Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

We use Oracle Enterprise Manager primarily for database management, with a focus on performance monitoring. 

Our environments are composed of both standalone and cluster databases which, in turn, are deployed in Oracle appliances like ODA and Exadata, as well as others hardware vendors.

In addition, we use the tool to create, configure and manage high-availability environments using Oracle Data Guard and Real Application Clusters, automation of manual activities and patching.

With Enterprise Manager, we have achieved a dramatic decrease in the number of database incidents. As a result, unplanned downtime has been reduced because we are resolving issues before the business is even aware of them.

The product has powerful features for diagnosis of database issues, complemented with tuning capabilities for most of the issues found.

With ASH Analytics, ADDM, Real-Time SQL Monitoring, SQL Tuning Advisor, we can measure SLAs, detect performance hotspots, perform deep diagnostics into specific tiers, tune applications, and remediate.

Oracle is always making improvements to Oracle Enterprise Manager. I think Enterprise cloud integration presents new management challenges.

More than five years.

We always strive to have the latest version of this product, which has always helped to improve stability and performance.

Yes, we encountered scalability issues. However, there are several techniques for achieving optimal performance. It can also help with capacity planning, sizing, and maximizing overall performance in a large scale environment.

Inadequately-sized Enterprise Manager deployments may result in the overall benefits of Enterprise Manager being compromised.

Good.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Today, you can even download the templates found on the Oracle website.

The basic functions are free. You only pay license fees for advanced features.

I’ve been using this product for years. I evaluated other options from different vendors such as Foglight and SolarWinds, to name a couple.

To me this is the best product for enterprise database management. I rate it a 10 out of 10.

Now, before you implement, you can do several tests with the Enterprise Manager templates VMS, available from Oracle. Also, check the compatibility matrix and try to always keep your system up to date.

I think the fact that I can manage all of our infrastructure, all the hardware and software, from one place which makes it very useful.

It makes it very easy for us to manage our infrastructure so that's important from a company perspective.

It's very expensive.

I think it's fine, there's no issue there.

I think it's fine, there's no issue there.

It's implemented just fine. It's fairly easy. Combination of an easy product and also technical expertise as well.

It's very expensive.

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.

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.

Real Time monitoring i.e SQL Monitoring and the ADDM

We have setup dashboards for the SMT (Senior Management Team) to give them a traffic light system on a very high level – enough for them to know that all systems are up and available

Costs of add-on’s and management packs i.e AWS (Amazon) and Golden Gate

3-4 years across 3 different jobs.

None, quite straight forward (having already deployed and installed weblogic before)

Just on a few occasions agent connectivity to repository would fail resulting in “stuck” messages on the OEM screens, resolved itself overnight – weird?

No

Customer Service: ExcellentTechnical Support: Excellent

Just the old OEM 10g/11g

Fairly straight forward. The download zip files have everything you need in one place and instructions are simple to follow for those who have experience in Oracle installations.

Installed by DBATEAM onsite

Setup costs are absorbed by the Enterprise licenses we already hold, but as we run OEM from Amazon cloud services we have daily costs for server/disk/networks etc. Hard to give a figure as it depends on what Amazon service we use

No

If you are already paying for enterprises licenses then it’s rude not to use it!

For masking purposes, and for case studies with the other existing masking tools existing in the market.

It has a very good user interface, and the controls are user-friendly. Many useful options are available.

The masking features are good, and many new options and features are available in OEM for masking when compared to other tools.

With regards to masking still, some options could be added like running in simulation mode, creation of audit file option, file summary, file after masking.

Less than one year.

• Remote administration
• Corrective actions
• Custom reports
• Oracle Secure Backup integration
• Exadata/SuperCluster plugin

• Corrective action reduces the occurrences of business impacting outages.
• Alerts enable us to proactively address issues.
• Reporting features allow us to monitor storage usage over time, thus perform effective capacity predictions.

OS level integration

Better integration with NetBackup

Five years.

Yes. However, this was due to a storage capacity issue with the repository DB.

No issues.

Fair, when needed.

Shell scripts. The reasons to switch were obvious.

It was straightforward. It was done in conjunction with consultant support.

If you can avoid all that by creating a comprehensive ULA, then that's the route to go.

No.

Excellent product for enterprise monitoring: The tool is able to monitor several other database products across various OS platforms. All database-related tasks can be performed on an Oracle DB from inside this tool.

I do recommend deploying agents on everything you can find, then going to see what useful data exists in your management views.

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.