Oracle Enterprise Manager Review

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.