Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

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.

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.

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 has been consistently excellent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.