Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Reviews

Managing deliveries is our primary use case: Oracle servers, Oracle networking, delivery receipts, applications, Tomcat/Apache, host machines, and checking the host data center.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control has improved our organization in many ways:

• Before implementing this solution, the patching was done manually. Now, we do the same task with patching management. 
• Before, we used to monitor every server every day. Now, we don't have to monitor it, because we have an in-place solution. 

We get alerts from Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. We can proactively monitor every server before a problem happens on it.

The accuracy is the most valuable feature for us. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control gives us diverse monitoring tools, monitoring capability that can be extremely powerful, security patching, database consolidation, etc. all in one packaged distribution.

The product does have room for improvement in patch management. It is complex, but since the documentation is very much elaborated, we followed the documentation. 

We were able to implement it by ourselves. We didn't have to ask the third-party implementers to come and implement it for us.

The deployment took around two days. The whole deployment, all the production servers (we have around three hundred servers), took around three months.

I would like to see more security features in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control like application data integrity.

The solution is pretty good. This is very powerful. Oracle Cloud Control has the capability of not only managing Oracle products, but also Microsoft, IBM products, SharePoint, etc. Lots of solutions and applications come in this domain. 

Oracle is managing all the different procedures of applications, deliveries, storage, network, and load-balancing. It is a complete data-center solution.

Right now we have a cluster node with two servers clustered. It has a database. This database is on a two-node server. We can scale it up to as many as we want. 

Civil administrators, supervising administrators, network administrators, auditing administrators, managers, supervisors, security consultants, etc. are all using it.

We have in the Cloud Control every person assigned to a role. We have assigned a particular role to them: indoors administration, SharePoint administration, Exchange, etc.

Some are for the main controller. Some are Oracle admins, BI publishers, BI reporting tools, managers, etc. Every person has his/her role.

I would evaluate the solution's technical support with a 7 out of 10. They are lacking. Sometimes I feel the engineers on Oracle support don't know as much as we know. 

Maybe because we are using their product heavily or they're engineers who are working in Oracle support, but they don't have much breadth of knowledge in the product. What I've witnessed sometimes has surprised me. They don't know the product as much as we do. When the support goes through and the support call goes to the US, they are professional. When it comes through India, it's just terrible.

We switched due to the ease of control in managing productivity and administration. We were not using that solution as heavily as we are using Oracle Control now. It was the mobile Microsoft SCOM security package.

The initial setup is complex but since the documentation is very much elaborated, we followed the documentation. We were able to implement it by ourselves. We didn't have to ask the third-party implementers to come and implement it for us. 

The deployment took around two days for all the production servers. We have around three hundred servers, so it took around three months.

I did the setup myself. We didn't have any integrator. We followed all of the documentation and I was the one who implemented all the solutions. 

We have saved a lot of money on costs like wages, overtime, and manpower. The required hours were too high to maintain the servers previously. 

We had lots of people maintaining the servers. Now, there are not many people needed. The company is saving a lot of money.

We had some indicators. We studied our environment. We have most of our production systems and applications on Oracle. Consequently, the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control distro was well suited for us. 

We use Oracle's product line. We know that it also supports the other products that we're using like Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, web-controllers, Apache servers, etc. 

We found Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control much more suitable for us than other products for storage, switches, net logs, F-5, etc.

If people know their environment, they will know what product suits their business department and needs. If they are happier using Oracle applications or customer applications based in Java and Oracle products. Cloud Control is much better for us.

I would rate it an eight out of ten because I found it very helpful, proactive, and easy to manage I didn't give it 10, because of the support. I don't find the support very professional. 

We are very dependent on the product, since it eases Oracle database administration. Mostly, if you have a lot of databases in your DC.

It has helped us in the manner of productivity, since it enables us to monitor and manage a lot of databases in a centralized web portal.

Patching multiple databases

Performance monitoring

Management and optimization

Database administration

Alerts and thresholds

Stability and performance of the tool itself. Might be better used with more hardware. Normally the specifications from the docs are enough.

Yes, there are some bugs. Some of the screens sometimes do not load data, and sometimes the portal hangs.

It has the ability to scale out the database and the OEM to more than one server.

It is under the Oracle support agreement. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Yes, we evaluated Spotlight from Dell (Quest), but we chose OEMCC, since it has more features and requires no direct licensing.

I think it is a bit complex. You have to install and create an Oracle Database with a template for OEM, then you have to install and configure the OEM.

We did it by ourselves.

OEM requires no licensing, but if you want to use features like the performance monitoring page in your database, you must have the Diagnostic Pack license. If you want the tuning advisor, you have to license the Tuning Pack. The license you need is not for OEM, but for the Oracle Database.

We evaluated Spotlight from Dell (Quest).

If you have a considerable number of Oracle Databases and they are very critical, I suggest you use this product. It eases administration, mainly regarding performance management and troubleshooting.

Our primary use is to administer the different databases we have, development, UATs, and production databases. We use it to have a central environment so we can make policies for all users; whether the passwords have expired or not.

The reason we have this is because before, let’s say I had 10 to 12 databases. I had to go to each server and log in to the enterprise manager, and do this job on each server. Another of our concerns that this helps us address is to get notifications regarding if the space is, let’s say, 80% used. In that case, I need it to send me a notification so I can maintain; or on the host level where our systems are, to have alert notifications regarding space or CPUs.

Our main use of Enterprise Manager is on the database level.

Using Enterprise Manager, I was able to create user profiles for all the instances that have the same profile. Secondly, it's easier to manage performance, to automate the AWR reports to run every half an hour, or hour. Then, if you have a performance issue you just open the report and you can see what was running the last one hour, the SQL statements, or what was causing the performance issues. And, of course, the alerts.

The most important, of course, is the monitoring feature, because we want to monitor the host and the databases. 

Of course, that you can manage and create the backup strategies from a central environment for all your environments, so you don’t have to do so on each database. You can set up the policy you want for each database, but you do it from a central environment. 

And, of course, the notifications, if the backup succeeded or not.

Because all our banking infrastructure is based on Oracle, I’ve tried to register Enterprise Manager on the middleware level, let's say, WebLogic applications. But I cannot say that I can do all the administration from Enterprise Manager, that I can do from the WebLogic Admin Console. So, I think here it needs some improvement: Things that you can do on the WebLogic Admin Console, you should be able to do them on the Enterprise Manager, so you don’t have to log into the Admin Console.

No issues with stability, really. 

Sometimes the alerts are coming a bit late, for example, an alert for the CPU. It depends on the threshold that you have, how long you want to check the CPU of the machine. I got some faulty alerts with Data Guard. I had stopped a synchronization for maintenance and then I re-synchronized Oracle Data Guard. It took some time to appear in Enterprise Manager and send me the right notification that Data Guard was up and running and synchronizing. I realized this because I went directly into the database to check the status of Data Guard, and it was telling me that it was running okay. But in Enterprise Manager, it needed some more time to update the interface. It doesn’t happen really often, that I get faulty alerts or late alerts.

Another example is when the database is down and then you start the database, it needs some time to load everything from the database. I don’t know if some maintenance can be done on the agent side that is installed on the database server. But the lack that I'm seeing might be from 20 seconds to two minutes. It depends.

I cannot think of any scalability issues.

In general, we have experience with Oracle support. For some things they are giving us solutions quickly. For some other cases they need more time, but for Enterprise Manager specifically, I have never used Oracle support.

I used Oracle Grid Control 10 a few years ago, as a consultant, and it was very useful. So when I came here and we started having more and more environments, I said, “Okay, the only way to manage all these environments is to have Oracle Enterprise Manager." And it’s impressive how much better Oracle 13c is, how much improved it is over Oracle Grid Control 10.

The installation, I think is, straightforward. It's not very, very complex.

You need some background on the order, what you have to install first and what second, and you need to check which versions of support that will be your back-end or WebLogic. But if you have a bit of background and you go through the main Oracle Database to get the versions that you need, I think there's no issue with installation.

We are using the free version. We are not using any licensed packages of Enterprise Manager, so I’m not quite sure how much each package is. As I understand it, there are different plug-ins that you need to buy for Enterprise Manager, but I’m not sure how much they cost.

The only solution I could think of was Oral Enterprise Manager because our infrastructure is based on Oracle.

To implement, you need to have a good server with a reasonable CPU, and good RAM on the server. You need to check the configurations that need to be done on each database where you want to install the Oracle agent, so it will be automatic; you need to make some changes on the host, the host that you want to register. I don’t think there is anything else complex in order to do this.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10.  To be a 10 it needs to be more viable for using it for middleware software.

The use case was the monitoring of the database, which included consumption of resources such as CPU, memory, processes, and I/O.

One of the clearest examples is the agility of discovering processes/sessions that are burdening the database environment. With this agility, the DBA can more quickly verify this type of problem, in addition to checking locked sessions and not having to do several searches in views and tables of the data dictionary. The tool already does this for you in an agile way.

We had a case where a particular DML command could not perform the required update command on a table, and in this case we saw, within a few minutes, that we had another session doing an exclusive lock on the table. It was caused by an index rebuild command without the "online" option, that marked it to be rotated daily.

I believe that one of the most valuable resources this tool has is the ability to check offending processes, which are burdening the hardware resources, and to generate advice quickly that can improve a query's performance.

Another feature is the Resource Manager, where we can manage the consumption of resources of certain queries, separately in resource groups. Depending on the characteristics of the query, queries can be placed in groups that consume less database and hardware resources. 

There are others features as well, such as AWS and ASH report which, in Enterprise Manager, are generated in a more agile way, and with a more friendly interface, helping to detect abnormalities in the database.

One of the things that can be improved is the quality of results generated by BI Publisher. They are somewhat confusing when it comes to analysis.

Another point is in the installation of the product. The installation steps are very complex and the documentation for them is very generic and does not make very clear the correct steps from the installation to the addition of the host and database.

Another point that can be improved is the agent instability in the monitored hosts, because sometimes an agent has to be resynchronized to recapture the information.

• Database performance tuning
• Weblogic server diagnostics
• Proactive monitoring and alerts for full Oracle infrastructure

The solution provides very useful insights for application and database performance tuning. We were able to do away with guess work in determining where the bottlenecks were in application performance.

• Central management of Oracle infrastructure for more efficient administration
• Advisors provide quick access to Insight and best practice information for performance tuning and configuration.

Oracle Data Guard monitoring: There are no alerts for redo log transport failure.

Primary use case was to have a central web interface where we could administrate all Oracle Database instances.

After installing, I found out that it is not only a database administration console. You could manage hosts, middleware apps (WebLogic), and many more plugins, which are available to download for other vendors' software and databases.

Our banking environment is based on Oracle Databases (11.2.0.4) and our banking software is Oracle FLEXCUBE (12.0.3), which is running on WebLogic (10.3.6). In total, I have about 15 databases registered in Cloud Control and four to five WebLogic consoles, all of which are self-monitored from Oracle Cloud Control 13C monitoring software, and configured to send an email alert when a metric threshold is triggered.

I have registered a testing Microsoft SQL Server environment, but I did not find it very useful (it cannot be used as an alternative or as SQL Server Management Studio).

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control has been really useful for our organisation. Before Enterprise Manager, I had 15 different database consoles with no centralised monitoring or alerting system. With EM, it has been easier to monitor all DB errors. For example, it is possible to register your My Oracle Support account, so when you get an error, it will automatically search for a document in My Oracle Support.

Also, you can create a system group (database, application, and web server), so you can monitor performance as a system.

Host-based monitoring is a big advantage of Enterprise Manager.

Now, with EM, it is easier to manage your Oracle Database backups and create email alerts regarding the status of your backups (Succeeded or Failed). I know when a target is up or down (this can be an Oracle Database instance, Listener, WebLogic Server, or even a deployment in the WebLogic Server).

When registering a host, only if your host is running Linux will you get all the information which is available on EM. It would be nice if in future releases to include IBM AIX (primarily) and Microsoft Windows (secondly).

When you register a WebLogic server (in our case WebLogic 10.3.6), you can actually do certain things. You cannot use Enterprise Manager as replacement for a WebLogic console.

No different solution was used before.

If you read the prerequisites from My Oracle Support, then installation is straightforward even without the manual. What you need to understand is what to install first, then second.

The implementation was done in-house.

I did not evaluate other options because our core banking system is based on Oracle.

The big win here is alerting - if configured sensibly (don't use the out of the box settings) with some planning this can be a real asset - alerts can also be sent to your problem management system and steered towards exactly the right group of people using target labels such as "line of business" or "department".

Alerting, patching, general monitoring. Each host to be monitored requires and agent to be installed and configured - this process is mature and works well.

It's much more than a monitoring package - sometimes when scratching beneath the surface you end up with issues . Such as agents requiring security, scan listeners moving about after fail overs, some patching processes failing - these are relatively rare though and considering the breadth of the product I would not consider this an issue.

No system works well.

IF configured correctly this product is fully scalable.

Customer Service:

8/9 out of 10 - Oracle support is generally very good - sometimes they need nudging / issues need escalating bit the support model is good.

Technical Support:

generally good - the documentation and knowledge bases are extensive - so often you can resolve your own issues.

No.

You need to install oracle middleware and an oracle repository DB back end

Install scripts are good however with proper planning/sizing there shouldn't be any issues.

In-house

OEM is invaluable in many ways, other products can replace bits of it - but the product should be used as a single point from which to view as much of your enterprise as possible.

You will probably already be an Oracle user and so will have an existing license agreement. Add-on's can be pricey though.

Nothing else was considered for Oracle database monitoring.

Its one of those products that you can, and should customise to your own requirements. Don't expect a one off install then leave it to take care of itself. Proper procedures will greatly assist, and time spent discovering features can be very rewarding. Agent deployment is straight forwards, and the agents are light weight and easily maintainable

My interaction with OEM was primarily for governing Oracle 10g/11g databases. I was particularly interested in the monitoring/alerting features, table maintenance automation, performance dash-boarding, and Active Data Guard management.

I used this with clients, but not internally. For those with larger footprints, but with an inexperienced staff, it really helped to cushion the issues brought on by skill gaps. It also provided greater visibility of database performance for administrators. This helped prompt decisions around capacity and availability.

The interface for Data Guard could use some work. We had challenges with switchover/failover testing.

I have used this solution for three years.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability problems. My largest installation had approximately 16 databases. We did not challenge the server's existing compute resources.

Technical support from Oracle was not required during my implementation.

There was no previous solution. The solutions deployed had a fair Oracle footprint, so it was determined that OEM would be the best fit.

The initial setup was straightforward. OEM's GUI is pretty comprehensive and user-friendly. The documentation is very clear in terms of prerequisites and steps to be executed.

The base product, including DB Control, is free. However, additional Ops Center management packs, e.g., Tuning, Lifecycle Management, must be licensed in accordance with Oracle's guidelines. It's very easy to get confused about this. We recommended a comprehensive review of the licensing documentation, or a sit-down meeting with the vendor, prior to installation.

We did not look at any alternatives.

Depending on the size of the Oracle footprint that you need to monitor, it's a good idea perhaps to pursue an Oracle Licensing Agreement with the vendor. This will allow you to implement management packs more easily. I would recommend this for larger environments of 25 or more databases.

Real-time SQL, performance monitoring and SQL Tuning Advisor are the features that I use the most. These features are very effective to find problems and to resolve them.

Besides these, setting alert mechanism, getting AWR reports and monitoring the Exadata hardware are the most useful features.

Also, adding clients remotely from the Oracle Cloud Control 12c screen makes this version different from the earlier ones.

There are still doubts as of how to use this tool for administration issues such as storage or replication operations. DBAs still prefer to administer databases by manual commands. They rather use this tool to monitor databases and alert mechanisms.

To be more specific, most DBAs (that I've met) prefer to use “Sqlplus”, “putty”, “secureCRT” command line tools or “Toad” tool to manage replication or to manage storage(tablespace, control file etc) instead of using EM Cloud Control.

They do not feel relaxed using EM Cloud Control for those subjects. Oracle may emphasize on those subject on the trainings. Or Oracle Support Engineers can motivate the customers about using those features if they are really stable.

I have used this solution for more than four years. Before this, I was using earlier versions of the product, i.e, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.

With the earlier release, we did encounter stability issues. But, now I use version 12.1.0.4.0. and I do not see any stability problems.

I have used the earlier version (i.e version 11g) and also, I have used dbconsole (i.e., the Oracle Enterprise Manager Console dedicated to one server). I switched to this version so as to administer my database and the Exadata hardware from one point.

The setup is not complex. Everyone can do it by using its official documents as well as the tutorials that can be found from the web easily.

If you plan to use OEM Cloud Control 12c for a corporate company, it will be better to get the Diagnostics and Tuning Pack or the Management license based on your needs. This tool will be your most important assistant. But for smaller goals, you can use the base OEM functions for free (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E246...).

If you use Oracle, you do not have many options. This product is the best for a DBA. But, if you have license limitations, then you can use it with the base functions or you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager Console (dbconsole).

Implementing this version is so much easier than the earlier ones. You do not need to install agents into the client one by one. You can install the agent from one point (i.e., from the OEM Cloud Control 12c screen). You just need some firewall actions before installing the agents. Implementation is easy, there is no need for a lot of engineering.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (EM CC) is the best product for monitoring many of the Oracle databases and other Oracle applications such as Siebel, E-Business Suite, WebLogic.

The product has a common user-friendly interface which provides simple maintenance and administration tasks.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) helps to monitor many of the different targets and resources.

It is a flexible system for metrics and for the notifications that inform the DBAs and system administrators, before the occurrance of a problem.

I think EM should be able to monitor new products from different vendors. I would like to have unified monitoring interface to monitor other software and hardware, for example: AIX operating systems, including IBM-specific features (HMC, LPAR parameters), disk and tape storages, some optical switches and other enterprise production hardware.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

We did encounter some stability issues but many of them were fixed.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a rating of about 7/10. This estimation is true for the Oracle support in general.

I used some open-source products, like Zabbix. I moved from the open-source products over to Oracle EM because it has many embedded metrics.

This product has a simple installation. All of the steps are described in depth in the Oracle documentation and I didn't have any problems with it.

From what I know, Oracle EM CC requires the Oracle Diagnostics and Tuning Pack license if you want to monitor Oracle databases.

Oracle EM is a unique product, i.e., if you need to monitor many of the Oracle products in detail.

My opinion is that this product must be used in companies that have many Oracle databases.