Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

I like the performance tuning features, particularly since it gives me a good glimpse of what has been happening. We maintain the data for 31 days, so I can graphically go back and see what exactly happened during that time. I can drill down to the user level or the SQL level and see what was happening at any point in time. That's a pretty good feature, and because it's more graphical, I don't have to analyze a whole bunch of rows.

In terms of the user response time, if I were to do a lot of queries, and analyze it, we can quickly provide the result to the end user or the developers, and then quickly come back to solving a lot of performance problems.

With any Oracle protocol, and Enterprise Manager is one of them, as far as the interface is concerned, it's not good and is still pretty ugly. I would like to see a decent UI because there are a lot of tools on the market that also give good drill-down capabilities. For example, with Enterprise Manager's drill down to database blocking logs, you can no longer see that in the UI, whereas other tools allow that. I need to be able to do this type of drill-down in one tool without having to manage different tools that do different things.

I've been using Oracle products for 22 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

You should go with the latest version as it's more stable, and that's one of the reasons I like it. It's a pretty stable platform.

We have a pretty good number of database with Oracle Enterprise Manager. You can scale it as much as you want. We have about 1,200 databases that we manage using it.

I have not used technical support because I am not the one who administer it. Technical support is good, I've heard.

If you're using one or two databases, Enterprise Manager is not something you want to use because Oracle has other products that can make it simpler. But ff you are using more than five or six databases, Enterprise Manager is the way to go.

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.

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.

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.

We've been OK deploying it within our company.

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

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.

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

We implemented it with our in-house team.

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

From my experience, I'd say that the most valuable feature is the ability to manage all the databases, hardware, and middleware from one pane of glass.

Having the single-pane-of-glass manageability of our database, hardware, and middleware infrastructure gives us the most efficient way to keep our thumb on the pulse of the infrastructure to ensure it's always up and running.

OEM needs to be a little bit faster. That's probably because the features that they've developed and put into the latest product are incredible. They're consolidating more and more, which, expectedly, slows it down.

I've been using Oracle Enterprise Manager for the last eight to ten years.

We've had no issues deploying it.

At the beginning it was in the development phase, but for the last, probably six years, it's been a fairly solid product from 10g right through to the current 12c version.

I haven't really had to scale it because the enterprise isn't large enough to require that, but the initial installation is sufficient for all the needs.

I've always been very happy with Oracle support. I think probably the one thing that I'd like to be able to have more of is input into the feature set for the next release.

For us, the most valuable feature is really the ability to monitor. We're using Enterprise Manager to monitor our database infrastructure. Whenever we create a database, we'll apply those templates, and it will monitor. Database will send alerts and create instances that will allow our team to be both reactive and proactive and use some of the warnings that it brings us. We're using it a lot for that -- the ability to do performance tuning, using the OEM, the ability to create different reporting, the ability to be able to get some suggestions from the OEM, in terms of the database performance.

The tool also gives us the ability to create reports for a set of databases, or a set of applications, such that we can create a daily report, weekly report, monthly report, whatever you want, to know about the performance utilization of that group of databases or specific databases.

That's really the key advantage of Enterprise Manager. Although we're using it for Database, the tool has enhancements to provide benefits to an entire IT shop in terms of monitoring and managing the entire IT infrastructure.

As with any organization, before we embark on anything, we have to look at the ROI as well as the ability of a particular tool. Enterprise Manager gives us a tool that's fast and reliable for monitoring and managing our whole IT infrastructure. We're a mutual fund company, so speed is really key in providing satisfactory customer service. The performance and functionality of Enterprise Manager has been huge for us.

The latest release, 13c, which I think came out in December, has additional enhancements in the areas of security, management, creation of users, and different level of functionality. It's much better than before, which was very limited and the majority of users created with the tool were forced to have more privilege than they should have. We're currently working on upgrading to 13c, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether that will apply for our environment.

Deployment has been fine. There have been no issues.

With Enterprise Manager, you've got a tool that's providing end-to-end administration and monitoring of your IT infrastructure. The tool, therefore, has to have a very smooth way to configuring so that it is highly available. This, of course, plays a very important role in functionality because you don't want the tool to be a single point of failure.

So Oracle has claimed that they've enhanced that part of Enterprise Manager. For me, that's important because as a data architect, I play a lot of roles and I've been able to configure the tool to have four nines of High Availability. If you have a tool that you depend on for monitoring and administrating your entire IT infrastructure, the last thing you want is for it to have an level of unavailability.

It's scaled to our needs.

We have premier support from Oracle, so we have a very good relationship with technical support.

Right now, the only complexity is setting up our environment for High Availability so that we can scale it and have it highly available not just within the same data center but spanning to multiple, different locations. That's the only tricky part because it involves additional products from other companies, like Cisco and F5. So for us, setting up a standalone, vanilla Oracle Enterprise Manager is a very, very small part. It's because we have to set up the large, diverse environment with maximum-availability architecture that it's been a challenge for us.

One piece of advice is just why, if you don’t have Oracle Enterprise Manager, you aren't taking advantage of it. I assume your DBA's might be spending extra hours and off hours, and if you set up and deploy Enterprise Manager the right way, you will see at least a 50% decrease in unnecessary, mundane work.

The most valuable feature of OEM is that it goes hand-in-hand with our EDI. Essentially, it allows us to operate the SOA Suite solution on a management level.

The biggest improvement Enterprise Manager has provided us is that it allows for easy maintenance and setup of our user base that's surrounded by SOA Suite.

The issues we've had with Enterprise Manager go hand-in-hand with our issues with SOA Suite. There are performance issues that we see tied to SOA Suite and the B2B functioning, all of which impacts Enterprise Manager.

We've had no issues deploying it.

There have been no problems with its own instability, just with performance that's tied to SOA Suite.

We don't have that many functional users using it, so scaling has not been a true issue for us.

We use a third-party hosting solution. A lot of the setup in technical maintenance is all handled through them. I know we've logged several SR's for the OEM issues related to the SOA Suite issues.

This was set up through our third-party implementer.

As a DBA contractor, I like the ability to be able to group my hosts/targets and set up different configurations to monitor based on the needs of my clients.

It has made my job easier in that I can put my focus on certain elements at the whim of my client.

The one area was the process of setting up targets and hosts as it seems rather lengthy and repetitive. There should be a way to merge some of the steps together.

As a DBA contractor, I have been using this solution/configuration since 2013. I started with the upgrade from 11 to 12.

I have had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

I have no issues scaling it as needed.

Customer Service:

Customer service has been consistently excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support has been consistently excellent.

My client has always been Oracle based.

With the proper available documentation the setup, although lengthy, was straightforward for the most part.

Implementation was done in-house. My advice, based on the upgrade that we performed, is to create a "sandbox" to "play" in and test, test, test and document, document, document.

We documented with great detail each step and the time it would take. We ran tests in the sandbox to ensure that the upgrade would work. It was very successful and ran into virtually no problems.

Do some research, follow the documentation and any advise that might be out there. The Oracle communities are good sources.

Over and above the monitoring, alerting and incident framework, all of which are excellent, I would say the Lifecycle Management Pack is of most value to us.

For a particular client, they had a large database estate with over 750 databases and it wasn't actually possible to measure their compliance position against their own security standard at any given time. They had a view of a few systems, but the collection and aggregation of data was manual intensive and time consuming.

The Lifecycle Management Pack for Enterprise Manager has allowed the organization to have an almost real-time view of security and compliance across every single database within the estate. This was also based on their own internal security standard which has been created in Oracle Enterprise Manager via pre-packaged and customized compliance rules.

I think with the documentation there could be improvements. Although the core database compliance functionality is well documented some of the other areas of compliance aren't for example the Real Time monitoring rules. Also, further information on how compliance rule data is collected from repository to agent would be helpful and would assist when digging into the Oracle Enterprise Manager repository for building BI reports using BI Publisher.

I've been using it for four years.

Understanding how to build custom compliance rules was probably the area which took most time but that was still relatively simple. Also, while using the product this area was refined in 12.1.0.4 release with Agent Side rules, we started using this feature in 12.1.0.3 with Repository Side rules.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

Customer Service:

Technical Support:

On the whole, technical support was good. Some of the very niche questions I had regarding some of the internal workings and collection of data took a little while longer to get answers for, but, to be fair, I always managed to find an answer to those queries.

For managing estate-wide security compliance, the only previous option was a scripted solution which was costly and not scaleable.

Deployment of Oracle Enterprise Manager is straightforward as the documentation is good and the issues in deployment are rare. The challenge comes in ensuring that you configure all the relevant aspects of Enterprise Manager prior to rolling out agents and using the product in anger. This isn't necessarily an issue with the product, but rather the mindset of how sometimes it's deployed. I've assisted in a number of projects which was to retrospectively fix Oracle Enterprise Manager deployments.

Having assisted on many Oracle Enterprise Managers implementations and seen the common mistakes, I wrote an article about it for the Oracle Scene Magazine Issue 57 (http://tinyurl.com/hxe4q9n). In summary, it's about planning what you want Oracle Enterprise Manager to do in helping you manage your IT estate and then undertaking the necessary configuration. Too often, people put little thought or effort into understanding what the product can do and just start rolling out management agents and then undertake a period of protracted reconfiguration.

Don't underestimate the time you invest in deploying and managing Oracle within your wider IT estate. The Lifecycle Management Pack needs to be seen as an essential purchase with Diagnostics and Tuning Packs. You may be able to create some 'home brew' solutions for software deployment, compliance and configuration management, but it will be light years behind what the LCMP can do and it's something that will continually be developed and improved.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is an Enterprise Management tool and should be treated as such. It's not a glorified DB console. Companies should look to configure it in a way which takes away all the low-level, least value-add activities that DBAs have to do on a day-to-,day basis. As an organization look at the value the product could bring and deploy it as you would any other software asset.

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.

Performance tuning, segment and memory advisor

All our production systems are monitored by OEM to get the alerts and warnings and deal with it

One of the biggest issues, specially for 12c grid contro,l is the performance; to be able to monitor and find the root cause of performance issue immediately, in real time. It is important for the grid control to perform quickly in order to minimize the time of investigation and to identify the root cause and required solution,

6 years

Some times with 12C

No

No

For Oracle databases and Oracle products in general, OEM is the best monitoring / console solution to get live and historical overview on your systems

• Provides a platform for tuning multiple databases and scheduling of multiple tasks. • Monitors database health and performs regular monitoring. • Used to administer multiple networks and services from multiple locations. • The Oracle environment, including database servers and application servers can be administered • Very useful for oracle database administrators. Because DBAs are required to create new user, manage database backups, adding tablespace and data files. Oracle Enterprise Manager offers database administration functionality that helps simplifies the routine tasks of database administrators. • The graphical interface of Oracle Enterprise Manager provides ease of use to database administrators for managing routine tasks including scheduling of database backup using RMAN.

• In a large organization with large number of targets, managing systems on an individual basis can be time consuming and difficult. • Upgrades/Patches Installation and implementation timelines can be extensive as each and every system must be upgraded one by one.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is a set of system management tools from Oracle that are used to monitor the Oracle environment, automating tasks to make database management easier for business. Enterprise Manager uses web based architecture and its HTML based console can be accessed from anywhere through browsers. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides complete, integrated solutions to achieve the level of business service quality required of enterprise applications, tools for managing configuration, performance and availability, and when combined with other management packs and plug-ins, it provides the means to achieve end-to-end management of the entire application infrastructure.