Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

The GUI interface for monitoring and managing databases is the most valuable feature.

The automated alerts tell me when I have an issue before a user calls. They are proactive.

We use it mostly for the connection to the databases. It could be the version I'm on, but we seem a little limited on what we can do for monitoring for the middleware.

No stability issues.

So far, it has scaled well for our needs.

Most of the time, when we open a ticket, we are happy with the resolution and the timing of the response. We've had a few incidents where they immediately say, “Maybe you should upgrade.” That usually kind of sets me off. It's like, why don't you listen to the entire thing before you immediately tell me to upgrade? Overall yes, no issues with that.

We looked at Spotlight. It was just too expensive, so we stuck with Oracle.

Go to training first. We did it the other way around: We tried to figure it out, and then go to training. That’s fine, as long as there isn’t a big gap between when you're going to implement it, and when you've been trained. We probably would have saved a lot of angst and issues if we were properly trained first.

Our biggest issue is learning all the features. There are more bells and whistles than we're probably using; getting familiar with the capabilities, and then actually being able to execute them.

I'm happy with it. I think we're not leveraging it enough, but for what we use it for, it's perfect.

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 mostly use the top events, and look at how the execution is happening on the database; and monitoring the cluster level rates. I even look at the execution plan. 

I really love this tool because I don't need to type the commands. It's very user friendly, I just click and get the reports and get it done.

It does help a lot because we have a centralized place, we can go there and monitor all the databases or whatever else we need to. It's in one place. We can monitor everything.

I would say mostly backup and recovery, through the Enterprise Manager. Or any corruptions, to be able to fix them through Enterprise Manager.

In terms of stability, I'm pretty confident. I'm very happy with the product.

Scalability is pretty good. We have everything monitored using Enterprise Manager.

We get our support through the Oracle Support help desk ticketing system. It's good.

We have two types of support. One is an on site person, from Oracle. The other option is that we can create a ticket through the online support.

Previously I was using all command-based, I needed to manually run things, but now I don't need to. Now, whatever I need, I can go and find it.

The switch was a company decision.

It was already set up in our datacenter, another team is managing it, but we are using it.

When looking at a vendor the most important criterion I'm focused on is timely support. A person available, and the ability of the person in support to fix the problem immediately. I also prefer anyone that is a market leader or that has a lot of options, and they know what they're doing.

I give it an eight out of 10 because I still feel that there are more improvements that need to be done.

Go use it first and see whether it's meeting your requirements. Then, if you're happy, go from there.

I think the look and feel and the accessibility to the databases, the scale of environment support. Ours is basically like a hosting company and we have a thousand databases and the way you can get to the metrics, quickly figure out the ETA to fix a problem, these are the things that I love.

As I said, ours is a hosting company. We host a lot of customer environments in our data center and pretty much the alerting mechanism and the deviates stay on top of things with using the ... applying patches, for example.

We can do things on the fly and templates and the monitoring, the way the alerts kick in. We can pretty much make generic and customize based on customer needs and it takes less deviate time I would say, even down time or when you want to set those blackouts when you are working without the teams. It is pretty straightforward.

I think maybe we have to streamline further. It is just that everything out of the box. It is not really...

We could use it but definitely with some effort we can streamline much better and sometimes some box here and there, like 13C you have to really wait, but there are great features. Just have to make sure it is a stable product.

No.

No.

Yeah, sometimes we see little things that are getting dragged with Oracle support and all that. I think overall they are fine.

I think training is not required unless you are really low rating all the great features. I would recommend getting them certified, OEM certification, 12C certification. That would help.

Quest products is one that I can think of.

Quest I don't think looks it at such a larger scale and we integrated Oracle's OEM service now and that also helps us. We liked the internal views which pretty much covers all the environments, also the OEM internal which captures the database. We call that database repository.

I would definitely recommend it. Yeah, just get the stable product right now, 12C, and probably 6 months down the line I could even recommend 13C.

• Managing databases via groups
• Running AWR and ADDM reports is simple and quick.
• Performance graphs are good to share with application teams and database users.

Warnings and alerts are sent to the primary DBA.  Primary DBAs address the alerts in a timely manner, instead of waiting for it to become an issue.

Performance tuning tools need improvement.  

We have been using this for five years.

The system has minimal issues with stability. The system has about 1500 databases currently.

There are no issues with scalability. the system is stable with about 1500 databases.

The software was acquired as part of merger.

Software was acquired via a merger and was already online. Our databases were added to the system.

Valuable features include SQLrun and the performance page.

It has helped us in terms of automated switch-over and fail-over.

The SQLrun sometimes does not work, and it crashes most of the time.

We have been using this for two years.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is very good.

We did not use a solution previous to this one.

The setup was straightforward.

The implementation was done in-house.