Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

Reporting and tuning

Central reporting and management tool for Oracle database and middle-tier products

BI Publisher integration; EM CLI commands

Four years

Agent deployments are easy

Not with 12c OEM

No

Home-built shell scripts required maintenance, incurred higher overhead, and exposed the company to risk if a key employee left

Initial installation of 12c OEM is convenient and straightforward

In-house implementation

OEM required 1.5 full-time employees during setup and still requires that much support in production

No

There are several sources of information including IOUG and communities.oracle.com

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

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'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.

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.

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.

Real-time performance monitoring

Can easily visualize bottlenecks in database performance tuning with historical graph trends; where as before it would be based upon manually tuning using scripts which are text based. Ability to get email alerts for systems in trouble; where as it would have been manual steps to obtain health-checks on all database servers.

Stability and bugs in the product. There seem to be too many.

3 years

Many problems which were fixed with patches.

Initially yes, but after patching it was stable; but with applying the latest version 12.1.0.3, we seem to be unstable again.

No

Customer Service: Appalling, raised issues with support and that take ages to respond.Technical Support: Appalling; they take far too long to understand the issue, they just simply appear to read scripts; if our problem is not on the script; then they struggle to think.

No

It was a complex installation, in that we have 2 servers as opposed to a single all in one solution; but it was nothing we could not manage.

In-house

Initial set up was approx. 5 days’ worth of DBA’s effort

No

Be prepared for a lot of heartache before it beds in. Get the latest patches for the project, and read up on most common bugs issues before implementation;