Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

The monitoring and alerting capabilities and ability for corrective actions in incidents provide the most value.

Provides monitoring and alerting to know when there are issues, and the ability to address issues automatically with corrective actions. This has saved admin time, as it's saved our admins from having to get up in the middle of the night to address minor issues that corrective actions could take care of automatically.

I would like to see Oracle address the multi-data center monitoring and management in a more seamless way where management services are easily spread across the data centers like they can be today, but address the single database repository that can only exist in one data center at a time.

I have been using various versions of Enterprise Manager for over eight years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Multi-Data Center High Availability monitoring, alerting and management is the largest challenge as there is a single repository database that is located in a single data center, therefore running across multiple data centers still ties back to a single repository database which runs from one of the data centers, but can distribute the OEM Console and Management servers in each of the data centers. All this works without issue, but the repository traffic from multiple data centers can be a challenge going back to another data center where the repository database resides.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's good, there are times that reaching the right technical analysts to resolve or address an issue can take time, but overall the support is responsive and good and when having a severity one in response to a down issue can be excellent.

I have not really utilized anything other than Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring, alerting and management of Oracle based environments.

Simple single server setups are quite simple to install and upgrade. Multi-Oracle management services with load balancers can be more of a challenge but are not overly difficult to get accomplished.

I am working for a consulting and managed services firm as a consultant and have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager for many of our clients over several years and we have always had great success in meeting the objectives it was implemented to address.

Oracle Enterprise Manager for the base product does not have additional cost when you have an Oracle Enterprise Database licenses, however to get the most value from OEM additional packs are required and have additional costs. Those costs are at the product level and not Oracle Enterprise Manager direct cost as I understand. However, in most enterprise level environments these packs provide huge value to the monitoring, alerting and management of the environment.

It's overall capability for Oracle products is very good and offers the ability to monitor and manage many Oracle products from a single environment and is seamlessly integrated to monitor and manage those products out of the box.

If you run Oracle Products from Oracle OVM, Oracle Database, Web Logic, etc. Oracle Enterprise Manager is by far the best way to provide a single console and monitoring and alerting solution.

I have mainly used it for management, monitoring and tuning for Oracle databases.

We manage and monitor many databases for customers (some customers have a few hundred databases) and OEM is extremely helpful in performing operations for monitoring and management from one single place. Setting up various jobs including RMAN backups is extremely helpful via OEM. We also use features such as corrective actions, where we can ask OEM to take appropriate corrective actions when an event occurs in the middle of the night.

I have been using OEM 13c which is their latest release and I would have expected that the product would have been more stable and should not have bugs for very simple things like CPU utilisation or amount of physical memory on Linux hosts. These are very fundamental metrics to monitor and should not be an issue. These are not a new features and I would have expected a much better release of the product.

I have been using OEM since 2002.

I have deployed OEM 11g and 12c in High availability mode and was not too complicated to implement. I have not tried HA with 13c. However, installation for all the releases have been fine.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

To me its like a lottery, if I am lucky I get a support engineer who knows what they are talking but many a times you get someone who just keeps asking very fundamental questions until you have to ask on duty manger to be involved and have the SR escalated. But I guess, it is the same across any other vendor.

I have used custom scripts and still do use it for standard edition of databases where OEM cannot be used. However, I prefer to use OEM wherever possible.

Although custom scripts might be easy to setup, the issue is when the person who wrote the scripts leaves an organisation, all the knowledge walks out as well.

Like any product, it is best that the implementation is done by someone who understands it well, whether done in-house or by third party. It saves a lot in long run and you know that its done right.

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. Amount of time required to perform many activities such as tuning and diagnostics pays off.

Do it once and do it right.

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 has been consistently excellent.

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.