Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

Monitoring, EM Jobs and IP/BIP Reports

My company either is outsourced DBA or secondary DBA support. I am able to use EM12c to standardize what would be an almost unattainable goal without the product. With standardized monitoring templates and incident rule sets, we are able to consistently monitor, manage and alert all DBAs in each group to the same level SLA for our customer's needs.

We would love to see a migration utility for EM jobs. I've been a proponent for consolidating all database tasks from outside schedulers into Enterprise Manager Jobs. The challenge is if there is an upgrade to EM12c, this must be migrated manually and the interface is almost exactly the same as we had back in EM10g. Some improvements would be greatly appreciated.

1 year and 3 months

I do have a number of clients who's primary OS environment is Windows. They have virtualized with this OS and release 3 build of EM12c experienced serious java failures and I had to change the project sign off to release 2. It was a huge "hit" to the initial credibility of EM12c when having to return to two different clients and ask to downgrade to the previous release.

The stability of the product is excellent. It is sensitive to network issues, but the problem lies in the network, not EM12c.

High heap usage is a common complaint during top EM job utilization. This is a tuning issue over a scalability issue, but it is impacting to the one receiving the incident notifications.

Customer Service: 2 out of 5. I often choose to open an SR as a last resort. My clients just don't have the time it requires to go through an SR process.Technical Support: I would give it a 3 out of 5. There are some service reps that are very helpful and know the product. There are others that I feel I'm wasting my time with and my clients only have me for a set hours per month, so I don't have time to waste.

Some of my customers had either customer scripts scheduled through cron schedulers or Windows schedulers. Having all jobs running within the EM12c eases management for any DBA who might not be familiar with my coding style or know where jobs are scheduled. All they need to know is how to log into the EM12c for that client and they are able to mange the environment when I'm unavailable.

Very simple and well documented.

In house- I was the one who implemented.

As this was for clients and I have 12 that I've implemented, I don't have those costs.

No

Consider EM12c over third party products. This is built to be very transparent to the Oracle database environment. Other's, such as Spotlight, Foglight, etc. are a secondary layer and this is using the ASH/AWR data, which is less impacting to anything in the database.

We use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to monitor and manage our Oracle and MySQL databases.

The Oracle Databases are key components of our company. All of our services rely on critical customer data and transactions. We need %99.9995 uptime, and Oracle Enterprise Manager helps us to achieve this goal with its superior monitoring and management capabilities. Even mid-level administrators can quickly detect and solve performance problems, and our monitoring team can easily follow the general status of our databases and servers.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides comprehensive monitoring features for all Oracle products. It has an extensible architecture, so it’s possible to add third-party plugins to extend its monitoring abilities. These are valuable features of Oracle Enterprise Manager for all Oracle customers.

On the other hand, I think the most valuable feature of Oracle Enterprise Manager is its management capability for Oracle products. It makes a real difference when comparing it to any other monitoring solution in the market. You can manage your Oracle Databases, Oracle VM, WebLogic, and other products with Oracle Enterprise Manager.

It's better to have native agents specially when monitoring legacy systems. So the agents can consume less resources.

More than five years.

I have not encountered any serious stability issues since version 13c.

I did not encounter any scalability issues, and we know that we can easily scale up our Oracle Enterprise Manager system by adding more application servers, and even using RAC database as its repository.

At the same level as other Oracle products.

I used several monitoring solutions, including open source, both free and proprietary. Most of them are designed to monitor system health and require additional plugins to monitor Oracle databases. Unfortunately, they do not provide the same level of insights when monitoring Oracle products as Oracle Enterprise Manager provides.

It is very straightforward because of its improved installer. Since version 12c, installing Enterprise Manager has been very simple. The installer handles everything even including configuration issues with your database repository and OS kernel parameters.

The basic functions are free. You pay license fees only for advanced features. That means you can buy a license for selected (mission-critical) systems which need extensive care, while you can still use basic monitoring for the rest of your target systems.

I’ve been using this product for years. I evaluated other options from different vendors such as Quest Foglight, CA Unified Infrastructure Management, ManageEngine OpManager, Zabbix, Nagios and maybe some other tools I don’t recall right now.

First, check the compatibility index and be sure that your targets are supported with the version you’re planning to install. I also advise keeping your system up-to-date by installing patches regularly.

OEM gives me, as the DBA, a very graphical representation of what's going on with my Oracle footprint, and it's very quick to display to me where I would have issues and where I can correct them. This gives me the capability to see when there are issues happening, which means that I can actually act on the issues pretty quickly before it becomes apparent to the business that there is something going on within the database, that could, for example, have a negative effect on their ability to get a drug out the door.

From my point of view, I've found OEM to be one of the easier products to deal with. It's the product that I use day in daily to view all of my databases, and the fact that I can actually integrate multiple databases and multiple middleware solutions into one single point is perfect for me, so I'm really happy with it.

The features that I'd want to use in Enterprise Manager would be in and around the diagnostics and tuning area of the database. Again, that is an additional license. Whilst I can get Enterprise Manager, I can do certain things with it, the really, really high-value part of Enterprise Manager requires additional licenses. So I'd like to see more advanced functionalities that, frankly, don't require us to spend more money.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's been very stable. I don't recall any big issues with stability.

We've been able to scale it as needed.

It was a very, very complicated product to set up. We initially used it with Oracle Single Sign-On to link Microsoft Active Directory to our E-Business Suite instance. It was difficult to set up, and actually now we've migrated to Oracle Access Manager with Identity Manager, and it's even more complicated. 

Oracle Access Manager is a product that Oracle has brought in. They've took over a company which had their own identity management solution. They took it over and re-labelled it, re-branded it to be their product. We had a few enhancements in it, but when they released it is was absolutely full of bugs, and, actually really, really complicated to set up. 

Later releases and scripts is what have made it a little bit easier, but I would like Oracle before they put these products out to the market, to invest some time in making them easier to set up.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

Read the documentation, because we found and still find it extremely complicated to bind the latest versions of the database into Enterprise Manager. It was much easier in earlier versions, but much more complicated now.

We use Enterprise Manager for databases.

We haven't used Enterprise Manager for very long. We mostly work with another solution.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager eight out of 10 for stability.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager eight out of 10 for scalability.

Installing Enterprise Manager is complex. The time needed to deploy it varies depending on the environment. 

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager six out of 10 for affordability. It's expensive. 

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager seven out of 10 overall.

On-premises

Database Management, SQL Tuning, Performance Management, SQL Monitoring, Performance Tuning Pack, SQL Diagnostic Pack, ADDM, AWR, and real time SQL monitoring.

it would be helpful if OEM is integrated with OBIEE reports and free report viewer without a license.

We have been using the overall OEM for over eight years.

There were no deployment issues.

We used DBArtisan, Embarcadero technologies, and Quest tools.

The monitoring and alerting capabilities and ability for corrective actions in incidents provide the most value.

Provides monitoring and alerting to know when there are issues, and the ability to address issues automatically with corrective actions. This has saved admin time, as it's saved our admins from having to get up in the middle of the night to address minor issues that corrective actions could take care of automatically.

I would like to see Oracle address the multi-data center monitoring and management in a more seamless way where management services are easily spread across the data centers like they can be today, but address the single database repository that can only exist in one data center at a time.

I have been using various versions of Enterprise Manager for over eight years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Multi-Data Center High Availability monitoring, alerting and management is the largest challenge as there is a single repository database that is located in a single data center, therefore running across multiple data centers still ties back to a single repository database which runs from one of the data centers, but can distribute the OEM Console and Management servers in each of the data centers. All this works without issue, but the repository traffic from multiple data centers can be a challenge going back to another data center where the repository database resides.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's good, there are times that reaching the right technical analysts to resolve or address an issue can take time, but overall the support is responsive and good and when having a severity one in response to a down issue can be excellent.

I have not really utilized anything other than Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring, alerting and management of Oracle based environments.

Simple single server setups are quite simple to install and upgrade. Multi-Oracle management services with load balancers can be more of a challenge but are not overly difficult to get accomplished.

I am working for a consulting and managed services firm as a consultant and have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager for many of our clients over several years and we have always had great success in meeting the objectives it was implemented to address.

Oracle Enterprise Manager for the base product does not have additional cost when you have an Oracle Enterprise Database licenses, however to get the most value from OEM additional packs are required and have additional costs. Those costs are at the product level and not Oracle Enterprise Manager direct cost as I understand. However, in most enterprise level environments these packs provide huge value to the monitoring, alerting and management of the environment.

It's overall capability for Oracle products is very good and offers the ability to monitor and manage many Oracle products from a single environment and is seamlessly integrated to monitor and manage those products out of the box.

If you run Oracle Products from Oracle OVM, Oracle Database, Web Logic, etc. Oracle Enterprise Manager is by far the best way to provide a single console and monitoring and alerting solution.

I manage a team of Customer Care and Billing Support Administrators. Earlier in our implementation when we were not quite stable we had to request assistance from our DBAs to troubleshoot performance of our databases. We eventually convinced them that it would be to their advantage to provide us with read only access to the graphs and to run AWR reports in OEM so we could troubleshoot ourselves. We actively monitor the databases and can get ahead of any issues. We are also making preparations for using OEM with Oracle Utilities Application Management which will provide application monitoring through OEM.

We definitely get ahead of issues before they become severe.

The reports are very busy. Once you understand the information it was great, but initially it was not very user friendly.

Five years.

No problems.

No issues.

None.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Good.

No.

The most valuable features are the Metric Extensions & Advanced Threshold management.

Metric Extensions

• Extend Oracle's monitoring capabilities to monitor conditions specific to your IT environment
• Provides a comprehensive view of your environment
• Create metrics on any target type
• Can be defined on any target:
  • Hosts
  • Databases
  • Fusion applications
  • BI components…

EM is a one-stop shop used to manage and monitor the entire Oracle E-Business Suite, BI and EPM infrastructure in our company. So, in our BI environment, we wanted to run a script to kill sessions which are running over 60 minutes and wanted to track and tune those sessions. We used Metric Extensions for the same.

Advanced Thresholds allow you to define and manage alert thresholds that are either adaptive (self-adjusting) or time-based (static).

• Adaptive thresholds are thresholds based on statistical calculations from the target's observed behaviour (metrics).
• Time-based static thresholds are user-defined threshold values to be used at different times of the day/week to account for changing target workloads.

We used time-based threshold settings for weekday and weekend load on various environments. This way we could fine tune the alerts for varying loads.

It gives an end-to-end view of our complex IT infrastructure and its health in real-time.

The Adaptive Settings descriptions could be clearer. 95% percentile, etc. is not clearly specified.

I have used it for over five years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is good.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

It reduced the number of incidents; we could predict failures.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Quest/Toad, but it did not do end-to-end monitoring across the stack of products.

It is one of the best, state-of-the-art products from Oracle; truly a single pane of glass to manage IT infrastructure.