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Oracle Enterprise Manager vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle Enterprise Manager
Ranking in Server Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
129
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (3rd)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Server Monitoring
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of Oracle Enterprise Manager is 2.4%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 3.2%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle Enterprise Manager2.4%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.2%
Other94.4%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer996648 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and President at a training & coaching company with 1-10 employees
Extensive functionality impresses despite occasional setup complexity
The functions and features of Oracle Enterprise Manager that I have found most valuable are its evolution from being problematic in 10g and 11g versions to becoming better and more stable. Now it has become a significantly improved product. We have integrated identity management, and we are using it for normal database examination, tuning, and performance. We are working with STATSPACK and similar tools that are integrated in Oracle Enterprise Manager. We are currently working with version 13.5, having upgraded from 13.4 last year. Automation is useful for improving operational efficiency, and there are many more opportunities to automate outside the databases. Not many things need to be automated inside the databases. We have jobs running, imports, exports, and similar tasks. To automate these processes, we utilize the Scheduler from Oracle, which is managed in the databases by the vendor. This is not part of our DBA functions in Oracle Enterprise Manager.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The product gives us as much control as we can have by providing a complete picture of the whole set of Oracle products."
"Oracel Enterprise Manager is must if you have too many oracle databases across the landscape"
"This solution allows us to quickly drill down when there are issues."
"OEM 12 C has simplified management of our Enterprise Systems and has eliminated unnecessary and legacy tools."
"Oracle Enterprise Manager has eased the responsibilities among our DBAs. We can now assign individual tasks to separate DBAs."
"It can also help with capacity planning, sizing, and maximizing overall performance in a large scale environment."
"It is a very good Oracle tool which enables us to incorporate all the databases throughout our environment, set up several rules, monitor from there, and perform almost any operation with one click of a button, making life easier and freeing our time from mundane tasks."
"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."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The solution has good alerts; notifications are sent via email to technicians, and you can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well, which is excellent."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
 

Cons

"It could be faster; sometimes it takes a while to make the connection. Sometimes, it's complicated, too."
"Sometimes the solution can be quite difficult in terms of when you want to deploy agents."
"One of the drawbacks that I don't like is, quite often you'll see that the agent will show a status of Pending."
"Metrics settings could be improved to be more intuitive. Installation process could be easier."
"I'm a bit skeptical of it. I personally experienced a little longer time than I would like to get the right solution for issues."
"Oracle Enterprise Manager could improve the monitoring types and the graphics."
"My opinion is that this solution needs to improve consolidation. That is what our business needs the most right now."
"We've had a lot of struggles patching automation. There's no good log file that you can debug."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system."
"MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking; without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, and I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Initially, our deal was for three years, and we extended it to five years. Oracle solutions are very costly."
"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."
"Based upon 3 days of implementation by a single person, plus licensing costs would be approximately $60,000, including the virtualized hosts."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"Be careful to only enable the packs for which you have a license as this is an issue we see time and again."
"The pricing is very high."
"The license is good but can be improved."
"As far as I know, you do not pay for Oracle Enterprise Manager separately. You can use Enterprise Manager for free if you already have an Oracle license for your database."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"The product is expensive."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
7%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise81
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Oracle Enterprise Manager?
What I like most about Oracle Enterprise Manager are its features, particularly the active session history. It provides insights into SQL, and I use it regularly to identify potential issues.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Enterprise Manager?
I would rate the pricing of Oracle Enterprise Manager as very expensive, definitely deserving a 10 out of 10.
What needs improvement with Oracle Enterprise Manager?
The weaknesses I would like to address in Oracle Enterprise Manager involve the dealing of Grid Infrastructure. Oracle Enterprise Manager's handling of Grid Infrastructure needs some improvement. I...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

7-Eleven, Halliburton, Cisco, Garmin, Nationwide, Korea Telecom, Allied Irish Bank
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Enterprise Manager vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,576 professionals have used our research since 2012.