Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

The most valuable features are the Metric Extensions & Advanced Threshold management.

Metric Extensions

• Extend Oracle's monitoring capabilities to monitor conditions specific to your IT environment
• Provides a comprehensive view of your environment
• Create metrics on any target type
• Can be defined on any target:
  • Hosts
  • Databases
  • Fusion applications
  • BI components…

EM is a one-stop shop used to manage and monitor the entire Oracle E-Business Suite, BI and EPM infrastructure in our company. So, in our BI environment, we wanted to run a script to kill sessions which are running over 60 minutes and wanted to track and tune those sessions. We used Metric Extensions for the same.

Advanced Thresholds allow you to define and manage alert thresholds that are either adaptive (self-adjusting) or time-based (static).

• Adaptive thresholds are thresholds based on statistical calculations from the target's observed behaviour (metrics).
• Time-based static thresholds are user-defined threshold values to be used at different times of the day/week to account for changing target workloads.

We used time-based threshold settings for weekday and weekend load on various environments. This way we could fine tune the alerts for varying loads.

It gives an end-to-end view of our complex IT infrastructure and its health in real-time.

The Adaptive Settings descriptions could be clearer. 95% percentile, etc. is not clearly specified.

I have used it for over five years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

It reduced the number of incidents; we could predict failures.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Quest/Toad, but it did not do end-to-end monitoring across the stack of products.

It is one of the best, state-of-the-art products from Oracle; truly a single pane of glass to manage IT infrastructure.

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 most valuable feature is that it is web-based. That helps us to get access from any location without being dependent on your personal laptop. You can access it from any laptop, any iPad or even iPhone; kind of everywhere.

Access to the data; you can access it anywhere. That helps us to get the information readily. That improves productivity as well.

Some of the new features it could give us: maybe access to some of the taxation data and also some of the other benefits it could include as part of the system. That would be useful.

My experience with the stability has been very good. I have not seen any issues. I use it for my own purposes, in a limited way, but I haven't come across any instability or not being able to access the data; it being down or anything like that.

We’re using it for around 15,000 employees, and it is meeting our requirements. I’m not sure how much it can go up to, but at least 15-20,000, I have not seen any problem.

I haven’t used technical support.

They wanted something that was available everywhere instead of being available only on a particular laptop or PC. That was one of the reasons for it: easy accessibility.

The first reason we chose Oracle was the feature set; it was really comprehensive. Plus, it met most of our immediate needs. That kind of led us to pick Oracle.

When I’m looking at a vendor like Oracle, the most important factors are stability, scalability, and of course, the price. All three of them definitely help to make a decision.

Initial setup was really simple: just go to the website, register, and you’re good to go.

If you are looking for a solution that is accessible, because of the global nature of the workforce, I think this is a good solution.

From the features perspective, I see there's still more that could be done, as I have mentioned.

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.

Using this product makes our integration process more easy and seamless. Previously, it used to be hard for a few applications. Now with this product, we can easily define our RES service or sub-service and can have multiple platforms hitting the service.

We have a dedicated security layer and use this as a security layer.

In my opinion, this product needs to improve its performance.

We need to have more detailed monitoring when certain services extend beyond a particular time frame. For example, if it goes beyond 60 seconds, we want to get an alert saying something is wrong. Anything that can self-optimize itself would be a great feature. For instance you put an SQL and if this tool can give us a recommendation stating that this SQL doesn't seem to be optimized and so you may run into issues for this feature. Thus, a self-optimization feature would be good.

I have used this product for almost 5 to 6 years.

This is a stable product.

We have experienced some downtime in terms of performance. For example, when we carry out some complicated code, it usually times out; sometimes it goes beyond sixty seconds and that's frustrating for the users.

Right now we don't have it on the cloud platform yet, but once we do most probably we will be able to run as many instances as we can. Currently, we are running it on twelve instances on our own private infrastructure. I think moving onto cloud would give us more flexibility.

Oracle provides good support and we find them very responsive. We tend to use them a lot because we don't have strong expertise in this area. We go ask them questions such as how do we do this, do you have any clients who are already using this kind of feature or do you have any extra plugins for this new feature and they are very supportive.

I would recommend this product to others. One of the things with Oracle is that they are expensive. They have to cut down their costs so that a smaller organization can easily adapt to these features. Although those who have an enterprise platform and wouldn’t mind spending the money on this product, should go for it.

Monitoring of the database is the most valuable feature, because we want to know what's going on there.

It is timely, if you want to add some memory or whatever. That's seems to be timely.

I don’t think the response system is that good. It is too slow.

It's pretty stable.

Scaling requires a little more configuration work.

I have not had to use technical support.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We don't integrate it with anything else. It runs as a standalone piece.

The monitoring product is getting better every year, but it still needs some work.

It's a standardized GUI tool, which is very good and pluggable with automatic connection to an Oracle database, in comparison with any other GUI tools available in the market. Other than that, if you see if you want to share the backups, or if you want to do any monitoring stuff, to customize your monitoring, and if you want to do the blackout. If you are doing any amendments, you can do a blackout.

If you want to monitor the regular site without doing any scripting or anything, you just need to plug in both databases, and then it's easy to maintain. It's one tool to maintain all the databases in one place without doing much customization, and it's easy to manage.

People used to say I develop my own scripts, or colleagues used to develop their own scripts. If you want to change, if you are doing an upgrade, or if you are going to migrate your database, for example, from Linux to Solaris (REAX), then we need to change all this coding, right, to support that. I want to write my own code, and he wants to write his own code. Everybody out there wants standards to write the code. Then when you do migrate all these things, we need to do so much hard work to make it actually work. If you use OEM as a standardized tool, then it's easy to manage, and you don't need to do all this hard work, which it makes easy.

If you see the documentation, it's not really that much good. They did not explain all the details, so maybe they need to improve the documentation to get a better understanding, so that most of the people can use it.

Stability is good, but I can see only very small performance issues. When the system is very busy and I click a report, sometimes takes a little bit more time than I expected. If you fix those performance issues and best practices, I think it's an awesome tool.

I was able to scale with multiple margins: small, medium, large, and extra large. We can pick those according to your organization’s size.

Technical support is always good. The only thing we need is to create a right severity, and talk to the right folks, actually. Then problems will be resolved.

I checked the BMC Patrol and Quest products also, to monitor the databases. I feel like among all these, that OEM is the best tool compared to any other.

I feel that it's a good tool. The only thing is that you need to read the documentation before starting anything. As you mentioned about the size, you need to know how may databases you want to monitor in the company, and pick the right size.