Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We are using this solution to record our employee's information and all of the daily on-site activity.

The most valuable features are security and speed.

The user interface is not very interactive. It needs improvement.

We have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

We are not using the latest version, but it's not that old. 

Currently, the newest version is 19C and we are using 11G.

Oracle Enterprise Manage is stable.

It's a scalable product.

We have approximately 500 users in our organization.

Currently, we do not have any technical support. 

Technical support is needed.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The user manual is very good and it is very easy to install.

Deployment times vary depending on the features that you want to include. 

If you want to include only the regular features of Oracle, then it will take 35 minutes, and less than an hour if you want to include some more options.

Two engineers are more than sufficient to maintain this solution.

We completed the setup, deployment, and implementation ourselves.

There is only the standard licensing fee. There are no other costs.

We will continue to use this solution.

For any organization that wants a reliable or secure system, this is the product to go with.

I would rate Oracle Enterprise Manager a seven out of ten.

You can get a healthful overview of all your targets in one snapshot in Enterprise Manager. You can see what's up or what's down and then take corrective action. It's a valuable tool for an admin like me.

Another feature of the Enterprise Manager is a plug-in, which crosses multiple teams. I've seen multiple teams coming to us and then asking for the tools to be deployed for their team. It's a cross-team effort, which streamlines a lot of things in terms of monitoring.

Also, since it's an Oracle-based product, it can talk to the Oracle-related products very well. The plug-in extension extends the functionality. I see a lot of benefits in terms of monitoring costing less effort; streamlining the monitoring has helped.

There are functional areas were you have extensions. Those extensions, or plug-ins, are one way to incorporate more products.

There are extensions that are available.

It's too early to know about stability, because right now we have 12c and we're looking to go to 13c.

We'll see what we can do in terms of scalability and operational deployment. We are still evaluating it. We're working with Oracle on that.

We're fortunate to have direct access to the product managers and the product support managers. They have been on our case for Enterprise Manager deployment.

It was already deployed to some extent when I entered into the team. I'm extending the deployment with the other team members. We did have some hiccups in working with Oracle.

At our company, we have multiple monitoring tools, so we do look at Precise as one other tool. There are a couple of other homegrown tools also. We'll be evaluating against all them next.

I didn’t choose Oracle. It was already picked for me.

PoC is a good starting point. It doesn't hurt to have a PoC and have some of the environmental test or something monitored by that environment. You learn from that. Then you take the best practices, which are already there from the various laws and Oracle published notes and you incorporate that. It's not hard.

The performance monitoring is the most valuable feature. We use it for a lot of performance monitoring. It's a good tool. It works well. We use it on a day-to-day basis.

It reduces our downtime; increases our performance. We get to know of any issues coming up before even the users complain about it. We know what's going on in the system using Enterprise Manager.

If it had more drill-down facilities, that would be great. We found that sometimes, if you drill down into certain views, it's slow and it's very costly, so we avoid doing those kinds of things. They need some improvements in that area; to optimize those drill-downs.

It's pretty stable. Once in a while, we do have agents which hang and we have to reboot the agents. But overall, it's pretty stable.

We use it enterprise-wide, so it's pretty scalable. We haven't had any issues.

Usually my team is not the one that looks after technical support, but I'm not sure. We don't support the tool; we just use it.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Go for it. It's very good. It's pretty user-friendly. You just go with the flow. Just click on what you need to see and take it from there. We don't see any specialized training required to use it.

We integrate it with Oracle E-Business Suite and it works fine.

I'm very happy with it.

The most valuable is when a client calls us to tell us the performance is really bad, I can quickly go on to OEM and see which SQL is causing the problem. I can drill down. I can quickly apply a profile to that SQL. The only drawback that I don't really like about that is they have to restart their job at the gate. The equipment profile doesn't take affect right away. You have to stop it, and you have to restart it. Other than that, it's fantastic. If they're able to stop it, you tell them to stop it. If not, you have to wait until tomorrow, where you'll see a better performance.

It's very quick, it's very easy to use. Considering the old AWR reports, which are still out there, you can get an AWR report at that particular time in OEM. OEM does data guard; you can set it up. They had a session at a conference I went to. They had the old DBA, which is like me, and the young DBA, which they used Justin Bieber. They were using the OEM, and the old DBA was still using their scripts. They were showing that the young DBA, which had no experience in Oracle whatsoever, was able to troubleshoot the problem much quicker than the old DBA who was running all his old scripts to figure out what the problem was. That's one of the things I really like about it.

Another thing is that you're able to see all your databases. Right now, we have 13 databases, so I can quickly monitor any of the 13 databases.

As I’ve mentioned, the biggest benefit is being able to pinpoint a performance issue very quickly, and be able to react to it very quickly.

One of the things I'd like to see is for profiles to be dynamic. That would be really great, where you don't have to tell the user, "Stop whatever you're doing and restart your job." To me, that would be highest on my list of improvements.

One of the drawbacks that I don't like is, quite often you'll see that the agent will show a status of Pending. When you try to refresh it, it'll stay Pending, which is kind of weird because you can still connect there. I did some Googling and it looks like there's a little issue there, where the agents aren't always up-to-date. Sometimes you have to go and stop the agents and restart the agents.

Other than that, I love the product.

The product is very stable. The only thing that I find is that the agent isn't that stable. Even though the agent doesn't seem to be stable, you're still able to connect. I don't know why, but you are.

I never used OEM before I started with Dynamite. Being with IBM, it was more like a contract we were being sent out on, so it was a different type of environment. It wasn't a performance tool, it was more building the databases and then walking away. OEM didn't come into the picture. Being with Dynamite, it's completely different.

I would give the same advice that I saw at the conference, with the old DBA and the young person that had no clue of what was going on behind the scenes of that database. How that young person, with a little bit of knowledge, was able to resolve an issue a lot quicker than the older person with all their fancy scripts.

Right now, we're at the very same version of OEM, so we haven't changed anything. Our company is very difficult when it comes to change. They've got a mindset that if it's not broken, don't fix it. They always look at us, especially IT, as an expense. Enterprise Manager Express really looks very interesting, and I really would like to try to push that. We'll see how well that flies, money-wise.

I really like the product, but there are some issues that need to be resolved. We're at version 12, and I believe there's a new 13c out, which probably has a lot of those issues fixed.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as Oracle or IBM, support has to be the number one criteria.

What makes it valuable is that we have one single pane that we can access to get all of our information and be proactive, whether it's Oracle Database, SQL Server, MySQL, or whatever, even host related.

Every release, they seem to move the navigation and you have to retrain your entire DBA staff. Maybe the user interface could be more consistent between releases. For every minor and major release, it usually jumps around all over the place.

We've been using it for quite a while, probably since 11g and a little bit before that; so, for 6, 7 years or more.

I think it’s stable. Every once in a while, it's kind of buggy, but for what it is, it's pretty good.

So far, it has been scalable. I think it's going to meet our needs moving forward.

For the most part, depending on who you get, technical support usually is good. Sometimes, it's hit or miss, but it depends on who you get those first few times.

For initial setup, you actually have to have some experience. If you don't, it can get a little tricky. I got a lot of gotchas. Even if you read the instruction manuals, the documentation, there are still things that you need to be looking out for.

I think it provides value for the money. It definitely helps us be proactive in our database administrating. We don't have to spend time reacting to everything. We can find out where the problem is before our customer even realizes they have a problem.

Look into OEM, especially if you have a lot of databases that you want to monitor, or other products. It provides a single pane of information that you can use, and drill down capabilities to find exact problems.

When I select a vendor such as Oracle to work with, I look for them to be reliable, provide value and so on.

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.