Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

We use this solution to monitor the server, looking at the system, and maintaining it.

I like that it's stable.

I would like to see better pricing.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution.

It's a scalable product. We have approximately seven users in our organization.

We have plans to continue using this solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

We are using Ruckus.

I was not involved in the maintenance.

We have a team of five to maintain this solution.

It's expensive.

We are paying on a yearly basis, but we are currently negotiating for a new license.

We are currently evaluating software such as Eggplant. 

We like Tosca, but we never received a response.

We are also looking into the Robot Framework.

Other than being costly, it works.

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

On-premises

The solution's most valuable aspect is the fact that it is embedded with the Oracle database and Oracle's engineering system, its extra data, and analytics. 

They have plug-ins that are very helpful. 

Due to the infrastructure's size, the introduction they offer is very, very useful. It helps with an overall understanding of the product.

They have a very nice graphical user interface.

The monitoring is good.

We can capture the SQL tune from us. With Oracle Enterprise Managers, we can see the rich performance tuning. 

Oracle has made a pretty complex system, which has made us want to explore other options.

The solution has a very large resource system. It's too big. There are too many items.

The solution has too many licenses. If you want to monitor the MSS or the other tasks, they want you to use their license. However, it's a very expensive license. Oracle is a very big company. The database is the number one product in Oracle, and in the world. They don't need to charge for the adjusted monitoring tool. They already are making so much on licensing elsewhere. I don't like it.

The initial setup is rather difficult.

It would be ideal if Oracle offered something that was open-source. They don't yet offer an open-source database. We would like to have the freedom to monitor in-house.

The solution does not scale at all.

I've been using the solution for about five or six years at this point. It's been a while so far.

It's a stable product. For the most part, they have quite a stable system. However, there are at times difficulties with the project server. They have a very big container program in their project server as Enterprise Manager is running in the project server. The old configuration was more difficult, and, in any case, users need to be precise with their configurations to ensure stability.

The solution is not scalable at all. You would not choose this solution in order to expand on it later.

I can't say that I have experience with technical support. I cannot comment on it.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's quite complex, or, rather, not very easy. You really have to concentrate on the tasks. You must first install the database before we can use our SQL server or our SQL database. Now, you must do the record database first. You must install the database before the server. I don't understand why. Then, you have to try to install the Enterprise Cloud Control Manager. 

It's important that whoever installs the solution has specific Oracle knowledge, otherwise they will run into problems.

We are partners with Oracle. We have a business relationship with the company.

I have more than 20 years in the IT sector. I am a database engineer.

We tend to use the latest version of the solution, however, we have clients on older versions. We have one client, for example, on version 12.

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten, overall. We're mostly satisfied with the product.

The main usage is for monitoring performance, a major part of the software is you can define some virtualization for RAM utilization. You can set up something and then you will start getting alerts which you can do some optimizations from the information.

It is the best monitoring tool for Oracle databases. 

You have full visibility with the tool, it is a complete solution. 

The software is simple to use.

In my experience, the monitoring could be improved. 

If the solution had an auditing feature, I would not look into other software, for example, Imperva or IBM Guardium. These other solutions have an audit feature and monitoring together, this one is strictly monitoring only. Oracle does have a separate product for auditing, which is very expensive.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

It is a very stable product.

We have five administrators that are using the solution, as it is only for administrators.

We have access to the support but the product is really easy to use, we have not needed any help.

The setup was easy, we encountered no problems and it took us only three hours.

We did the implementation ourselves.

The solution is inexpensive to purchase.

I have evaluated Imperva and IBM Guardium. 

I am going to continue to use this product in the future.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager a nine out of ten.

On-premises

Enterprise Manager is a single window plane of glass which allows one to look into every aspect of the systems deployed in an organization. We use it to mange our internal infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics, Oracle VMs, ERP solutions (such as Oracle Applications and Fusion Middleware, like SOA and AIA), and Oracle Linux servers.

This solution allows us to quickly drill down when there are issues. It helps us monitor solutions both in-house and at our customer premises. We use it extensively for performance tuning testing, monitoring, and configuration.It is also the only tool that can monitr all apects of Exadata , Exalogic and other Oracle engineered systems.

The database performance monitoring features are very useful and allow us to quickly zero in on DB-related issues.Exadata storage server and Infiniband switches can be viewed from the GUi in OEM which cannot be done in other tools . The ability to deploy metric extensions makes this tool extensible for our custom monitoring also.

The product is pretty comprehensive, but quite resource hungry. This might be due to the majority of the application seemingly being written in Java. 

Also, better mobile access would be useful.

More than ten years.

There were some issues with the software due to its resource requirements. Be careful to follow the recommended sizing guidelines.

No issues. It is very scalable. Ther are also comprehensive documents for both HA setup and DR setup. One caution is that for DR setup additional licensing is required.

We have not faced any major issues with the product. Auto deployment may be difficult in certain customer environments due to the firwall port issues but in those cases manula deployment of agents is an acceptable workaround. We originally had some timezone related issues due to the fact that my home timezone changed from Asia/Calcutta to Asia /Kolkata but this is no longer an issue

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only solution which can monitor and drill down into the inner workings of engineered systems, like Exadata and Exalytics. Thus, we had to use this system when we deployed those systems. Being system integrators we work with a wide variety of tools however this tool has very wide support across all of oracles hardware and software.

Setup can be complex depending on the options required. There is a simple express install and a much more elaborate enterprise class setup, which is also possible.

Our in-house team has the capability to implement this (with customers).

This solution was the only one which allows us to monitor all our solutions from one interface. However, the optional packs are expensive, hence your mileage may vary. Please take advice before choosing what exactly to purchase. Remember that the base configuration is free to monitor any Oracle product.

Evaluate your requirements carefully. Elaborate DR and HA setup of OEM can become expensive. 

Be careful to only enable the packs for which you have a license as this is an issue we see time and again. I.e., customers who do not understand the licensing model have not turned off access to packs that they are not licensed for, then get into legal issues for it later.

None of the other options out there have the breadth and depth of this solution. This is the only solution which can drill down to the cell level of an Exadata system. Finally, it has modules available for almost every Oracle product available.

If you are an Oracle shop, or even an Oracle SI, then familiarity with Oracle one stop management solution is an imperative. Everything ties into this solution, so it has become a de facto standard for Oracle-based software given that the base is free to use with Oracle products. There is no downside to deploying this solution in your data center.

On-premises

Other

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.

On-premises

Our primary use is for monitoring and management of Oracle products. We are running several Oracle products in our environment.

The product gives us as much control as we can have by providing a complete picture of the whole set of Oracle products. We can monitor all of them.

We would like to have a single dashboard for monitoring and controlling all of our products. This would add value, for us, because as it is now, we have to go to different screens to check different products.

We have been using Oracle Enterprise Manager for about seven years, since 2013.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager is pretty stable and we haven't had any issues.

We have not had to contact technical support for this product because we haven't had any issues. However, if we need to then there is a support portal available.

This product is easy to install and we can complete the deployment in a day, including the agent.

We are satisfied with the pricing.

Overall, I am satisfied with this product. It assists us in finding issues through monitoring services.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

On-premises

We primarily use the solution for a database.

It's the most reliable database available on the market. 

The tried and tested services that Oracle provides is second to none. 

The solution offers excellent support.

The product is very mature. There are a lot of new upstarts, however, this technology has a long history of quality. While other options may not have many use cases available, Oracle certainly does. They have a wide variety of success stories users can look to.

The solution is considered expensive.

We've been using Oracle for the past five or six years. Some of our customers are on the solution.

The solution is quite stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash.

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to increase usage, it can do so rather easily.

As we deal with many clients, the sizes of the companies vary. I'm not sure how many users each company would have on one solution. Whether they need 100 or 1,000 users, we'll design the system to meet their needs.

Oracle does provide very good technical support. They have company support models available. If you are a license holder, you can raise your ticket in the Oracle site and get support. It's my understanding that our clients are happy with the level of support available to them.

We use a variety of solutions, according to our client's needs, as we are service providers.

The solution can be both complex and straightforward to implement. If you area laptop user, it's very simple. However, when you need to configure it as a production server, then it's a complex.

Typically, it takes about one to five hours to deploy the product. It's not too long.

If you are only using a developer edition, it will take a maximum of 30 minutes to one hour to deploy. If you need to set up your entire production, then it will take at least a couple of days due to the fact that there are a lot of activities that need to be done.

One active professional can handle an Oracle setup. You don't need too many people to implement it.

We have our own in-house team that can handle deployments for our clients.

The solution is quite expensive. It's not the cheapest on the market. Companies will have to pay a fair bit for it. The pricing is core and processor-based. The overall cost largely depends on how many nodes your company needs to deploy.

We're working with the latest version of the solution.

We're on the service industry side of the business. Whatever our clients need we work to accommodate. Whether they prefer an Oracle server or a Microsoft option, we'll work with them to meet their needs. We don't exclusively deal with Oracle. We would never push our clients to use specific technologies. We just suggest options and highlight the features that best apply to their use cases. Then, we simply follow their wishes and deliver on their expectations.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. They're very competitive in the market and very good as a product overall. Our clients are happy with it. If the pricing was a bit lower I might give them a perfect ten out of ten.

On-premises

I was previously using it for my own personal use.

I didn't need much. I was using it to connect a database. I connected the database, and then the Linux host. I also wanted to test various remote hosts. Unfortunately, since I was installing on a machine that didn't have enough resources, I was not able to connect it to deploy those agents. For me to have done that, I needed a platform that had adequate resources like RAM and storage. After installing it, it just consumed everything that I had. I only have 16GB RAM. It was not enough for me to try others. I was basically using it to test how it would be able to run. I managed to run it by deploying the database that I was using it to run the EM. That is the only thing that I managed to acquire.

It's more effective to use command-line interface than using the GO setup.

One of the great things about that EM is that you are able to connect to Oracle Support. This will make your work easier due to the fact that it will help you identify if your database is to be upgraded or if you are experiencing any issues. It can help you quickly identify issues instead of having to raise them in a service report. It's much more efficient.

There are a number of different user interfaces you can choose from.

The solution is pretty interactive and user-friendly.

Sometimes the solution can be quite difficult in terms of when you want to deploy agents. 

You need to go through the Oracle documentation in order for you to be able to deploy an agent. Sometimes it just takes a long time, however, the thing is there is the overall concept of deploying. I don't think it is a problem, for the most part. 

That said, for someone who is starting to use the product, it takes quite a long while for you to get to know and understand the actions. The issue is the solution has got so many items and products for you to use. You just need to basically get to what you want.

There's a lot of documentation to go through as a new user.

It takes a while for a new user to get the hang of the product.

I've been using the solution for the past month. Previously, I used its environment (for the past 12 months or so) for opportunity yield. I hadn't been using it in a production environment. It's now installed on my machine.

When I was administering the database using that EM, it was quite amazing. However, in terms of usability and other things, I can't say much because I haven't used it yet in a production line. So far, I haven't had issues with stability, but it's still too soon to tell.

I haven't had time to really judge the scalability. It's still too early to tell. I need more experience with the product before making any assumptions.

I can't say much about technical support due to the fact that I haven't done much using the EM. Since I haven't interacted with them too much, there isn't anything really to say about how I find their service. I simply haven't used it.

The setup is quite straightforward, depending on what you want to use. I started with the GO setup or the interactive pack. I also use silent mode, whereby you just run the command, and then you see the information inside those parameters. I preferred the silent mode installation, whereby you have to make sure that you have set your parameters accordingly. 

That said, the installation I conducted wasn't difficult for me to install. The only thing that I noticed was that it's a big file. It's quite a big software or application to be deployed, so when you do, you need to deploy it where there are enough resources for you to install everything.

In my case, the deployment took about five hours to complete.

I handled the implementation on my own. I did not need the assistance of any consultants or integrators.

I'm not aware of how much the product costs, so I can't speak to the pricing.

We're just a customer. We have no relationship with the vendor.

There is a more up to date version, 18.42, however, I have not started using it yet as it requires some patching. Currently, I'm on version 18.4, which is quite stable.

I would recommend the solution to others. In fact, I've already met many people in which I have done just that. It's only been a month using the product and already I've noticed that it is quite effective.

Since I haven't done quite a lot in terms of production learning, I will just rate it at seven out of ten at this time.

On-premises

The primary use case of this solution is used in our HSA Group for backup and recovery.

The most valuable feature is high availability.

The features that we are using the most are for partitioning, Armonk, and encryption. 

RMAN tools need improvement.

There are some doubts about the Oracle policy on price quotes. I have a good relationship with the customers and If I start dealing with them, and get them a discount, then that discount is available to all of the Oracle partners. I prefer the way it works with other companies, like HP, where any discount that I negotiate on behalf of a customer will be available only to me.

I have been using this solution for twenty-five years.

This solution is stable, and it's reliable.

This solution is scalable.

Technical support responds quickly. Our customers are satisfied with the availability of technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward. I have been a DBA for ten years now and I have been working with Oracle for twenty-five years.

The pricing is very high.

This solution is the best! It's perfect!

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

On-premises

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.

I use Oracle Enterprise Manager for database administration and to manage our IT help desk. It is also used to scope database issues which need support in a production environment.

Oracle Enterprise Manager has eased the responsibilities among our DBAs. We can now assign individual tasks to separate DBAs.

I have found the singular GUI feature very helpful. Fewer DBA resources can be allocated with Toad licenses.

They should improve the hover text context. This would provide assistance whenever a task is attempted by a DBA.

More than five years.

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.

We use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to monitor and manage our Oracle and MySQL databases.

The Oracle Databases are key components of our company. All of our services rely on critical customer data and transactions. We need %99.9995 uptime, and Oracle Enterprise Manager helps us to achieve this goal with its superior monitoring and management capabilities. Even mid-level administrators can quickly detect and solve performance problems, and our monitoring team can easily follow the general status of our databases and servers.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides comprehensive monitoring features for all Oracle products. It has an extensible architecture, so it’s possible to add third-party plugins to extend its monitoring abilities. These are valuable features of Oracle Enterprise Manager for all Oracle customers.

On the other hand, I think the most valuable feature of Oracle Enterprise Manager is its management capability for Oracle products. It makes a real difference when comparing it to any other monitoring solution in the market. You can manage your Oracle Databases, Oracle VM, WebLogic, and other products with Oracle Enterprise Manager.

It's better to have native agents specially when monitoring legacy systems. So the agents can consume less resources.

More than five years.

I have not encountered any serious stability issues since version 13c.

I did not encounter any scalability issues, and we know that we can easily scale up our Oracle Enterprise Manager system by adding more application servers, and even using RAC database as its repository.

At the same level as other Oracle products.

I used several monitoring solutions, including open source, both free and proprietary. Most of them are designed to monitor system health and require additional plugins to monitor Oracle databases. Unfortunately, they do not provide the same level of insights when monitoring Oracle products as Oracle Enterprise Manager provides.

It is very straightforward because of its improved installer. Since version 12c, installing Enterprise Manager has been very simple. The installer handles everything even including configuration issues with your database repository and OS kernel parameters.

The basic functions are free. You pay license fees only for advanced features. That means you can buy a license for selected (mission-critical) systems which need extensive care, while you can still use basic monitoring for the rest of your target systems.

I’ve been using this product for years. I evaluated other options from different vendors such as Quest Foglight, CA Unified Infrastructure Management, ManageEngine OpManager, Zabbix, Nagios and maybe some other tools I don’t recall right now.

First, check the compatibility index and be sure that your targets are supported with the version you’re planning to install. I also advise keeping your system up-to-date by installing patches regularly.

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.

Performance diagnostics. That is the best.

It allows me to receive real-time alerting notifications when somebody's doing something that is detrimental in the environment. I can get right on issues and correct them as quickly as possible.

It's a pretty well-rounded product. Nothing really comes to mind right now.

Very stable, extremely stable.

The ability to scale is excellent.

Outstanding.

We weren't using anything previously. The decision was just made to go with this one because I was familiar with it, and it's a pretty solid stable product from Oracle.

The setup was moderate, but the documentation and everything that exists is really invaluable.

In choosing a vendor our most important criteria are affected by the fact that we work for the Children's Hospital Research Institute. They're a non-profit so budgets are always tight. Cost would be the primary factor, and vendors being willing to negotiate, for non-profit companies, on the prices.

Be sure that you have the people with the skill sets to be able to use the tool, or be willing to invest in the training to learn how to use the tool.

It's a more mature stable product.

The ability to capture data and then processing it based on what we need to pull for analysis.

• Less manual work
• Less labor intensive
• More data consistency

More flexibility in terms of the user being able to customize a little bit instead of having it so standard. That would be helpful.

It's been pretty stable. It's good.

For us, it's a good size. It applies to all populations. It's good.

For technical, we have a technical team. Usually, because I'm an analyst, I just pass it over to the technical team and they deal with the technical side.

It was an old system. That's why we transferred into this. In technology, you need to be advanced. You need to keep up.

The decision was made by top management, but I'm sure that they look at cost and the support of it. Mainly the cost.

I think the initial setup was not too complex. It wasn't that bad.

We went with Oracle because we were looking for stability, a vendor that is reliable, being able to get help, troubleshooting when there's a problem. I think those are the important ones.

I would recommend looking into it.

I think it's mainly to do a health check of the system and the application and how the performance is doing, so that we can determine any tuning and tweaking that we need to do; it's helpful.

It's mainly to figure out the scalability of our application using the OEM. That gives us an insight into how the processes are doing. That's the value that we're getting, to go back and tweak the application.

It's quite stable. I have not had any issues.

We are just experimenting with a couple of products right now, so we have yet to go over that. We haven't really done any scalability test.

I have not ever used it.

We had bought Oracle before. We moved away from a proprietary system into the Oracle Database, so this was a needed this functionality.

When looking at, and selecting, a vendor to buy from, the most important criteria I look for are the stability of the product, scalability, and technical support after that. We went with Oracle because it is the main brand.

It's good to use. We're not having issues with it.

We primarily using this for the monitoring, it monitors all our Oracle infrastructure. As a DBA I also use it for SQL monitoring and for performance tuning analysis.

It's user friendly.

We have Oracle Accelerator. We heard this is a better tool for monitoring Accelerator. But it's more than monitoring just that, we have extended the monitoring to DB2 and SQL Server platforms.

I think they have already listed some things in 13c. I heard it includes a couple of features we are looking for like monitoring templates. I want to explore those features. Probably they will be included in 13c.

We have been using it for the last three years.

It is pretty stable. There are some pros and cons, but we compared it to other tools which are available for monitoring Oracle databases and other products, and what we found is this is one of the best.

It's scalable. Currently, we are monitoring close to 3000 targets and it's pretty well scalable.

I'm a bit skeptical of it. I personally experienced a little longer time than I would like to get the right solution for issues. They have good support. It depends on the person with whom you are interacting.

I would say setup is moderate, actually. It's not that difficult. If you have a good background in web logic and servers then I think it's easy. They have very good documentation in place so you just have to follow the documentation and it can be installed easily.

This is one of the best tools we've had. I would advise others to go for it.

The look and feel I think. Fast and compatible. It's easy to customize.

Security. 

The performance, I feel. The performance needs to be increased a little bit.Sometimes it will take some time to open forms, so I feel it should be a little bit faster.

Downtime is there, but it depends on the user's needs.

Scales well.

They're good.

I recommend it. You should learn it; you need to know about it before you start using it. There are tools and thing which can help. There is development training you can attend, and then you can start with it.

Everything you do; you can see the whole picture. You can everything in one place. That's very good, very convenient.

Easier to read. For example, on the home page of information, under Adm, that should be a little bit easier to read. Sometimes you have to spend a lot of time to read and understand what's going on there.

Very stable.

Scaling is okay.

I've opened tickets a few times. They are quick to respond, get back to you quickly. I'm happy with it.

I would recommend learning and using OEM right away. It will cut down the time put in by DBAs a lot, by using OEM.

I'm very happy with OEM.

Helps us to monitor the databases and avoid any downtime.

We get alerts from OEM, so we get to know this is the issue with the database. There are multiple databases which we can configure on it, so we can proactively monitor those issues.

It should be more scalable, because only for the database can we have the backup source standardized. But for the GUI, if the service crashes... it should be more scalable.

We haven't had many stability issues but, yes, sometimes. It's actually dependent on the host. If the host goes down then obviously the UI goes down. That's why I was talking about scalability.

It's provided by Oracle, so it's okay.

We were using our manual scripts for monitoring, and backup scripts which Oracle provides.

Every step and all the documentation is there on the Oracle site, so there is nothing for me to suggest. It is the most up-to-date tool as of now for monitoring, that's it.

The speed at which I can drill down to isolate issues.

• As a troubleshooter, I was able to quickly resolve memory issues.
• Finding the top 10 longest running queries helped to control query performance issues. 

Metrics settings could be improved to be more intuitive.

Installation process could be easier. 

There could be better configuration documentation.

10 years.

No issues.

Stability is good. No issues.

I do not have a need for this product's scalability.

No.

It was complex. The installation document was tough to understand.

I installed the tool myself.

Get this tool.

Yes, DBArtisan.

I am very happy with this tool.

• 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.

Some of the most valuable features are its real-time performance view/dashboard, metric history, real-time monitoring and alerts, as well as quick access to Oracle's tuning and diagnostic options.

These are valuable because it makes it much easier to investigate periods in the past (good or bad) as metrics for a period are stored in the repository. Real-time resolution of issues is made easier as wait-events can be viewed and investigated in real-time. SQL queries can also be viewed and investigated in real-time and recommendations are available if the diagnostic and tuning packs are licensed (Oracle databases).

In my experience it seems the best tool for monitoring Oracle products, ranging from software to hardware like the engineered systems (e.g. Exadata).

In my team, we have display screens dedicated to displaying the real-time wait-events of our most critical databases. Every team member can look up and tell the average health of the critical Oracle databases at a glance. If something unusual is going on, it is immediately apparent on the display.

In addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager completely and adequately handles our hardware and software alerts which are sent out by email as soon as set thresholds have been exceeded.

I feel more dashboards can be added, especially those useful to higher levels of IT management.

I feel it would be great to have improved support for other database types like MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.

I also think additional software like the JAgent for monitoring GoldenGate installations should be integrated into Oracle Enterprise Manager itself, and not require additional installation and configuration.

About four years.

Generally, it is pretty stable. Occasionally, one may run into errors that may be tricky to resolve without in-depth knowledge of the product or the help of Oracle Support.

No, I haven't had any issues with scalability so far.

On a scale of one to 10, eight.

We previously used Dell Spotlight, but needed more in-depth administration and monitoring capabilities, as well as a web interface.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. Most administrators with some experience in installing Oracle applications and databases shouldn't have a problem setting it up, as long as they follow the installation guide.

As with all Oracle products, care should be taken when using any features to ensure that they do not activate licensed features that have not been paid for. Oracle Enterprise Manager allows one to do so many things easily, but it is up to the administrator to be sure of the licensing implications.

Dell Spotlight was the only other option we looked into before settling on this product.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is great for monitoring and administering Oracle hardware and software. However, administrators should ensure that their actions are limited to free and licensed features only, otherwise there may be trouble at the next Oracle license review.

It is a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for managing database consolidation, something that has been missing and difficult to do. The Database Consolidation Workbench provides a risk-free and accurate approach to consolidation by eliminating guess work and human errors. Most of the errors that lead to severe issues in production environments are due to poor sizing of the configuration and so-called “educated guesses”. The Workbench provides a flexible approach for various customer scenarios: every environment is unique and several scenarios are possible.

Database consolidation has been for years a tedious process for many clients. The benefits are enormous. By using the Database Consolidation Workbench, companies achieve the following:

• Reduce complexity
• Improve efficiency
• Lower costs
• Better security
• Better monitoring
• Harmonized backups and easier restore
• Better performance
• Simplify maintenance
• Fewer servers in fewer locations
• Harmonized environment

It needs to support the Database versions lower than 10.2.

I have been using the Database Consolidation Workbench since its release with OEM 13c. I am even going to give two keynote speeches over the next month at Oracle conferences in Europe. The subject is of major interest to both business professionals and technical resources.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

10/10

We used just spreadsheets and common-sense practices, which were often doomed to fail. The solution provided now by Oracle covers the last missing piece of the complete set-up when consolidating databases. One can think of Database Consolidation Workbench OEM 13c as the “Holy Grail” of Database Consolidation.

The initial setup was more than straightforward. It's easy to set up, configure, and use.

Reasons to upgrade to Enterprise Manager 13.2: https://blogs.oracle.com/oem/e...

It is part of Real Application Testing, so no new investment is necessary for clients who already are already using RAT.

There are no products available that can be compared with Database Consolidation Workbench. Not even close.

This is one of the most important additions to Oracle Enterprise Manager from both the business perspective and DBA point-of-view. Start first with upgrading OEM 11g or 12c to 13c as the Database Consolidation Workbench was introduced first in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c as part of the Real Application Testing option. Run different scenarios within different projects in order to pick the best strategy. Always validate at the end.

Database Management, SQL Tuning, Performance Management, SQL Monitoring, Performance Tuning Pack, SQL Diagnostic Pack, ADDM, AWR, and real time SQL monitoring.

it would be helpful if OEM is integrated with OBIEE reports and free report viewer without a license.

We have been using the overall OEM for over eight years.

There were no deployment issues.

We used DBArtisan, Embarcadero technologies, and Quest tools.

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:

Customer service is good.

Technical Support:

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.

One of the valuable features is performance drill down.

I would like to see drill-down tabs.

We have been using this for eight years.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

We did not use a previous solution.

The implementation was done in-house.

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.

This is a very good Oracle tool which enables us to incorporate all the databases throughout our environment, set up several rules and even monitor from there. We can perform a lot of operations. If you have small databases you can plug into the OEM, and you can perform any sort of operation with one click of a button. That makes it more convenient and makes life easier than logging into each database separately.

You can set the rules so that every time you have several maintenance activities you don't need to go to each database and do the same work again and again. Instead you can create jobs in the OEM and you can also create groups, like production, development, performance and environment. All these environments you can club together so that you can perform several operations based on environment-specific criteria.

When you need to perform activities like purging and archiving, this can be done easily and you can even do backups which is a tedious activity. If you have the right description monitor, just click on the buttons in the OEM so that you can fire up the backups everyday at a specific time. It can even alert us by email if by any chance the backup fails and you can just log in to a particular mission and check why it failed.

It's a very easy way of maintaining all the databases instead of wasting time on the regular day to day tasks. You can use your time productively, instead of investing time on these mundane tasks. That way it helps us a lot.

It could improve in some areas like the screen. It's not so clear for the novice, when a new person looks at the screen he/she may not really understand where to start first. They could make that process a little easier, so that even a novice who starts using it can at least have the basic idea what to do.

We've been using the product for almost six years.

It is stable of course, it's from Oracle.

It's scalable depending on the way you build it. From the base configuration itself the server capacity and the installation, you have a number of targets, say 0-10, 10-250, 250-1000. Based on your company's requirement you have to install and configure those so that it will be scalable throughout that time period. You will also require enough memory, CPU cards for supporting those targets.

I would rate the support as 8/10. Once they start responding on the tickets, they'll definitely take you to the solution.

I would recommend it. There are a lot of people who like to write scripts and stuff. If they are comfortable writing scripts then definitely they could use it. But many things can be done which cannot be done through scripting. I would recommend you give it a try. Definitely once you give it a try you will like using it.

The best features are the usability and the interface.

More tools along the lines of support would be valuable. It would also be nice to catch things either as they happen or before they happen, as opposed to seeing that something is broken and having to go in and fix it.

I’ve used the product for four years.

Services are pretty inconsistent. Too much usage will make it go down, and we will have to step in to bring it back up.

It is a scalable solution that meets our needs for now.

Every couple of weeks we need support. We always use the community, and as long as the issues have happened before, it’s a good help.

We were using something off the mainframe before we switched to EPM. We went from mainframe to distributed, which made a big difference.

Setup is pretty complex for a large system. It was pretty complicated for us, but we had consultants who helped a lot.

It’s a great product, but make sure that you have people on staff that are familiar with it, or get your staff familiarized with it, because there are a lot of things that you need to learn to maintain it.

I manage a team of Customer Care and Billing Support Administrators. Earlier in our implementation when we were not quite stable we had to request assistance from our DBAs to troubleshoot performance of our databases. We eventually convinced them that it would be to their advantage to provide us with read only access to the graphs and to run AWR reports in OEM so we could troubleshoot ourselves. We actively monitor the databases and can get ahead of any issues. We are also making preparations for using OEM with Oracle Utilities Application Management which will provide application monitoring through OEM.

We definitely get ahead of issues before they become severe.

The reports are very busy. Once you understand the information it was great, but initially it was not very user friendly.

Five years.

No problems.

No issues.

None.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Good.

No.

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:

Customer service is good.

Technical Support:

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.

It monitors our database environment, which is very critical for our environment.

We are going to minimize the downtime. If the system is down, it will page us; and we're going to get to that issue. Its a very added advantage. It also tells us when the system is running slow; if some people are experiencing performance issues, we can see that. It's a very useful graphical user interface for the management to understand.

We want to see some of the official licensed products, the other core components that come inside so plug-ins are made easy for us.

They've got to integrate more into the network inside. They've got to integrate more depth and provide a solutions for that. The storage system monitoring is really a little basic. They just give the symptoms, not the solutions. That's the bad thing.

The stability is good. So far, it's running perfect, so there are no complaints about it.

I think this product doesn't have to scale much because it just monitors the database. We're keeping about one year's worth of work. We can scale according to the storage.

We were using hand grown scripts as our previous solution. This has a nice GUI interface, and all that, and that's the reason we went with this.

We didn't consider much because we didn't have any competitor for that here. We do have another product called Ignite. We were using it, and we used it also linked with this one; but they were home grown scripts we had.

It's a simple straightforward tool to install. We did it 6 years ago, and we keep upgrading the work instructions. It's perfectly fine.

There is online documentation. He has to go look around and see what he can get, and then implement it if he wants to.

It basically provides a transformation for the company to go into the product line application. It gives better and faster data to the management in order to review the data quickly.

Using this product, we have improved our process for generating revenue and sending out invoices to our customers. It also enables us to track our engineers' time correctly.

We are expecting new functionality in the billing aspect. In respect to the engineering sector, there is a need to include the performance part in the management side.

Still, there are lot of improvements that need to take place. For example, we are expecting basically a vertical solution for the engineering industry in terms of federal and department transportation solutions. We are expecting this in the product. Right now, there is no such type of product with which you can generate this solution.

This product is around 80 percent stable; 20 percent we are working on enhancing the product.

I would rate the level of this product’s scalability at a 8/10.

It basically avails of a wide range of data, which it can pull together in one dashboard and present this data to the management in a quicker manner. This is the only scalable aspect in the product.

We have used Oracle Advanced Customer Service and found them to be helpful. They supported our product.

We are transmitting from one ERP to another ERP, so the people need to be supported. Basically, Oracle advised us since it is the same product.

After which, we moved to EBS for future data support. They created a custom solution since we are unable to apply the patches or anything, so then we moved to this product.

It is a complex product, in its methodology of how to pull the data together and then how to copy it. The other reason is the process as to how we need to send it to our customers, for timely invoicing without any backlogs.

The reason why we chose this vendor is because they were familiar with the product now, and they gave a better judgement of the product itself.

Oracle is more flexible and you can convert it as per your business. That is why we have this solution. Whereas in other ERP products like SAP, we cannot customize the product and we need to use what exactly they provide.

We are going to see how it is helping the organization. That is the way we are going to do research.

I think what I really like in this product is that DBAs and my management development team don’t have to sit and manually write queries.

It has a graphical interface, which makes it handy for you to monitor the databases and that is the most useful feature.

You can manage many databases at the same time.

You don't have to write ad-hoc queries. Initially, my DBAs used to write scripts which were manual. So, running the scripts, writing them and trying to figure out what we want to monitor was a very difficult process. With OEM, you have all of this in the inbuilt interface, which really helped them in adding new databases in the main that we must monitor.

As the number of databases increased, it was fast for us to start monitoring them as well.

One of the big problems we had was using Data Guard along with OEM; it just didn’t work (Data Guard is a local higher level solution). Every time we did a takeover, it would stop working, so that was the biggest challenge we had. I think that this has been probably fixed in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c.

We had issues in terms of stability. Some of the functionalities, which we were looking for, were not available. It's not that it wasn't working, but it wasn't able to meet all our requirements.

Stability, as far as it was in a test environment, we did find a few issues. This was in Oracle Database 11g and it would just hang our systems. Thus, we didn't let it go to production.

We have Oracle Advanced Customer Support in our company. Using it was easy. It's just that product had a few issues in certain scenarios.

Oracle recommended it to us: "Everybody is using it out there, so use it!"

It was straightforward. We had to install a server on the database side and GUI on the client side; it was quite straightforward.

Based on our experience, if you are looking for a certain type of requirement, it would work.

The main requirement for us was stability since we run machine-critical applications.

Resiliency is really the main requirement from our side, even beyond scalability.

We run a company that provides services for banks and financial institutions, and resiliency is the most important factor, especially for a product like OEM. Security is equally important but for OEM, we don't really expose anything, so it's fine. It's more of a monitoring interface.

You can monitor your database thoroughly. Some valuable features of this product are checking your SQL executions and how the SQLs are progressing in terms of any blocks or contention in the database. In other words, you can monitor the entire progress of your database per millisecond.

It benefits our organization by identifying the problem immediately and rectifying it. So, the user doesn't have to bear any sort of impact.

Some of the features that need improvement are increased monitoring at the operating system and storage levels, without having a plugin. At the Oracle level, improvements can be done by providing minute details in regards to SQLs.

The product is stable 99.9% of the time, but there are a few issues that need to be improved. I have noted that these issues are generally updated in a later version of the product, as and when it is released.

Oracle does provide some plugins. However, if these can be provided with the Oracle Enterprise Manager software itself, there is a scope for scalability. In addition, increased monitoring at the storage level and the OS level can really help.

The technical support is not always 100% up to the mark or sometimes not as we expect it to be.

At times, they (the customer support team) take more time to respond or we don't get the desired response/solution from their end and then we have to keep tracking them.

We have always been using this product.

The setup is simple and not complex. I find that it has improved with later versions that are being released.

The setup process used to take much longer than it does now and I hope that this will be enhanced in the future.

We have not evaluated any other product besides Oracle, as it suits our product best.

Stability and responsiveness are the two major factors while choosing a product. Right now, response time is the most critical aspect for our organization and that is what we need.

If you database scalability is more or if your infrastructure is as big as the product we have, Oracle is the only solution out there. There are other competitors, but they are all NoSQL database tools. Thus, Oracle stands out.

We haven't fully utilized it yet on a day-to-day basis, but we will put more into it. We do see patching is going to be a big improvement. Day to day, I think we are at 20 percent for now, but that number will increase.

Support definitely can be improved; documentation and support. The documentation is convoluted, very confusing.

I have been using it for four years.

It's stable, so far.

So far, it's okay; it scales.

The support is not good for this product. The enterprise system that I have is kind of complex. Support is very basic; they don't have someone who really is savvy.

Initial setup is okay. It's 50/50.

My company choose to use this product because I can see that it's going to be more aligned with the technology, with the cloud. It's more robust, and we can see it's going to be an essential product for IT.

When I’m deciding whether to work with a vendor such as Oracle, I look for kind of a mix that includes reliability and strategic too: How does it fit into the enterprise system?

I recommend Oracle Enterprise Manager.

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.

It provides a graphical interface and easy management. It's not very cumbersome. The new versions of Oracle, 12c and 13c, have user-friendly graphical interfaces, compared to older versions, where it was very cluttered. You could not figure out where to go at all.

They have developed a cloud version, but the Oracle data is very limited; not very large scale data. It's mostly for process data and structure data. I would like to see something along the lines of big data in combination with RDBMS; that would be good.

I have been using it for a very long time.

It has been stable up until now; no downtime.

I don't think it is that scalable. We are using multiple nodes, and we have faced issues there, with the scaling.

At times, technical support is very good; at times, it's very bad. It just depends on who you get on a particular day.

Response time is good; someone gets back to you quickly.

Setup is good; really easy.

If someone came to me and asked my opinion, I would recommend this product.

The most valuable feature is the performance monitoring. This is one single-point dashboard, which presents the health of the database, at a particular point in real time. It helps you see which queries are running, and the top file sessions that are running. That helps you accurately identify what is bogging down the system.

That top session, which is chewing up CPU resources and memory, helps you see if it is doing the right thing, using the right indexes, using the best EXPLAIN PLAN. If everything is all good, maybe that tells you the box’s resources is not enough. However, 90% of the time, there are bad queries, rogue queries; it provides ample opportunities to queue.

Thanks to this tool, it helps us drill down, get to the bottom of the problem really quickly. Quick identification of a problem is key. Once the problem is identified, then you have other tools to figure out how to make this query run fast.

There are nice features like the hash report and AWR codes. At the click of a button, on the fly, you can generate these reports, which tell you exactly at the time of the clicking the health of the database; how well or how bad it is running. That is what the business is looking at from the DB. DB is like a doctor. They want the cure. They want to know what is the problem for the disease. This helps us identify the health of the database in real time, fast.

The main benefit is the quickness; the speed at which you identify, diagnose and resolve problems. The old-fashioned way depends on the DBA’s manual skills. It would take him forever, if we were to go the legacy route. This is nice, like a MRI scan. That helps. It is very fast; the queries are faster, the work gets done faster, you generate the reports faster, you are able to deliver how well the company's doing faster.

You can talk about the different features in IT, but at the end of the day, what it boils down to, what matters to management when they come into the office is that they want to look at the reports. They want to see how well their business is doing. These tools help make sure these queries are done well, so that you generate more reports, more quickly, so that management knows about the health of their company early and fast. That helps them slice and dice this information, and arrive at meaningful, logical conclusions to how well they want to run their business.

As it is, this product has so many features. We have yet to explore its full potential. There is one feature that tells you how long the query has been running. It would be nice if they could introduce a GUI feature in the performance monitoring section that shows when the query will finish. We can see when it started by looking at the session history. People are looking at you to tell them when will it finish. It would be nice if there is a GUI feature that tells you the start and the finish times. That way you can set the right expectations.

The product is very stable and doesn't take up a lot of resources. We have seen products that work well in the short-term, but that cause more harm. What was supposed to be a small footprint, ends up chewing up all the box’s resources, whereas that's not the case with this product.

There are times when you have to troubleshoot during the height of a crisis, when the box is already busy, and the chances are you are inflicting more pain. Nonetheless, this product still works very well, despite how busy the box is, because of the small footprint. Meaning, it doesn't take up a lot of resources. With fewer resources, it strives to get the job done.

Technical support is excellent. They get back to us really fast, if there is an issue. Also, there are tons of material out there on the Oracle support website. 90% of the time, you can get the answers very simply, without the need to reach a physical person to guide you to resolve your issues.

We had other solutions such as Toad and Spotlight, but once we saw this, there was no going back. It was pretty good. It's a one-point destination; one umbrella. It has so much to offer. Basically, if someone were to start using this product, they will not deviate. It has so much potential, honestly.

Initial setup is very straightforward. It is very easy to install and configure. It is also easy to migrate to different platforms. It is easy to fix if it is broken. It's not rocket science. I have seen other products where, once it is broken, it is broken; you have to do it properly from scratch. That's not the case here. With simple fixes, you can be back in business and running.

We were considering going with Quest Central and couple of other vendors, but being a big Oracle shop, it made sense. Sticking with one vendor made sense, so that we can get a better offer on the pricing. Considering Oracle is the database, it is no wonder the product has more insight into the database functioning. That's why we chose this solution.

My high rating reflects its ease of use and that it contains a host of features, anything and everything a database administrator would want it to perform; all the way from creating a database to adding space, to performance monitoring, to back up and recovery, to exports and imports, and security. You name it, they have it.

Cloud is the big buzzword. The reason why companies are moving from on-prem to cloud is cost-cutting. IT companies knowingly or unknowingly have spent top dollars on IT, but the thought process is changing. It all boils down to cost-cutting. Basically, the IT companies want to continue to do the same great stuff but with low costs, so that they can pass the benefit to the investors. I would say, cost. At the end of the day, cost is the most important criteria when I am considering working with a vendor. If you can bring down the cost, there is nothing else like that.

I strongly recommend using this product. This is going to make your life easy, so that you can use whatever time you save for better things in life.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single pane of control that gives you the visibility to see all Oracle products, plus the non-Oracle products; hardware, software, middleware. It covers it all.

The benefits to my organization are with administration, plus it centralizes your control.

There are a lot of plugins. I would like to see more and more plugins for different software. Most of them are third-party software. If Oracle Enterprise Manager could provide a standard web service to interface with any application, that would be ideal.

I don't think anybody can walk on water. Software is buggy and that's the nature of the beast.

Stability is excellent now; not so much, before.

Scalability is endless because you can use Oracle technology to expand the back end and also use Oracle technology to expand the front end.

Technical support is very helpful. They were efficient. Usually, Oracle support is very good.

We previously used vendor-specific monitoring or control systems to administer different type of resources; hardware, software. OEM gives me the ability to expand that by putting everything under one control console.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was pretty straightforward. Over the years, they have even simplified a lot of processes. Before, you had to install this and that, but now it's just one single installation that does it all.

For me, choosing this solution was a no-brainer because we are an Oracle shop. From having all different types of vendors for hardware and software, we are gradually becoming an Oracle shop.

Try to understand what OEM can do for you. Exploit it and its feature set. For example, I can modify the back-end storage through OEM. I don't have to go to my ZS4 console to see how much space I have, how to administer it, or how to allocate storage space to a particular project. I can do that through OEM. That's the power of having a single pane for control.

When I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle, support is the most important criteria. Over the years, Oracle product has improved the stability, so that the most important thing now is how fast they can provide solutions when I need their help. That's the most important thing.

I can run the database, run queries, run reports, see the whole picture, and analyze the data.

I can see the whole picture and analyze the data; I rely on that a lot. I feel like I can see the whole entire database.

It could be faster; sometimes it takes a while to make the connection. Sometimes, it's complicated, too.

It is very stable. Once in a while, I see IT involved in a ticket but I don't think it happens all the time.

I think we used to use Sybase and then we transferred to Oracle. Now they no longer use the Sybase servers. I’m not so sure why we switched from Sybase to Oracle; maybe the technology made them move from Sybase to Oracle, maybe it was more stable, more space or something like that.

I like it. I would encourage a colleague or friend looking for advice to use Oracle.

The automating diagnostic monitor (ADM) is the most valuable feature.

It will list the top findings: numbers one, two and three. Those are the areas where we have to troubleshoot. That helps my organization.

There are a lot of options; it takes time. I don't see anything like a dashboard or something similar. Adding some dashboards would possibly be a nice thing.

Stability’s good; no downtime.

Scalability’s good; it's okay.

We get good support. Tickets are resolved quickly and we are happy with the resolution. It is perfect.

I was not involved in the installation. A different team did it.

I think we are an Oracle shop; naturally we lean toward them.

It's pretty self-explanatory; just log in and explore the options. That's it.

I believe training would help. An expert can go over several options and make it easier.

The most valuable feature is that it is very easy for the novice DBA to drill down and find problems that might otherwise be difficult to find.

It has helped developers and novice DBAs drill down and find the cause for problems. There are two pieces. One, it allows people to pinpoint issues easily, and then drill down and get more details of the issue. Previously, this used to be a skillset in the hands of a very few people, but now virtually anybody can do it. Even if they can't fix the actual problem, they could filter down a lot of the issues, and get only the relevant information, which is helping us.

I probably would like to see better SQL tuning advisors that are built into the product. When you know the issue, rather than just pinpoint it, if it could also give you a solution that might work, I think that would help the product.

There are a few things on the wish list. We would hope that it makes some predictions of what we could fix and also the resources for printing that it takes. In some cases, it is not available when we need it the most.

It is mostly stable, but we have found some issues when we are having resource contention or CPU issues. It is not easy to bring up the product because it is a bit of a resource hog. Sometimes when you need it the most, that is when you find it missing, but those are rare and far between.

It is a very scalable product. No complaints there. We use it for hundreds of databases and it grows.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would probably give Oracle tech support somewhere between a 6 and a 7. Often, when you know what the issue is, there is a lot of collecting data for root cause which we might have provided just the previous day. We find ramp up is a bit of a waste of time before we can actually get a solution.

We were covered by the Oracle enterprise license agreement and it made more sense for us to go with this product as opposed to looking for another one. They have had it for a very long time.

It is a very straightforward setup and also we had help from Oracle as part of our enterprise license agreement with my company. They helped set it up and it has been working pretty well.

It was an easy choice. The Oracle Enterprise Manager is pretty well known and I don't think anything else, an external product, matches or comes even close.

Look at the reputation and the size of the company. These products are often very expensive. It is better to go with someone who has been around for a long time and who would continue to be in business, as opposed to flavor-of-the-month products.

When I am looking at a vendor such as Oracle, the most important criteria that I am looking for from them are market reputation, the scale of the company, and the stability.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of all of the different types of targets in our infrastructure, including not only the Oracle Database components, but the SQL Server components also, in the host.

We are able to manage larger numbers of databases with less human resources.

I would probably like to see more plug-ins to manage even more heterogeneous types of resources.

I would say 95% of the time it's up and running without any problems.

It's scaled pretty well for our needs, so far. We're planning on moving over to a server that has more resources available because we are getting to a point where, with some of the features that are available – such as dealing with monitoring compliances, security compliances – it's starting to take up more resources than what we have on that server along with these targets. We're having to move off of this server to have some more resources.

When I open a ticket with Oracle, it is resolved in a timely fashion. I’m happy with the resolution. They work. We have MOS. They work extensively with us to try to get resolutions as quick as possible.

I rate technical support 8/10.

We did have Foglight. It was providing us decent monitoring of the targets, but the OEM, specifically for managing the Oracle databases, is a lot more robust. You have more tools to work with to administer the Oracle databases.

I was involved in deploying and setting it. It was very straightforward and I set up all three of the tiers, from the web to the application to the back-end database. We have them running on just one server, but it's providing what we need out of it. We're currently managing approximately 900 targets.

It's a very robust tool. You will find there are many links and it's easy to navigate, but it might take you some time to learn where everything's at.

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.

The most valuable feature is its ability to integrate directly into S Space and move data, run business rules, run calculation scripts, and things like that.

The user interface is pretty clunky.

I have not rated it higher because it’s still new.

I have been using it for about 18 months.

It seems to be as stable as any other ETL product we use.

We're still in the development process. We haven't really put anything into production just yet.

As far as scalability, we're learning as we go on how to parameterize everything and stop hard-coding stuff. It seems to be handling what we're asking it to do.

Technical support is good. We get answers that we need within a couple of days. They are knowledgeable.

Initial setup is a little kind of hokey, but once you figure it out, it's okay.

We use also use DataStage and Informatica, outside of the Hyperion stack and the Oracle stack.

I recommend using the product for similar situations, just because it does technically integrate all the Oracle products together, especially in the EPM space.

Reputation is a big part of the decision regarding which vendor to work with. The other part is strategy: Do they have partners that can help us strategize on implementation? We don't need people on the keyboard, we need people helping us with setting up the big picture.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly GUI. With OEM, we can see the monitoring tools for the host or database.

We use it every day. For any performance issue, we jump into OEM and then we use it. We monitor the database to help us deal with the issue.

There as some monitoring tools, such as GoldenGate, that would be great if they could put them in OEM.

Right now, whatever we have is enough, but for additional features we want GoldenGate.

We have been using Oracle for a long time.

We do have other technologies.

It's stable.

We are moving to a data center right now. It was in one data center and we are moving it to another data center, where we have our other data business, and it has scaled well.

Technical support is good; very good. They were efficient.

Initial setup and upgrades were straightforward. We have upgraded from 10 to 11 and from 11 to 12.

It's a very flexible, straightforward installation. It's user friendly, usable day by day and we can see the database monitoring, host monitoring, everything.

When I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle, I look for good tech support, reliability, and stability.

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.

Customer Service:

Great, the three times I have needed to open a ticket!

Technical Support:

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.

The most valuable feature is the automation of the alerting. We can be proactive when we use that program instead of being called in the middle of the night because something’s wrong. You get the alert and the warning before. You can customize every threshold to meet your needs, and have different settings for different database groups.

The company spends less money over time because we are not working overtime hours at the office.

I would like to see better support for Oracle GoldenGate. Right now, it doesn't work well with Oracle GoldenGate. You still have to use GoldenGate monitor if you want to take advantage of the product.

There are some bugs and often we cannot debug the product right there and we have to reconfigure some things. It does the job, as long as you don't encounter a bug.

The stability's not so bad. It's a stable product, a mature product. When we change versions, there are some problems there.

Scalability's good. We went from two databases to over 250. It's working fine.

We have used technical support many times; it is very bad. We often had to dig down ourselves into the source code to find out why it’s not working on our platform. Every time we conferred about that, it became a little more complicated. Their answer is often to just delete the target, rediscover it and it should be fine.

We were pretty much doing our own thing with an in-house script. Since we were growing fast, we could not continue like that.

Out of the box, initial setup is pretty straightforward: You install it, you discover your target and it monitors them. If you want to go further and do custom monitoring, for example, it can become quite complicated. On the other hand, it's very flexible. That's good.

It's been a long time, so I don't remember which other products we were considering. Probably from the beginning, we were considering Oracle because they let us experiment with it first and we saw that it worked. Also, because we kind of expect our versioning to follow the version of the database.

Go only with the out-of-the-box configuration first. Let it run for a while like that to learn the product. Learn a few things before trying to configure everything in it.

When I’m selecting a vendor, price is a big factor. Licensing is a big factor. It has to do the job we need it for. Those are the most important criteria.

Both OS and Hardware Management, Network Boot, Server Pools, and Live migration of LDOMs over Server Pool are Ops Center's most valuable features to me.

It helps a lot in data center consolidation, P2V, and with LDOM live migration. It reduces overall required downtime and is highly scalable, especially with T5 architecture.

The monitoring feature should be improved, so that it may be used as a dependable monitoring solution, as well as a deployment solution for SPARC-based hardware and operating systems.

I have used the product for three years.

No, I didn’t encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

I will rate technical support at 9.

I have had the opportunity to work with various other UNIX as well as Linux systems, but among all of them, I found Solaris to be a very stable operating system. Now with the evolution of LDOMs, ZFS and zones, it’s providing a perfect platform for virtualization solutions.

To me installation doesn’t seem complex, but at the same time comprehensive understanding of technology is required.

We performed implementation ourselves, except some time when we requested Oracle’s professional services.

I recommend Oracle solutions like T5 Super-Cluster, T5-8 and Oracle Solaris 11 operating systems, as they are highly scalable and fault-tolerant systems.

Enterprise Manager comes with a suite of products that includes agents for setup. This makes it easier to monitor databases as well as servers and SANs.

It's given us the ability to monitor multiple aspects of the organization. Also, the ability to monitor different versions of Oracle and different platforms has been helpful for our customers.

Using, setting up, and maintaining the agents can be tedious and even almost a full-time job. Once it's done, it works pretty well. It's just setting them up that could use some improvements.

We haven't had any issues with the deployment other than setting up the agents.

I've had problems with its reliability and speed. Sometimes even giving it a large amounts of software and hardware to run on, it can still be sluggish and fail to respond as quickly as you would think.

It does seem to scale. Even when we throw thousands of objects at it, the scalability still seems to be there.

The newer versions are much simpler and they have a better look and feel, and once you get the agents taken care of, it goes a lot quicker.

We implemented it ourselves.

If you are going to be database-heavy, and that is what you are going to be monitoring the most, then Enterprise Manager might be your best bet. If not, there are other options out there to look at to see which pieces you need to monitor. Do we need to monitor applications, servers, and networks? Figure out which part you're going to need for that.

OEM gives me, as the DBA, a very graphical representation of what's going on with my Oracle footprint, and it's very quick to display to me where I would have issues and where I can correct them. This gives me the capability to see when there are issues happening, which means that I can actually act on the issues pretty quickly before it becomes apparent to the business that there is something going on within the database, that could, for example, have a negative effect on their ability to get a drug out the door.

From my point of view, I've found OEM to be one of the easier products to deal with. It's the product that I use day in daily to view all of my databases, and the fact that I can actually integrate multiple databases and multiple middleware solutions into one single point is perfect for me, so I'm really happy with it.

The features that I'd want to use in Enterprise Manager would be in and around the diagnostics and tuning area of the database. Again, that is an additional license. Whilst I can get Enterprise Manager, I can do certain things with it, the really, really high-value part of Enterprise Manager requires additional licenses. So I'd like to see more advanced functionalities that, frankly, don't require us to spend more money.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's been very stable. I don't recall any big issues with stability.

We've been able to scale it as needed.

It was a very, very complicated product to set up. We initially used it with Oracle Single Sign-On to link Microsoft Active Directory to our E-Business Suite instance. It was difficult to set up, and actually now we've migrated to Oracle Access Manager with Identity Manager, and it's even more complicated. 

Oracle Access Manager is a product that Oracle has brought in. They've took over a company which had their own identity management solution. They took it over and re-labelled it, re-branded it to be their product. We had a few enhancements in it, but when they released it is was absolutely full of bugs, and, actually really, really complicated to set up. 

Later releases and scripts is what have made it a little bit easier, but I would like Oracle before they put these products out to the market, to invest some time in making them easier to set up.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

Read the documentation, because we found and still find it extremely complicated to bind the latest versions of the database into Enterprise Manager. It was much easier in earlier versions, but much more complicated now.

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 like the reports of Enterprise Manager, as you have a lot of targets. You can create generic reports based on some metrics of those targets. It allows me to have some sort of place to check all my targets.

I would like to have more details and privileges. Sometimes, I have a problem where I need to grant a user in Enterprise Manager the privilege to view a database. When I grant a privilege to him, to monitor a database, he also gets the privilege to view the host of the database, and I don't want him to show the host, only the database. I would say more grantable and obtainable privileges are needed.

I've been using it for four to five years.

It's very, very stable.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I never needed support for Oracle. The packages that they offer are very good. I never need to contact any guys from Oracle to perform support.

It's very easy to setup, not for someone who has never worked with it, but if you had junior or someone a little more experienced than a junior, they are good enough to deploy. It's easy to deploy.

Before deploying a new service, be sure you configure it very well, because it's very boring and time consuming to later do this. It would be good to do this during the deployment phase. That is what I would think.

The monitoring and alerting capabilities and ability for corrective actions in incidents provide the most value.

Provides monitoring and alerting to know when there are issues, and the ability to address issues automatically with corrective actions. This has saved admin time, as it's saved our admins from having to get up in the middle of the night to address minor issues that corrective actions could take care of automatically.

I would like to see Oracle address the multi-data center monitoring and management in a more seamless way where management services are easily spread across the data centers like they can be today, but address the single database repository that can only exist in one data center at a time.

I have been using various versions of Enterprise Manager for over eight years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Multi-Data Center High Availability monitoring, alerting and management is the largest challenge as there is a single repository database that is located in a single data center, therefore running across multiple data centers still ties back to a single repository database which runs from one of the data centers, but can distribute the OEM Console and Management servers in each of the data centers. All this works without issue, but the repository traffic from multiple data centers can be a challenge going back to another data center where the repository database resides.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's good, there are times that reaching the right technical analysts to resolve or address an issue can take time, but overall the support is responsive and good and when having a severity one in response to a down issue can be excellent.

I have not really utilized anything other than Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring, alerting and management of Oracle based environments.

Simple single server setups are quite simple to install and upgrade. Multi-Oracle management services with load balancers can be more of a challenge but are not overly difficult to get accomplished.

I am working for a consulting and managed services firm as a consultant and have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager for many of our clients over several years and we have always had great success in meeting the objectives it was implemented to address.

Oracle Enterprise Manager for the base product does not have additional cost when you have an Oracle Enterprise Database licenses, however to get the most value from OEM additional packs are required and have additional costs. Those costs are at the product level and not Oracle Enterprise Manager direct cost as I understand. However, in most enterprise level environments these packs provide huge value to the monitoring, alerting and management of the environment.

It's overall capability for Oracle products is very good and offers the ability to monitor and manage many Oracle products from a single environment and is seamlessly integrated to monitor and manage those products out of the box.

If you run Oracle Products from Oracle OVM, Oracle Database, Web Logic, etc. Oracle Enterprise Manager is by far the best way to provide a single console and monitoring and alerting solution.

I have mainly used it for management, monitoring and tuning for Oracle databases.

We manage and monitor many databases for customers (some customers have a few hundred databases) and OEM is extremely helpful in performing operations for monitoring and management from one single place. Setting up various jobs including RMAN backups is extremely helpful via OEM. We also use features such as corrective actions, where we can ask OEM to take appropriate corrective actions when an event occurs in the middle of the night.

I have been using OEM 13c which is their latest release and I would have expected that the product would have been more stable and should not have bugs for very simple things like CPU utilisation or amount of physical memory on Linux hosts. These are very fundamental metrics to monitor and should not be an issue. These are not a new features and I would have expected a much better release of the product.

I have been using OEM since 2002.

I have deployed OEM 11g and 12c in High availability mode and was not too complicated to implement. I have not tried HA with 13c. However, installation for all the releases have been fine.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

To me its like a lottery, if I am lucky I get a support engineer who knows what they are talking but many a times you get someone who just keeps asking very fundamental questions until you have to ask on duty manger to be involved and have the SR escalated. But I guess, it is the same across any other vendor.

I have used custom scripts and still do use it for standard edition of databases where OEM cannot be used. However, I prefer to use OEM wherever possible.

Although custom scripts might be easy to setup, the issue is when the person who wrote the scripts leaves an organisation, all the knowledge walks out as well.

Like any product, it is best that the implementation is done by someone who understands it well, whether done in-house or by third party. It saves a lot in long run and you know that its done right.

For any Enterprise edition database customer, I highly recommend that they should implement OEM and at a minimum purchase license for Diagnostic and Tuning pack for database. Amount of time required to perform many activities such as tuning and diagnostics pays off.

Do it once and do it right.

I like the performance tuning features, particularly since it gives me a good glimpse of what has been happening. We maintain the data for 31 days, so I can graphically go back and see what exactly happened during that time. I can drill down to the user level or the SQL level and see what was happening at any point in time. That's a pretty good feature, and because it's more graphical, I don't have to analyze a whole bunch of rows.

In terms of the user response time, if I were to do a lot of queries, and analyze it, we can quickly provide the result to the end user or the developers, and then quickly come back to solving a lot of performance problems.

With any Oracle protocol, and Enterprise Manager is one of them, as far as the interface is concerned, it's not good and is still pretty ugly. I would like to see a decent UI because there are a lot of tools on the market that also give good drill-down capabilities. For example, with Enterprise Manager's drill down to database blocking logs, you can no longer see that in the UI, whereas other tools allow that. I need to be able to do this type of drill-down in one tool without having to manage different tools that do different things.

I've been using Oracle products for 22 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

You should go with the latest version as it's more stable, and that's one of the reasons I like it. It's a pretty stable platform.

We have a pretty good number of database with Oracle Enterprise Manager. You can scale it as much as you want. We have about 1,200 databases that we manage using it.

I have not used technical support because I am not the one who administer it. Technical support is good, I've heard.

If you're using one or two databases, Enterprise Manager is not something you want to use because Oracle has other products that can make it simpler. But ff you are using more than five or six databases, Enterprise Manager is the way to go.

The most valuable feature is the way it shows me, on top in one screen, right there, my availability options. Then if I have to drill down the performance, it shows me what's running, rather than me going in and doing my own scripts. It provides AWR reports, active session reports, and things like that.

The biggest bang for our buck with Enterprise Manger is automated patching. We have at least 1000 or so databases, so automation in patching, applying security patches, and PSU's has been huge for us. We are working heavily with Oracle and their representatives to have patches written up.

We've had a lot of struggles patching automation. There's no good log file that you can debug. We have to go back to the account managers and work with Oracle internals. I'm hoping that 13c will bring something better on that front.

We've been OK deploying it within our company.

It's been stable, but the patching is the biggest pain-point right now for us.

We are not there yet with scaling it. Like I said, if you patch one single database, it works OK. If you have, on one server, ten different databases, that's where it hangs, and we don't know where it failed and when it might fail.

The initial setup was good and fairly straightforward. We didn't have a whole lot of trouble with it.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

If you're a newbie who doesn't want much hands-on in a CLI, it's a good solution.

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.

For us, the most valuable feature is really the ability to monitor. We're using Enterprise Manager to monitor our database infrastructure. Whenever we create a database, we'll apply those templates, and it will monitor. Database will send alerts and create instances that will allow our team to be both reactive and proactive and use some of the warnings that it brings us. We're using it a lot for that -- the ability to do performance tuning, using the OEM, the ability to create different reporting, the ability to be able to get some suggestions from the OEM, in terms of the database performance.

The tool also gives us the ability to create reports for a set of databases, or a set of applications, such that we can create a daily report, weekly report, monthly report, whatever you want, to know about the performance utilization of that group of databases or specific databases.

That's really the key advantage of Enterprise Manager. Although we're using it for Database, the tool has enhancements to provide benefits to an entire IT shop in terms of monitoring and managing the entire IT infrastructure.

As with any organization, before we embark on anything, we have to look at the ROI as well as the ability of a particular tool. Enterprise Manager gives us a tool that's fast and reliable for monitoring and managing our whole IT infrastructure. We're a mutual fund company, so speed is really key in providing satisfactory customer service. The performance and functionality of Enterprise Manager has been huge for us.

The latest release, 13c, which I think came out in December, has additional enhancements in the areas of security, management, creation of users, and different level of functionality. It's much better than before, which was very limited and the majority of users created with the tool were forced to have more privilege than they should have. We're currently working on upgrading to 13c, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether that will apply for our environment.

Deployment has been fine. There have been no issues.

With Enterprise Manager, you've got a tool that's providing end-to-end administration and monitoring of your IT infrastructure. The tool, therefore, has to have a very smooth way to configuring so that it is highly available. This, of course, plays a very important role in functionality because you don't want the tool to be a single point of failure.

So Oracle has claimed that they've enhanced that part of Enterprise Manager. For me, that's important because as a data architect, I play a lot of roles and I've been able to configure the tool to have four nines of High Availability. If you have a tool that you depend on for monitoring and administrating your entire IT infrastructure, the last thing you want is for it to have an level of unavailability.

It's scaled to our needs.

We have premier support from Oracle, so we have a very good relationship with technical support.

Right now, the only complexity is setting up our environment for High Availability so that we can scale it and have it highly available not just within the same data center but spanning to multiple, different locations. That's the only tricky part because it involves additional products from other companies, like Cisco and F5. So for us, setting up a standalone, vanilla Oracle Enterprise Manager is a very, very small part. It's because we have to set up the large, diverse environment with maximum-availability architecture that it's been a challenge for us.

One piece of advice is just why, if you don’t have Oracle Enterprise Manager, you aren't taking advantage of it. I assume your DBA's might be spending extra hours and off hours, and if you set up and deploy Enterprise Manager the right way, you will see at least a 50% decrease in unnecessary, mundane work.

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.

As a DBA contractor, I like the ability to be able to group my hosts/targets and set up different configurations to monitor based on the needs of my clients.

It has made my job easier in that I can put my focus on certain elements at the whim of my client.

The one area was the process of setting up targets and hosts as it seems rather lengthy and repetitive. There should be a way to merge some of the steps together.

As a DBA contractor, I have been using this solution/configuration since 2013. I started with the upgrade from 11 to 12.

I have had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

I have no issues scaling it as needed.

Customer Service:

Customer service has been consistently excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support has been consistently excellent.

My client has always been Oracle based.

With the proper available documentation the setup, although lengthy, was straightforward for the most part.

Implementation was done in-house. My advice, based on the upgrade that we performed, is to create a "sandbox" to "play" in and test, test, test and document, document, document.

We documented with great detail each step and the time it would take. We ran tests in the sandbox to ensure that the upgrade would work. It was very successful and ran into virtually no problems.

Do some research, follow the documentation and any advise that might be out there. The Oracle communities are good sources.

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.