Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is for monitoring and reporting and emailing those back to the client.

When it comes to Enterprise Manager, we use single instances and price management. We install these in every installation of Oracle and then we manage them specifically for individual databases. We are looking to consolidate everything. 

I have found the uptime of all of our systems to be most valuable with this solution. This is important because we need to guarantee specific uptime and preventive maintenance. We need to know upfront if there are going to be any issues on the database so we can proactively solve those.

My opinion is that this solution needs to improve consolidation. That is what our business needs the most right now.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

My impression is that the stability of this solution is quite good. We've never had any issues and we've been doing prevention maintenance. 

I would rate the scalability of this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Our business is doing consultancy for different types of companies and I was looking for an RMM system to manage all of these systems.

My impression is that the initial setup is quite straightforward and easy. However, I have more than 15 years of experience with Oracle.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

We are using Oracle Enterprise Manager for managing databases in banking.

Oracle Enterprise Manager has helped our organization by allowing us easy access to data in the extractor manager.

The most valuable features of Oracle Enterprise Manager are the data guide and online monitoring.

Oracle Enterprise Manager could improve the monitoring types and the graphics.

I have been using Oracle Enterprise Manager for approximately six years.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is stable.

I have found Oracle Enterprise Manager to scalable. We are using a lot of data in our large data warehouse. We plan to increase usage and upgrade in the next two or three years. For the next upgrade, we will most likely move to the cloud.

We were previously using SQL and we switched to Oracle Enterprise Manager because of compatibility issues with our system.

The initial setup of Oracle Enterprise Manager was a bit complex. The whole process took approximately two days.

I rate the setup experience of Oracle Enterprise Manager a four out of five.

We used a specialist to do the implementation. The vendor assists with the maintenance of the solution.

We did evaluate other solutions before choosing Oracle Enterprise Manager.

My advice to others is Oracle Enterprise Manager is a stable and scalable enterprise compared to the other similar solutions.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager an eight out of ten.

It's a good product for Oracle management and monitoring. This solution is deployed on-premises, and we are using the latest version.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring because it's very useful for checking and troubleshooting compared with other products, like Nagios for example, that have some interaction with Oracle. Enterprise Manager is good for a DB administrator to troubleshoot and check monitoring.

The interface could be more friendly for basic users.

I have been using this solution for one year. 

I haven't used Oracle technical support for this product. But we have used them for other products, like Oracle Server or Oracle Appliance, for example. For Oracle Appliance, I don't have good feedback because recently we had some issues with Exadata, and they were taking too much time with giving us a solution, so the case was still open for weeks.

Technical support is responsive, but the problem is that there are some other customers that we are managing, and there is not good feedback because every now and then, there are issues for which we open a case, and the same issues are continuously appearing. We are experiencing issues with the same hardware, and we never get a fix.

This is for Oracle Private Cloud Appliance and for Oracle Exadata. For Oracle software, we have good feedback about the quality of the support. But as far as the hardware, I cannot say the same.

Setup wasn't very complex, but usually Oracle products are not easy to install. It's normal for there to be some complexity because Oracle products are not "plug and play" like other products.

For monitoring issues, I compared Oracle Enterprise Manager to Nagios. There was a monitoring need that Nagios could not provide but Enterprise Manager could.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

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.

Provides 24x7 monitoring of application system availability for both on-premise, and on-cloud application systems, and forecasting data relating to overall system utilization (or under-utilization.)

With over 3,400 different target components deployed and in-use, it would be impossible for 4 DBA's to otherwise monitor and assess the condition of this number of separate application and database systems by individually logging into separate administration consoles for each product. The automation elements reduce the training time required to get our junior operators up to speed doing routine patching or cloning, and allow the senior staff to have more resource time available for strategic planning and ensuring overall availability of the critical systems without sacrificing proper monitoring and security awareness checking.

Recently, including new off-premises (cloud- based) application re-hosting, presents the challenge of whether to monitor cloud from on-premise, or vice-versa. We are currently experimenting with a cloud-watches-cloud plus on-premise-watches-on-premise approach.

The 13cR5-PG (Patch Group) 6 updates to the OEM family, strongly integrate Cloud (off-site, hybrid and on-premise) services providing a seamless way to see all of your resources regardless of where they are deployed.

PG6 adds enhancements for EMCLI (Command Line Interface) extensions to allow additional automation and scripting of common OEM tasks (Blackout begin/end, Patch availability monitoring, cloning enhancements.)

The 12c series of Oracle Enterprise Manager products, version 12.1.5.0.x introduced Cloud (both public and private) support for both monitoring, and lifecycle management. This allows individual components, or entire systems to be resident either in-house on conventional hardware/VM's, or ported into virtualized datacenter environments, off-site, whether for fault tolerance and disaster recovery, or simply to reduce the cost of non-Production systems by using a pay-to-play methodology (reducing investment in specific hardware just to support disposable and transitional software systems development?) Consolidated and uniform monitoring of all Oracle-related technologies. Ability to enable centralized control and administration of Oracle products from a single console. Ability to see at a glance, all conditions of all products throughout the enterprise. Version 13c includes hybrid cloud support making transparent the transfer of provisioning systems between Oracle's Cloud and on-premise equipment. All of the cloud systems and in-house systems appear in logical groups according to their common function (Applications, Middleware, Databases, etc.) The configurations are also snapshot-friendly and made comparable to quickly isolate differences between similar systems.

In the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) based Oracle Observability and Management OAM (formerly Oracle Management Cloud (OMC)) 1.53.0 you have many subscription-based options, like Log Analytics and Application Performance Management that you can activate quickly, try them on for size, and keep them or decomission them for relatively less cost and time than doing so, on-premises. These features also avail you access to technologies requiring higher horsepower (CPU/RAM/etc.) found in the OCI Exadata-based Virtual Machines (VMs) that may be beyond your current investment level. Newly added features, include Java deployment central administration, logging analytics, 21c and 23c compatibility, and  enhancements for the new cloud service extensions.

Continued development of the Cloud Management suite has integrated further dynamic container and vCPU management options to the cost management side of the Integrated Lights-Out features of the cloud service providing better management of your capacity planning, and thus cost mitigation.

Reporting and statistical charting is largely still left up the end-user to develop custom solutions. The newest releases support reporting through the Cloud Analytics, SaaS service. Reliance upon BI Publisher will eventually be depreciated. The actual product inventory discovery and configuration process has improved, but is still fairly convoluted and requires multiple pre-requisite setup steps to be completed, requiring numerous Cancel, Go back and set something else up, then Return to the process you were performing types of process flows. It works really well if all the technology stack layers are current releases, but the more heterogeneous the architecture is, the more you will spend more time configuring outlying systems, or systems that aren't quite up-to-date.

The OAM array of offerings is quite numerous, so when you first try to navigate the menu offerings, you'll experience 7 to 10 layers of click-throughs to find what you may be looking for in the mass number of options. There is currently a hybrid UI between the Cloud Classic menus and the revised OCI v2.0 menus that has many duplicates, but are found using different navigation paths, which can be confusing. While the main dashboards are fairly clear, there are often click-throughs that lead you down not so clear breadcrumb trails during your navigation. One thing that is particularly annoying is when a Cloud Management component itself fails (such as a Cloud Agent, or a discovery job) you will still need a 2nd monitoring system, such as OEM to watch for the failed Cloud service target. Sometimes simple operations like checking for a failed backup set in OAM are not at all straight-forward and need to be programmed individually by the customer, rather than being available as a simple template to be activated, as expected.

More than 15years.

During upgrades, plugins take on 2 different architectures - some are built as standard WebLogic composites, allowing hot upgrades and installation (meaning you don't have to have an outage for the OEM Management System (OMS) in order to complete the installation. Others are more complex requiring specific outage windows during which time the OMS will not be able to monitor targets (often the OEM Agents are still operating, and collecting information, but you need to develop standalone OS-based alerting on the individual boxes to leverage an individual Agent's ability to provide outage notifications when the OMS is down.) These OMS-downtime upgrades and installations can also be the most prone to potential failure during installation requiring complete system rollback to a backup point.

OAM is updated frequently and only incurs momentary downtime when sortware homes are being switched between pre- and post-patch versions. Agent patching is similar to on-premise, requiring no downtime.

Both on-premise and OMC are scalable vertically and horizontally; you would just include the licensing costs of high-availability for both the middle-tier and database layers (or number oF VMs for clustering) and the added storage or incremental costs to include additional targets or resiliency.

Customer Service:

7 of 10 for customer service (often various contacts are disconnected from each other communication-wise regarding the profile and installation data of customers).

Technical Support:

8 of 10 for technical support (My Oracle Support is well-integrated into the OEM platform and guides the user quickly to relevant solutions.)

Neutral

Previously used prior release of OEM (version 9.2.0.6) - these older versions are no longer supported by Oracle, and are prone to many security, stability and incompatibility issues with most newer product releases (for example, 10g (10.2.0.x) is the only client still capable of backwards-compatible connections to 9i and 8i databases, and also forwardly compatible to 11g and 12c databases - but it is not supported anymore, patch or bugfix-wise.)

Straight-forward - the basic deployment simply requires an adequately sized and certified hardware platform with sufficient storage to hold the software, and database repository, and sufficient CPU to run a web-based application based upon the number of potential monitored targets and users.

OAM is a little different in that there are a number of security-related prerequisites to enable the OAM side to communicate securely with the OCI VMs being monitored.  All of the process, though lengthy, is reasonably documented, and typical of Oracle documentation, a little fragmented and jumps around a bit.

In-house implemented. 3 days from initial download to production operation.

The typical acquisition and year-to-year support maintenance costs equate roughly to a person-year of a typical DBA. You can expect that given the ability of the existing staff to either become more precise and strategic at preventing issues from arising without adding additional staff, makes this an easy pitch. e.g. You could either add 3 additional dedicated DBA's whose job is to login and monitor every application in a typical 4-5 major application environment (EBS, HR, BI, Webapps, Mobile, SOA, etc.) 24x7, or you can install OEM and configure it to provide the requisite alerts and projection reports needed to ensure the same SLA requirements, without adding staff.

Based upon 3 days of implementation by a single person, plus licensing costs would be approximately $60,000, including the virtualized hosts. Day-to-day is very roughly $100 for routine patching and maintenance. High-availability significantly may double or even triple these expenditures, but for some environments that's inevitable. If one system needs that level of oversight, then all of the infrastructure will be managed to the same level of oversight by OEM. There is also an augmented set of separate, but useful features being added under the Oracle Management Cloud suite of products designed to focus more on analytical problem identification (such as when one issue triggers a seemingly unrelated set of other symptoms) and leverages the power of mass target data agglomeration at the expense of having costs driven by the volume of data being recorded. But this is typical of most cloud-based solutions, where bandwidth utilization is a cost driver.

Oracle Management Cloud is basically a VM environment spun up in the region containing your systems to be monitored and managed. Oracle do not support cross-region management using OMC (however, you can do that with additional plugins to OEM on-premise) so if you run VMs actively in more than one region, you'll end up with multiple OMC systems, and the associated costs.  Be aware, you are charged in many different levels, but mostly to license the product itself, the cost and storage to run the VM, and then storage to injest and store however much logging and data you want to retain for the puposes of monitoring, troubleshooting, auditing, and forecasting growth. This is quite different from on-premise monitoring costs which usually are limted to a base license, plus support subscriptions, and then incremental spends for increasing base storage for the hosts. It's best to proceed slowly and incrementally when adding systems to OAM to monitor, so you can baseline and measure how much each system costs in-total to monitor, and determine what level you want to monitor each system (Enterprise and Standard monitoring templates are available and can be dynamically switched for each system, or the whole OAM target inventory.)

ELK, HP OpenView, BMC Patrol

Analyze your daily monitoring and service intervention needs, based upon the available (or target) headcount, otherwise you may find yourself inundated with more alerts and notifications than can actually be handled by your staff. Don't just turn on all the alerting and notifications out of the box. Start with what you know you want and are capable of responding to, and closing effectively. Enable those. Then work outwards towards the nice-to-know, or discovery alerts.

Currently, depending on your implementation and use timeframe, you may also want to evaluate the Oracle Observability and Management Cloud solutions, which are similar, but different in that they employ a pay-as-you-go approach to the monitoring and management cycle. The On-Premise OEM solution works best for dynamically growing environments (that tend to get bigger and bigger over time) or for stable complex environments that will be in-place for the next 10 or more years.

Web services and environment status by ping service and SOAP & Restful web service request. check on JVM and other transaction monitoring.

This product helps to reach the cause of an outage or unstable system in production and in handling such situations. It provides an easy way to reach the root cause of the problem and to resolve it asap. It helps in CPU utilization monitoring as well as thread and memory management.it helps in building emergency respond team for monitoring team. At some point monitoring team does not need to engage operation team as feature like restart of server can done through this tool.

Max use was server monitoring and operations of applications. This helps handling of critical situations in a production and support for the customers.

Customization for double secure / nonce based / token based Business Transaction Management. Where you can monitor DB calls as well as Web service calls under firewall.

One to four years. 

No

Yes... sometimes it does not trigger an alert in case of an issue. Trying to fix it with custom build changes.

Customer Service:

2 on a scale of 1 to 5 (1=worst , 5=best)

Technical Support:

2 on a scale of 1 to 5 (1=worst, 5=best)

Neutral

We still have t-mart alert system. We switched to this one to monitor systems in detail. T-mart alert is just a replication of a user's behavior which does not show the cause of the issue.

Straightforward with all necessary steps mention in the online documentation.

Together as a one team. 3 on a scale of 5.

License version..does not cost too much due to license and agreement between vendor and company.

No. We use other Oracle products like Java, Weblogic Portal, Weblogic Server, Sun One web servers, Solaris servers and Linux.

If you have a license contract with Oracle and if you have a lifetime agreement on service on any product from Oracle, then this product is worth using. Otherwise, it's best to explore the option of using an open-source product. Not worth it for start-up companies.

We use the solution for database repositories. The use cases depend on the applications. We can't use Oracle at the back end if our application does not support Oracle. Our company moved us from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server. The use cases of sales and distribution are very different from manufacturing.

It is a good solution. It is the best database management system.

The deployment is not straightforward.

I have been using the solution since 1997.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. We have around 700 users. We do not have plans to increase the usage.

We must undergo some training to deploy the product. The time taken for deployment depends on what we are deploying. If it is a green system, it will take a lot of time. If it is a single node, it will take less. The configuration is different.

We work mostly with partners.

The product is very expensive.

I would not recommend the solution because of its price. Otherwise, it is good. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We have 200+ databases and monitoring that number of databases without using a enterprise tool would involve a tremendous amount of manual work. Furthermore, early notification about databases and operating system alerts helps our DBA team in fixing the issue before there is any major impact on the business.

Database performance monitoring, dashboards, databases management and Dataguard setup and monitoring are the features that I like the most.
BI Publisher is another cool feature to generate customized reports.

Middleware (weblogic) has some bugs and crashes occur which should be fixed to make OEM more productive.

This

I have been using OEM for 6+ years

We were using custom build application to monitor the systems but this product provides more functionality and GUI interface.

We have an enterprise Corporate License so cost is not an issue.

We checked Quest software (Spotlight and Toad) however we found OEM to be more productive.

I feel that this a 5 star product because of how easy it is to configure and the vast features that are available.