CA Database Management for DB2 for zOS vs Oracle Enterprise Manager vs SCOM comparison

Oracle Enterprise Manager is an on-premises management platform that provides a comprehensive integrated solution for managing and automating your various Oracle products, including applications, databases, middleware, hardware, and engineered systems located either in your Oracle data center or in the cloud.

With the Oracle Enterprise Manager's console, you can administer multiple databases and servers, distribute software to multiple servers and clients, monitor objects and events throughout the network, and integrate with other tools.

Key Oracle Enterprise Manager Features and Products

• Hardware and virtualization management: Manage all Oracle environments from one central console. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides management and automation for Oracle engineered systems, databases, middleware, and hardware.
  
  
• Database management: Oracle’s Database management provides a full lifecycle solution for updates and configuration management, patching, provisioning, testing, performance management and automatic tuning.
  
  
• Application performance management (APM): User and database monitoring with diagnostics and performance analysis that provide rich reporting on real user activities.
  
  
• Enterprise monitoring: Built-in monitoring of all components of the IT infrastructure enables rapid problem diagnosis. Both Oracle and non-Oracle components are constantly monitored.
  
  
• Oracle real user experience insight: Insights on real user experiences and preferences enable businesses and IT stakeholders to develop a shared understanding into their application users’ experience.
  
  
• Non-Oracle management: Oracle Enterprise Manager manages non-Oracle components with a comprehensive set of plugins. The self-update mechanism allows customers to download, import, and deploy extensions built by Oracle, Oracle partners, and Oracle customers. These extensions enjoy the same level of stability as Oracle's own products.
  
  
• Installation and upgrade: The upgrade process provides efficient, reliable, secure data migration with minimal downtime of your environment.

Reviews from Real Users

Oracle Enterprise Manager stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its central management and monitoring and its reporting capabilities

Robin C., head of Oracle Exadata Centre of Excellence at Tata Consultancy Services, writes, "The database performance monitoring features are very useful and allow us to quickly zero in on DB-related issues. Exadata storage server and Infiniband switches can be viewed from the GUI in OEM which cannot be done in other tools. The ability to deploy metric extensions makes this tool extensible for our custom monitoring also."

PeerSpot users note the effectiveness of these features. A database manager at a tech services company notes, “The solution's most valuable aspect is the fact that it is embedded with the Oracle database and Oracle's engineering system, its extra data, and analytics.  They have plug-ins that are very helpful. Due to the infrastructure's size, the introduction they offer is very, very useful. It helps with an overall understanding of the product. They have a very nice graphical user interface. The monitoring is good. We can capture the SQL tune from us. With Oracle Enterprise Managers, we can see the rich performance tuning.”

SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) is a cross-platform data center monitoring and reporting tool that checks the status of various objects defined within the environment, such as server hardware, system services, etc. The solution allows data center administrators to deploy, configure, manage, and monitor the operations, services, devices and applications of multiple enterprise IT systems via a single pane of glass. It is suitable for businesses of all sizes.

SCOM Features

SCOM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Application monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Threshold alerts
• IT Asset Discovery
• Predictive capabilities
• Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
• Application performance management console
• Server availability and performance monitoring
• Collaboration tools
• Virtualization monitoring
• Patch management
• Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
• Application dependency mapping and thresholding

SCOM Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing SCOM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Management and monitoring of Windows as well as Unix/Linux platforms
• Remotely connect to Windows machines and perform administrative tasks from the console itself
• Custom dashboard creation to help monitor the datacenter with ease
• Agent based monitoring
• Integrates well with other Microsoft products
• Easy to use and reliable

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SCOM solution.

A Manager at a financial services firm says, “The feature I like most about SCOM is that it is easy-to-use. I find it very user-friendly. I also like the knowledge base which it has. You can find the resolution to questions or issues directly within the SCOM itself. It will alert you with a recommendation of what you need to do at the same time. This sort of self-diagnosis or prompting is one of the great values you get from SCOM compared to other solutions.”

PeerSpot user Zahari Z., Information Technology Auditor at a financial services firm, mentions, “Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications. There is a mechanism to set up a notification from the SCOM and whenever there is a drop in the availability the notification alerts not only for availability but for other issues as well. You can align thresholds according to the speed of your environment and you can have a threshold related notification, which is one of the useful features.”

Bill W., Sr. Systems Engineer at Arapahoe County Government, comments, “ I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time. When we patch, things are automatically put into maintenance mode so that the numbers for our systems being down, do not count against us.”

A Project Manager at a tech services company explains, “The feature I have found most valuable is the book feature. While we run the Sprint one we can add some setups for multiple sprints.”

A Systems Engineer at an educational organization states, “Because it's Windows-based, it actually reports quite well. It reports everything you can think of on the Windows server and allows you to monitor anything. It's excellent for those in the Windows world as it's very good at it.”