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it_user436206 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Applications DBA/UNIX SA at a agriculture with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
It's great being able to see that all the information you need is in front of you on the screen.

What is most valuable?

I find it nice that OEM provides a graphical way to manage both our database and E-Business Suite. It's great being able to see that all the information you need is in front of you on the screen. There are links that allow you to kill sessions or to check your performance. With other solutions, you just see numbers go by on a screen.

How has it helped my organization?

It helps me do my job as a DBA. Even though I may know how to manage it wth the CLI, I'm much quicker at doing things and identifying problems. Having it running and seeing a spike on the graph lets me know that we have a performance issue, I've got something locked up, and I need to address that proactively instead of being reactive. Sometimes I go to the CLI to get right to the thing quicker, but the graphical interface, again, is nice.

What needs improvement?

It can be a process hog sometimes. When I do leave it running, the CPU fan kicks on, and I can hear it running. Otherwise, it's a great tool.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We've had no issues with deploying it.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's been stable. We haven't had any instability issues to speak of.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's been scaling just fine. We have no issues scaling it for our needs.

How was the initial setup?

It's easy, very easy to set up. You've got to know what you're doing, but it's not a lot. You've just got to follow the documentation and configure it accordingly.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team. It was pretty straightforward.

What other advice do I have?

Follow the directions as the setup and implementation are all nicely laid out for you.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user436200 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Admin at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Automation in patching, applying security patches, and PSU's has been important for us. We've had many struggles patching automation.

Valuable Features:

The most valuable feature is the way it shows me, on top in one screen, right there, my availability options. Then if I have to drill down the performance, it shows me what's running, rather than me going in and doing my own scripts. It provides AWR reports, active session reports, and things like that.

Improvements to My Organization:

The biggest bang for our buck with Enterprise Manger is automated patching. We have at least 1000 or so databases, so automation in patching, applying security patches, and PSU's has been huge for us. We are working heavily with Oracle and their representatives to have patches written up.

Room for Improvement:

We've had a lot of struggles patching automation. There's no good log file that you can debug. We have to go back to the account managers and work with Oracle internals. I'm hoping that 13c will bring something better on that front.

Deployment Issues:

We've been OK deploying it within our company.

Stability Issues:

It's been stable, but the patching is the biggest pain-point right now for us.

Scalability Issues:

We are not there yet with scaling it. Like I said, if you patch one single database, it works OK. If you have, on one server, ten different databases, that's where it hangs, and we don't know where it failed and when it might fail.

Initial Setup:

The initial setup was good and fairly straightforward. We didn't have a whole lot of trouble with it.

Implementation Team:

We implemented it with our in-house team.

Other Advice:

If you're a newbie who doesn't want much hands-on in a CLI, it's a good solution.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Oracle Enterprise Manager. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
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Oracle Consultant & DBA - Cloud Support Engineer at Amazon Web Services
Consultant
Top features are the ability to consolidate information and access to my databases into a single portal

What is most valuable?

Consolidate information and access to my databases into a single portal.

How has it helped my organization?

We increased our capacity and speed of detection, diagnose & resolution of database issues.

What needs improvement?

UI is the part that I like to see improved in the future.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using EM for almost 6 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Not so much, and all easily fixed.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not in version 12c, EM uses Database 11gR2 and WebLogic that both have superb stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None and, in case of need, we can always add another WebLogic Server or another node to the database tier.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: Oracle Support is very good most of the time.Technical Support: You start with junior technicians, but you can escalate if necessarily.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No, previously we used Enterprise Manager Database Console, that is a local DB console.

How was the initial setup?

We're used to Oracle products, so the deployment wasn't complex at all.

What about the implementation team?

We did the implementation ourselves.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't have a money estimate, but in man-hours, a deploy in a single machine, for an estimate of 100 targets, takes 8 hours.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, we evaluated Pandora, Nagios and Zabbix.

What other advice do I have?

Follow the installation guide step by step, there won't be any surprises. Check your memory, CPU & disk requirements before implementation.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user8013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Oracle Enterprise Manager for hybrid cloud monitoring

This post is syndicated from https://johanlouwers.blogspot.com/2013/07/oracle-enterprise-manager-for-hybrid.html

Cloud computing comes in many forms, in some cases cloud computing is “just” another form of hosting and it is considered an IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service). In this cloud computing model some of your servers / systems will be located within the cloud of a cloud vendor. Amazon is a good example of this. By having your servers in one or more cloud and some (or none) located in your traditional datacenter you start creating a hybrid cloud model.

Having a hybrid cloud model provides you the options to make sue of the best of breed hosting options. This can be a big advantage however in some cases also brings a challenge. Even though everything can be hosted somewhere in a cloud you most likely would like to have a unified monitoring in place which gives you a holistic view of all your servers and services.

Monitoring capabilities, which provide you a holistic overview of your Enterprise IT assets are provided for Oracle products and none Oracle products by Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides you with options to monitor hardware and software within your Oracle landscape and also maintain it from the same console.

Oracle is providing a great, out of the box, solution when monitoring your on premise IT assets and it can even monitor in multiple datacenters when you have a dual or triple datacenter setup. However, in some cases you have servers running within the Amazon Web Service (AWS) hosting cloud. This is a trend that is seen more and more within the corporate world. Even though some of your servers are running at AWS you still want to include them in your default monitoring tool, Oracle Enterprise Manager and be able to monitor the complete hybrid cloud setup.



In the above example you can see how we leverage an already available tunnel between the enterprise datacenter and AWS to ensure that the OEM connection is secured and encrypted on a network layer. Connecting the datacenter and AWD in such a manner is common practice and when connecting Oracle Enterprise Manager to the servers in AWS you can leverage this tunnel to do so.

Oracle is providing a plugin for this in the Oracle Enterprise Manager extensibility exchange. This plugin is developed by Oracle to monitor the AWS services and by doing so provide you a single monitoring console.

  • Support for monitoring the following Amazon Web Services:
    • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
    • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
  • Rich and exhaustive list of metrics.  Metrics are collected remotely using the Amazon Web Services Cloudwatch API.
  • Detailed configuration information.
  • Custom Home Pages with charts and AWS configuration information.
  • Raise alerts based on thresholds set on monitoring data.

The plugin is available for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2.0 and later. More information can be found at the Oracle Enterprise Manager exchange website, the documentation can be found here.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user1020 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user1020Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Real User

Hi Johan,

We currently have a small data center operations environment, having only fewer than 10 servers. However, we do have Oracle Peoplesoft Campus Solution deployed on a fully-virtualized system on a Cisco UCS blade server system. Our application servers are Oracle, but our back-end database is MS SQL Server. We currently don't have any application performance monitoring and asset management solution.

Would you recommend Oracle Enterprise Manager for this relatively small set-up? We are also looking at MS System Center Configuration Manager, but I think this is a better product considering the Oracle system that we have. I'm quite impressed with the reviews of this product here on IT Central Station and looking for valuable advise on this.

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Manager DBA at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
We checked various Monitoring software but OEM provided us with the greatest ability for productivity

How has it helped my organization?

We have 200+ databases and monitoring that number of databases without using a enterprise tool would involve a tremendous amount of manual work. Furthermore, early notification about databases and operating system alerts helps our DBA team in fixing the issue before there is any major impact on the business.

What is most valuable?

Database performance monitoring, dashboards, databases management and Dataguard setup and monitoring are the features that I like the most.
BI Publisher is another cool feature to generate customized reports.

What needs improvement?

Middleware (weblogic) has some bugs and crashes occur which should be fixed to make OEM more productive.

This

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using OEM for 6+ years

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using custom build application to monitor the systems but this product provides more functionality and GUI interface.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We have an enterprise Corporate License so cost is not an issue.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We checked Quest software (Spotlight and Toad) however we found OEM to be more productive.

What other advice do I have?

I feel that this a 5 star product because of how easy it is to configure and the vast features that are available.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user516651 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user516651Works with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor

OEM helps monitor across heterogenous systems which is key for big companies with various prod environments.

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reviewer1428951 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Database Administrator Senior Team leader at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Good monitoring and management of our Oracle products, but consolidating everything into a single dashboard would be better
Pros and Cons
  • "The product gives us as much control as we can have by providing a complete picture of the whole set of Oracle products."
  • "We would like to have a single dashboard for monitoring and controlling all of our products."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use is for monitoring and management of Oracle products. We are running several Oracle products in our environment.

What is most valuable?

The product gives us as much control as we can have by providing a complete picture of the whole set of Oracle products. We can monitor all of them.

What needs improvement?

We would like to have a single dashboard for monitoring and controlling all of our products. This would add value, for us, because as it is now, we have to go to different screens to check different products.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Oracle Enterprise Manager for about seven years, since 2013.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The Oracle Enterprise Manager is pretty stable and we haven't had any issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have not had to contact technical support for this product because we haven't had any issues. However, if we need to then there is a support portal available.

How was the initial setup?

This product is easy to install and we can complete the deployment in a day, including the agent.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We are satisfied with the pricing.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I am satisfied with this product. It assists us in finding issues through monitoring services.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user44463 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Database Administrator
Vendor
As a troubleshooter, I was able to quickly resolve memory issues with this product

What is most valuable?

The speed at which I can drill down to isolate issues.

How has it helped my organization?

  • As a troubleshooter, I was able to quickly resolve memory issues.
  • Finding the top 10 longest running queries helped to control query performance issues. 

What needs improvement?

Metrics settings could be improved to be more intuitive.

Installation process could be easier. 

There could be better configuration documentation.

For how long have I used the solution?

10 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is good. No issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I do not have a need for this product's scalability.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

How was the initial setup?

It was complex. The installation document was tough to understand.

What about the implementation team?

I installed the tool myself.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Get this tool.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, DBArtisan.

What other advice do I have?

I am very happy with this tool.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Team Lead, Database Administration at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Wait-events can be viewed and investigated in real-time, making resolution easier
Pros and Cons
  • "Some of the most valuable features are its real-time performance view/dashboard, metric history, real-time monitoring and alerts, as well as quick access to Oracle's tuning and diagnostic options."
  • "I feel more dashboards can be added, especially those useful to higher levels of IT management."

What is most valuable?

Some of the most valuable features are its real-time performance view/dashboard, metric history, real-time monitoring and alerts, as well as quick access to Oracle's tuning and diagnostic options.

These are valuable because it makes it much easier to investigate periods in the past (good or bad) as metrics for a period are stored in the repository. Real-time resolution of issues is made easier as wait-events can be viewed and investigated in real-time. SQL queries can also be viewed and investigated in real-time and recommendations are available if the diagnostic and tuning packs are licensed (Oracle databases).

In my experience it seems the best tool for monitoring Oracle products, ranging from software to hardware like the engineered systems (e.g. Exadata).

How has it helped my organization?

In my team, we have display screens dedicated to displaying the real-time wait-events of our most critical databases. Every team member can look up and tell the average health of the critical Oracle databases at a glance. If something unusual is going on, it is immediately apparent on the display.

In addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager completely and adequately handles our hardware and software alerts which are sent out by email as soon as set thresholds have been exceeded.

What needs improvement?

I feel more dashboards can be added, especially those useful to higher levels of IT management.

I feel it would be great to have improved support for other database types like MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.

I also think additional software like the JAgent for monitoring GoldenGate installations should be integrated into Oracle Enterprise Manager itself, and not require additional installation and configuration.

For how long have I used the solution?

About four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Generally, it is pretty stable. Occasionally, one may run into errors that may be tricky to resolve without in-depth knowledge of the product or the help of Oracle Support.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No, I haven't had any issues with scalability so far.

How are customer service and technical support?

On a scale of one to 10, eight.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used Dell Spotlight, but needed more in-depth administration and monitoring capabilities, as well as a web interface.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. Most administrators with some experience in installing Oracle applications and databases shouldn't have a problem setting it up, as long as they follow the installation guide.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

As with all Oracle products, care should be taken when using any features to ensure that they do not activate licensed features that have not been paid for. Oracle Enterprise Manager allows one to do so many things easily, but it is up to the administrator to be sure of the licensing implications.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Dell Spotlight was the only other option we looked into before settling on this product.

What other advice do I have?

Oracle Enterprise Manager is great for monitoring and administering Oracle hardware and software. However, administrators should ensure that their actions are limited to free and licensed features only, otherwise there may be trouble at the next Oracle license review.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Oracle Enterprise Manager Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: January 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Oracle Enterprise Manager Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.