Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

I think the neatest, most valuable feature of Enterprise Manager (OEM) is that single pane of glass for the whole stack, that it gives me as an admin the ability to look all the way up from my storage all the way up to the application tier.

There's a lot of benefits to Enterprise Manager. From the monitoring capabilities is that single pane of glass. It's being able to look at an application and then look at the database component. Look at the storage component on it from a monitoring, troubleshooting. Once you understand what the pain point is, you can easily automate it through thresholds and events, where you get notifications or tickets opened when you see a similar behavior. But, It's not just the ability to monitor, it's the ability for actual change. I can use Enterprise Manager to actually install Bare Metal systems. I can use Enterprise Manager for all my database, to deploy new database instances, or deploy WebLogic instances. That's the value is it's that single pane of glass for the whole enterprise.

What I would love to see in Enterprise Manager is more support for the hardware, more support for Bare Metal. Right now I can do Bare Metal deployments with Linux and OVM and that's an awesome capability, but I would love to see more functionality with Solaris. I'd also see more change functionality in Enterprise Manager. It's a great tool for monitoring an ODA, Oracle Database Appliance, but it doesn't let me change the database appliance, as an example.

I have been using 12 and 13 since they came out.

A few, but usually due to errors on my part

Stability on 13c has been fairly good. I haven't had any major issues with 13c where it's panic for no reason and just gone dead or anything like that. In 12, again, didn't really have any major stability issues there of it panicking or blowing up.

Scalability for an Enterprise Management system, it does scale well. Both 12 and 13 scale well for high availability as well as for handling more agents, more targets.

Great, the three times I have needed to open a ticket!

Oracle's tech support for OEM is fairly good. Again, I've been using OEM heavily since 12 was released, I think four years ago now. I've had to open up, I think, three tickets since I've really been using it, so it's been a very low volume of tickets.

Generally, with Enterprise Manager, the question is when do you decide to use it. My thought is if you're running an Oracle product and you want to enterprise great IT, you need to use it from day one.

From just the monitoring and the provisioning, just all the capabilities of it, it saves you a lot of time. It simplifies a lot of the workload you do day-to-day in an IT shop.

Very easy for the initial setup, up and running in afternoon

The initial setup on Enterprise Manager is fairly straightforward. Actually, on my own personal blog, I blog step-by-step - installing the database, installing the OMS, it takes a couple hours, depending on the speed of disc, but it's fairly straightforward.

OEM helps with the license complexity, you can ask it for each page what licenses are needed, and it can also report on all your license consumption

Enterprise Manager, I'd probably rate it a nine and a half. If you're not running it, install it and run it.

The most valuable feature is the automation of the alerting. We can be proactive when we use that program instead of being called in the middle of the night because something’s wrong. You get the alert and the warning before. You can customize every threshold to meet your needs, and have different settings for different database groups.

The company spends less money over time because we are not working overtime hours at the office.

I would like to see better support for Oracle GoldenGate. Right now, it doesn't work well with Oracle GoldenGate. You still have to use GoldenGate monitor if you want to take advantage of the product.

There are some bugs and often we cannot debug the product right there and we have to reconfigure some things. It does the job, as long as you don't encounter a bug.

The stability's not so bad. It's a stable product, a mature product. When we change versions, there are some problems there.

Scalability's good. We went from two databases to over 250. It's working fine.

We have used technical support many times; it is very bad. We often had to dig down ourselves into the source code to find out why it’s not working on our platform. Every time we conferred about that, it became a little more complicated. Their answer is often to just delete the target, rediscover it and it should be fine.

We were pretty much doing our own thing with an in-house script. Since we were growing fast, we could not continue like that.

Out of the box, initial setup is pretty straightforward: You install it, you discover your target and it monitors them. If you want to go further and do custom monitoring, for example, it can become quite complicated. On the other hand, it's very flexible. That's good.

It's been a long time, so I don't remember which other products we were considering. Probably from the beginning, we were considering Oracle because they let us experiment with it first and we saw that it worked. Also, because we kind of expect our versioning to follow the version of the database.

Go only with the out-of-the-box configuration first. Let it run for a while like that to learn the product. Learn a few things before trying to configure everything in it.

When I’m selecting a vendor, price is a big factor. Licensing is a big factor. It has to do the job we need it for. Those are the most important criteria.

Both OS and Hardware Management, Network Boot, Server Pools, and Live migration of LDOMs over Server Pool are Ops Center's most valuable features to me.

It helps a lot in data center consolidation, P2V, and with LDOM live migration. It reduces overall required downtime and is highly scalable, especially with T5 architecture.

The monitoring feature should be improved, so that it may be used as a dependable monitoring solution, as well as a deployment solution for SPARC-based hardware and operating systems.

I have used the product for three years.

No, I didn’t encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

I will rate technical support at 9.

I have had the opportunity to work with various other UNIX as well as Linux systems, but among all of them, I found Solaris to be a very stable operating system. Now with the evolution of LDOMs, ZFS and zones, it’s providing a perfect platform for virtualization solutions.

To me installation doesn’t seem complex, but at the same time comprehensive understanding of technology is required.

We performed implementation ourselves, except some time when we requested Oracle’s professional services.

I recommend Oracle solutions like T5 Super-Cluster, T5-8 and Oracle Solaris 11 operating systems, as they are highly scalable and fault-tolerant systems.

Enterprise Manager comes with a suite of products that includes agents for setup. This makes it easier to monitor databases as well as servers and SANs.

It's given us the ability to monitor multiple aspects of the organization. Also, the ability to monitor different versions of Oracle and different platforms has been helpful for our customers.

Using, setting up, and maintaining the agents can be tedious and even almost a full-time job. Once it's done, it works pretty well. It's just setting them up that could use some improvements.

We haven't had any issues with the deployment other than setting up the agents.

I've had problems with its reliability and speed. Sometimes even giving it a large amounts of software and hardware to run on, it can still be sluggish and fail to respond as quickly as you would think.

It does seem to scale. Even when we throw thousands of objects at it, the scalability still seems to be there.

The newer versions are much simpler and they have a better look and feel, and once you get the agents taken care of, it goes a lot quicker.

We implemented it ourselves.

If you are going to be database-heavy, and that is what you are going to be monitoring the most, then Enterprise Manager might be your best bet. If not, there are other options out there to look at to see which pieces you need to monitor. Do we need to monitor applications, servers, and networks? Figure out which part you're going to need for that.

OEM gives me, as the DBA, a very graphical representation of what's going on with my Oracle footprint, and it's very quick to display to me where I would have issues and where I can correct them. This gives me the capability to see when there are issues happening, which means that I can actually act on the issues pretty quickly before it becomes apparent to the business that there is something going on within the database, that could, for example, have a negative effect on their ability to get a drug out the door.

From my point of view, I've found OEM to be one of the easier products to deal with. It's the product that I use day in daily to view all of my databases, and the fact that I can actually integrate multiple databases and multiple middleware solutions into one single point is perfect for me, so I'm really happy with it.

The features that I'd want to use in Enterprise Manager would be in and around the diagnostics and tuning area of the database. Again, that is an additional license. Whilst I can get Enterprise Manager, I can do certain things with it, the really, really high-value part of Enterprise Manager requires additional licenses. So I'd like to see more advanced functionalities that, frankly, don't require us to spend more money.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's been very stable. I don't recall any big issues with stability.

We've been able to scale it as needed.

It was a very, very complicated product to set up. We initially used it with Oracle Single Sign-On to link Microsoft Active Directory to our E-Business Suite instance. It was difficult to set up, and actually now we've migrated to Oracle Access Manager with Identity Manager, and it's even more complicated. 

Oracle Access Manager is a product that Oracle has brought in. They've took over a company which had their own identity management solution. They took it over and re-labelled it, re-branded it to be their product. We had a few enhancements in it, but when they released it is was absolutely full of bugs, and, actually really, really complicated to set up. 

Later releases and scripts is what have made it a little bit easier, but I would like Oracle before they put these products out to the market, to invest some time in making them easier to set up.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

Read the documentation, because we found and still find it extremely complicated to bind the latest versions of the database into Enterprise Manager. It was much easier in earlier versions, but much more complicated now.

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.

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.

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.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

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

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

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.

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

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

In my opinion, without Enterprise Manager no DBA can do their job. There are better tools out there, but they only complement OEM because it may not do the whole job. OEM, though, is very intuitive when it comes to performance tuning, metrics, and monitoring.

Without it, it's like driving a car without seeing with your eyes. Without OEM, I can't troubleshoot any of the issues that arise. For the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor, port reports, memory advisors depending on load, manual memory management and other database analyses that SGAs and PGAs expect -- these are all things that can only be provided by OEM.

It's quite user-friendly when integrating, but when propagating user access and agents, it's not so intuitive. I'm using 12.1.0.3, I believe, and there seems to be a log of bugs that haven't been worked out.

The issues with deployment in 12.1.0.3 have to do with user access and agents. Other than that, it deploys fine.

It is buggy in certain process, but every Oracle product has bugs, although unless you really hit it you would never really come to know about it. For example, one of the Java processes within OEM chews up the entire CPU. This is an obvious bug, but there is a patch that can be applied to correct the issue.

It scales with out issues for us.

Deploying agent is not easy, but the rest of setting up is fairly easy.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

You need OEM if you are having Oracle databases. OEM is very expensive, but it does some nice things like memory advisors and ADDM reports. There are products that complement OEM, but they can't replace it.

I like the reports of Enterprise Manager, as you have a lot of targets. You can create generic reports based on some metrics of those targets. It allows me to have some sort of place to check all my targets.

I would like to have more details and privileges. Sometimes, I have a problem where I need to grant a user in Enterprise Manager the privilege to view a database. When I grant a privilege to him, to monitor a database, he also gets the privilege to view the host of the database, and I don't want him to show the host, only the database. I would say more grantable and obtainable privileges are needed.

I've been using it for four to five years.

It's very, very stable.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I never needed support for Oracle. The packages that they offer are very good. I never need to contact any guys from Oracle to perform support.

It's very easy to setup, not for someone who has never worked with it, but if you had junior or someone a little more experienced than a junior, they are good enough to deploy. It's easy to deploy.

Before deploying a new service, be sure you configure it very well, because it's very boring and time consuming to later do this. It would be good to do this during the deployment phase. That is what I would think.