Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

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.

• Managing databases via groups
• Running AWR and ADDM reports is simple and quick.
• Performance graphs are good to share with application teams and database users.

Warnings and alerts are sent to the primary DBA.  Primary DBAs address the alerts in a timely manner, instead of waiting for it to become an issue.

Performance tuning tools need improvement.  

We have been using this for five years.

The system has minimal issues with stability. The system has about 1500 databases currently.

There are no issues with scalability. the system is stable with about 1500 databases.

The software was acquired as part of merger.

Software was acquired via a merger and was already online. Our databases were added to the system.

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.

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 have mainly used it for management, monitoring and tuning for Oracle databases.

We manage and monitor many databases for customers (some customers have a few hundred databases) and OEM is extremely helpful in performing operations for monitoring and management from one single place. Setting up various jobs including RMAN backups is extremely helpful via OEM. We also use features such as corrective actions, where we can ask OEM to take appropriate corrective actions when an event occurs in the middle of the night.

I have been using OEM 13c which is their latest release and I would have expected that the product would have been more stable and should not have bugs for very simple things like CPU utilisation or amount of physical memory on Linux hosts. These are very fundamental metrics to monitor and should not be an issue. These are not a new features and I would have expected a much better release of the product.

I have been using OEM since 2002.

I have deployed OEM 11g and 12c in High availability mode and was not too complicated to implement. I have not tried HA with 13c. However, installation for all the releases have been fine.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

To me its like a lottery, if I am lucky I get a support engineer who knows what they are talking but many a times you get someone who just keeps asking very fundamental questions until you have to ask on duty manger to be involved and have the SR escalated. But I guess, it is the same across any other vendor.

I have used custom scripts and still do use it for standard edition of databases where OEM cannot be used. However, I prefer to use OEM wherever possible.

Although custom scripts might be easy to setup, the issue is when the person who wrote the scripts leaves an organisation, all the knowledge walks out as well.

Like any product, it is best that the implementation is done by someone who understands it well, whether done in-house or by third party. It saves a lot in long run and you know that its done right.

For any Enterprise edition database customer, I highly recommend that they should implement OEM and at a minimum purchase license for Diagnostic and Tuning pack for database. Amount of time required to perform many activities such as tuning and diagnostics pays off.

Do it once and do it right.

A lot of ingenuity has been put into the monitoring and alerting capabilities. There are many products (including a number of custom scripts I have written over the years) that are capable of sending basic alerts, for example when a file system mount is approaching capacity, but all of those pale in comparison to the myriad functions Enterprise Manager has. For example; taking corrective action to fix a problem before it even becomes a problem; create a trouble ticket, package the necessary log files and automatically submit that ticket; or perform root cause analysis of a number of related incidents, just to name a few.

I first starting using this product in a corporate IT environment to help my team monitor our Oracle databases. The product worked so well, other groups soon took notice. They saw that not only were we being alerted of potential problems before they happened, we were also able to quantify and report on those metrics. It quickly led to other groups using the various heterogeneous capabilities of EM, such as monitoring third party middleware, Sql Server, VMware and multiple storage arrays.

Enterprise Manager is not easy or for the faint of heart. It is extremely robust, and hence very complicated to set up and maintain. A tool like this requires a company to put a lot of eggs in small number of baskets. Creating an environment to maintain five or more nines is complex and expensive.

Five years.

Deployment is generally the most difficult part, especially when implementing high availability and disaster recovery. The installers run well but each implementation is highly unique. Once the system is installed and running, the agents need to be deployed to the various systems throughout the environment, targets needed to be added and configured, templates need to be set up, users and authentication need to be added and metrics need to be defined. Enterprise Manager has come a long way with the ability to export information through templates and other methods but the initial deployment will always take time and resources.

Once the product is deployed, it is very stable. In fact by the definition of it being a management and monitoring utility, it must be highly stable and available. Enterprise Manager has self-monitoring features built in as well to notify administrators immediately if it is not available. There are a number of articles in My Oracle Support that show how to have other third-party products monitoring Enterprise Manager as well.

The only issue I can see with scalability is not being able to multi-master the repository. The repository requires a single Oracle database. The database can use HA features like Oracle RAC or DR features like Oracle Data Guard, but there can only be one active database at a time. The middleware is Oracle Weblogic which also has robust clustering and load balancing capabilities.

Customer Service:

I am in regular contact with a number of software engineers with Oracle and many of the product managers that work on Enterprise Manager. They have all been more than willing to engage me, my customers and my colleagues on how they can make Enterprise Manager work better for its users. I have never felt like my comments, gripes or accolades have fallen on deaf ears. In fact, they are usually eagerly accepted and many times invited. This is one of the strengths of Oracle as a whole, especially the Enterprise Manager team.

Technical Support:

In general, the technical support is very good. Because of the large scale implementations I am doing, the issues I report to My Oracle Support (MOS) are often bugs and must go through multiple layers, including development to find or create a patch to fix an issue. The problem in general with MOS is that there is a lot of wasted time getting through the first tier of support to the high level technicians that can actually find and fix the problem. This usually requires escalation to a manager or help from someone internal to Oracle.

I have used a number of monitoring, provisioning and lifecycle management solutions and continue to do so. I have never found a product that has so many of these capabilities in a single product and a single user interface. I don't believe there is another product in the same class as Enterprise Manager. The fact that I work so closely with Oracle products on a daily basis makes this even more relevant. Enterprise Manager is obviously at its best when working with Oracle products and not as strong as other third party products that are designed to work more closely with their own products so I will continue to work with other products similar to Enterprise Manager as well when it is more advantageous.

The actual installation of Enterprise Manager is fairly straightforward. However, that is just a small piece of what needs to happen for a full deployment. The full deployment is almost always complex which makes each installation complex. This is especially true when deploying for high availability and disaster recovery.

I have done it both ways. The first large implementation I did was 100% in-house by myself and a half-dozen other Oracle DBAs. I now work for a solutions provider and help other organizations with their implementations.

Do not expect to have a full implementation complete in a couple of days. There are many hours of work and many different steps to go through. There is a lot of collaboration that must happen with other teams; database, networking, storage, applications, developers, identity management, firewall and others. Find out how long it takes to process your longest change request and multiply that by 30.

The tight integration with Oracle ASH, AWR and ADDM is invaluable. Management of Oracle Appliances with support for system health monitoring and performance views for all hardware and software components.

OEM 12 C has simplified management of our Enterprise Systems and has eliminated unnecessary and legacy tools. Oracle Enterprise Manager has a comprehensive set up plug-ins for operating systems, hosts, databases, middleware, security, network, servers, and storage.

Prior to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C I would have said the UI could be improved, however this has achieved in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C which has a new and improved UI.

Since 2004 starting with Oracle OEM 10g

No

No

No

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Excellent mechanism for support management using ‘My Oracle Support. The support framework is second to none. Excellent interface, with fast response and resolution times, also includes escalation paths and full audit trail.

Previously have used TOAD. The main reason for the switch is that OEM is free and offers more functionality.

Very simple to setup within a command line interface known as EMCTL

In House

No

Get OEM 12c integrated into your support tool arsenal. The latest version allows you to manage and diverse group of products other than just the database, these include but are not limited to Web Logic, MySQL, Linux.

The main usage is for monitoring performance, a major part of the software is you can define some virtualization for RAM utilization. You can set up something and then you will start getting alerts which you can do some optimizations from the information.

It is the best monitoring tool for Oracle databases. 

You have full visibility with the tool, it is a complete solution. 

The software is simple to use.

In my experience, the monitoring could be improved. 

If the solution had an auditing feature, I would not look into other software, for example, Imperva or IBM Guardium. These other solutions have an audit feature and monitoring together, this one is strictly monitoring only. Oracle does have a separate product for auditing, which is very expensive.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

It is a very stable product.

We have five administrators that are using the solution, as it is only for administrators.

We have access to the support but the product is really easy to use, we have not needed any help.

The setup was easy, we encountered no problems and it took us only three hours.

We did the implementation ourselves.

The solution is inexpensive to purchase.

I have evaluated Imperva and IBM Guardium. 

I am going to continue to use this product in the future.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager a nine out of ten.

On-premises