agents. 

You need to go through the Oracle documentation in order for you to be able to deploy an agent. Sometimes it just takes a long time, however, the thing is there is the overall concept of deploying. I don't think it is a problem, for the most part. 

That said, for someone who is starting to use the product, it takes quite a long while for you to get to know and understand the actions. The issue is the solution has got so many items and products for you to use. You just need to basically get to what you want.

There's a lot of documentation to go through as a new user.

It takes a while for a new user to get the hang of the product.

I've been using the solution for the past month. Previously, I used its environment (for the past 12 months or so) for opportunity yield. I hadn't been using it in a production environment. It's now installed on my machine.

When I was administering the database using that EM, it was quite amazing. However, in terms of usability and other things, I can't say much because I haven't used it yet in a production line. So far, I haven't had issues with stability, but it's still too soon to tell.

I haven't had time to really judge the scalability. It's still too early to tell. I need more experience with the product before making any assumptions.

I can't say much about technical support due to the fact that I haven't done much using the EM. Since I haven't interacted with them too much, there isn't anything really to say about how I find their service. I simply haven't used it.

The setup is quite straightforward, depending on what you want to use. I started with the GO setup or the interactive pack. I also use silent mode, whereby you just run the command, and then you see the information inside those parameters. I preferred the silent mode installation, whereby you have to make sure that you have set your parameters accordingly. 

That said, the installation I conducted wasn't difficult for me to install. The only thing that I noticed was that it's a big file. It's quite a big software or application to be deployed, so when you do, you need to deploy it where there are enough resources for you to install everything.

In my case, the deployment took about five hours to complete.

I handled the implementation on my own. I did not need the assistance of any consultants or integrators.

I'm not aware of how much the product costs, so I can't speak to the pricing.

We're just a customer. We have no relationship with the vendor.

There is a more up to date version, 18.42, however, I have not started using it yet as it requires some patching. Currently, I'm on version 18.4, which is quite stable.

I would recommend the solution to others. In fact, I've already met many people in which I have done just that. It's only been a month using the product and already I've noticed that it is quite effective.

Since I haven't done quite a lot in terms of production learning, I will just rate it at seven out of ten at this time.

It is a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for managing database consolidation, something that has been missing and difficult to do. The Database Consolidation Workbench provides a risk-free and accurate approach to consolidation by eliminating guess work and human errors. Most of the errors that lead to severe issues in production environments are due to poor sizing of the configuration and so-called “educated guesses”. The Workbench provides a flexible approach for various customer scenarios: every environment is unique and several scenarios are possible.

Database consolidation has been for years a tedious process for many clients. The benefits are enormous. By using the Database Consolidation Workbench, companies achieve the following:

• Reduce complexity
• Improve efficiency
• Lower costs
• Better security
• Better monitoring
• Harmonized backups and easier restore
• Better performance
• Simplify maintenance
• Fewer servers in fewer locations
• Harmonized environment

It needs to support the Database versions lower than 10.2.

I have been using the Database Consolidation Workbench since its release with OEM 13c. I am even going to give two keynote speeches over the next month at Oracle conferences in Europe. The subject is of major interest to both business professionals and technical resources.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

10/10

We used just spreadsheets and common-sense practices, which were often doomed to fail. The solution provided now by Oracle covers the last missing piece of the complete set-up when consolidating databases. One can think of Database Consolidation Workbench OEM 13c as the “Holy Grail” of Database Consolidation.

The initial setup was more than straightforward. It's easy to set up, configure, and use.

Reasons to upgrade to Enterprise Manager 13.2: https://blogs.oracle.com/oem/e...

It is part of Real Application Testing, so no new investment is necessary for clients who already are already using RAT.

There are no products available that can be compared with Database Consolidation Workbench. Not even close.

This is one of the most important additions to Oracle Enterprise Manager from both the business perspective and DBA point-of-view. Start first with upgrading OEM 11g or 12c to 13c as the Database Consolidation Workbench was introduced first in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c as part of the Real Application Testing option. Run different scenarios within different projects in order to pick the best strategy. Always validate at the end.