Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

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.

Overall monitoring of Oracle databases and operating systems. Real time performance tuning of SQL queries.

By using OEM, less time and resources are spent to monitor and manage databases.

It comes with some monitoring bugs, which once reported to Oracle support is always solved.

I have been using this solution for the last 6 years.

No issues at all, very easy to deploy.

A very stable product.

Up until now I have not had any issues.

Customer Service: The best in the industry.Technical Support: Very good. Sometimes there is a need to escalate things, but that's ok.

I used BMC earlier, but OEM is very vast and mature as compared to other similar products.

Straightforward, easy setup GUI.

In-house team.

Not really.

Go ahead and implement it, as you'll find that it is very useful for infrastructure related tasks.

Monitoring and tuning of Oracle databases.

It has improved significantly our monitoring and tuning of our databases.

Installation and configuration.

6+ years

Yes, configuration is a pain.

Nope

Nope

Customer Service: 4 stars, sometimes support takes time to figure out the issue and provide a solution.Technical Support: 4 stars

Used to monitor manually before.

Medium difficulty

In-house

None

None

Go for it and utilize all the features!

Real-time performance monitoring

Can easily visualize bottlenecks in database performance tuning with historical graph trends; where as before it would be based upon manually tuning using scripts which are text based. Ability to get email alerts for systems in trouble; where as it would have been manual steps to obtain health-checks on all database servers.

Stability and bugs in the product. There seem to be too many.

3 years

Many problems which were fixed with patches.

Initially yes, but after patching it was stable; but with applying the latest version 12.1.0.3, we seem to be unstable again.

No

Customer Service: Appalling, raised issues with support and that take ages to respond.Technical Support: Appalling; they take far too long to understand the issue, they just simply appear to read scripts; if our problem is not on the script; then they struggle to think.

No

It was a complex installation, in that we have 2 servers as opposed to a single all in one solution; but it was nothing we could not manage.

In-house

Initial set up was approx. 5 days’ worth of DBA’s effort

No

Be prepared for a lot of heartache before it beds in. Get the latest patches for the project, and read up on most common bugs issues before implementation;

Query tuning, historical graphs, real time statistics on query usage, easy to find blocking or locking queries, easy to kill queries, easy to add new datafiles to tablespaces about to run out of space, easy to explore table structure

For Oracle databases we setup e-mail alerts through OEM. Setup several maintenance jobs to handle previously time consuming tasks such as automatically adding datafiles to a tablespace about to run out of space. Improved root cause analysis on database slowness issues

For databases and servers with high blocking issues, the monitoring and graphs in OEM frequently became so over loaded that they could not be used and would not load making OEM useless for troubleshooting certain production issues. When this would happen, I had to go back to using queries from the sqlplus command line.

2 years

OEM agents on database servers frequently stopped collecting data and had to be restarted.

Unknown, wasn't involved much with scalability but the Enterprise Manager web based site did get a little slower as we added thousands of servers.

Oracle support is helpful and knowledgeable.

Used Toad a little bit but didn't have a solution exactly like EM. Toad licensees were expensive and had to be installed on each user's machine while enterprise manager was web based and I'm sure Oracle gave the company special pricing since we already used so many of their products.

Use as many features as possible but the more you rely on Enterprise Manager, the more you must remove and SPOF by having redundancy (RAC clusters or whatever failover solution you choose) and having a hot backup in a separate data center using data guard or some other replication technology so that if your data center goes down you can still bring up Enterprise Manager some where else.