Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

Provide 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 2,700 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.

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.

We use OEM for managing Production, Test and Development environments. It provides a centralized location for proactively administering all database components with the ability to do much more.

SQL Tuning allows massive performance gains behind the scenes in order to more easily troubleshoot the most complex SQL statements. The use of SQL Profiles and creating SQL Baselines, makes improving SQL performance a less time consuming exercise. We've developed a number of monthly metrics we use to show our customer performance and any potential bottlenecks. In addition, we have set up a number of alerts for quickly addressing potential issues.

SQL Tuning Advisor, ADDM, Top Activity, ASM Space Manager, Incident Notifications. The ability to identify performance bottlenecks and make an immediate impact can serve as a significant contribution to Database Administers which saves time and resources.

Patching. It's extremely difficult to determine what requires patching and the process to patch each component is slightly different. In desperate need of a single patch or a simplified process at a minimum. OEM 13c is out and we have it installed. There seems to be some potential bugs associated with implementing third party certificates and the Tuning Advisor so just something to consider before upgrading. 

One new issue came up recently. We upgraded to 12.2 and went with a container/pdb model for each database. After doing so, some of the functionality gets a little tricky with OEM. For some things you need to be in the PDB to work and for other things you need to be in the cdb$root. You can create SQL Profiles through OEM but dropping them through OEM has become a point in futility. Instead, we are doing more manual SQL Tuning Advisor functional through sqlplus which works well.

More than ten years

OEM is a very stable product.

Scalability is not an issue with OEM. It can support a number of targets and target types without sacrificing performance.

We used cron jobs and custom scripts for some of the capability. However, many of those scripts are no longer necessary.

The initial setup was not too painful with 12.1.0.3 as there's good documentation on it. Earlier versions presented some challenges and sometimes required opening a SR to cut through some of the confusion.

In-house

The initial setup was probably a couple of hours of installation time. Besides applying the quarterly patches which takes 2 - 4 hours (we have two Cloud Control environments) another "cost" is hardware resources on a VM. There are a few bugs with the software which require opening SRs with Oracle Support which contribute to the day-to-day cost. Perhaps 8 hours per month is spent dealing with support, just as a rough guess. I would highly recommend the Tuning and Diagnostic Packs for OEM to greatly aid performance tuning with come with additional licensing fees.

We also have Foglight and AppDynamics in house. Foglight will be going away and from my perspective, it doesn't offer any real value over what Cloud Control can provide. AppDynamics offers some nice capabilities in terms of drill down and identifying bottlenecks. I would say it's better about determining the root cause of a problem especially if the root cause is with the application code. However, if the problem is on the database side, Cloud Control will provide through the Advisors ways of fixing the problem which AppDynamics can not do.

The product is very powerful and should be used to automate more key DBA type tasks. Performance tuning bad SQL becomes extremely simplified as long as you leverage the out of box capabilities and you have purchased the Tuning and Diagnostic Pack. Those are a must have to really take advantage of the capabilities.

The main usage is for monitoring performance, a major part of the software is you can define some virtualization for RAM utilization. You can set up something and then you will start getting alerts which you can do some optimizations from the information.

It is the best monitoring tool for Oracle databases. 

You have full visibility with the tool, it is a complete solution. 

The software is simple to use.

In my experience, the monitoring could be improved. 

If the solution had an auditing feature, I would not look into other software, for example, Imperva or IBM Guardium. These other solutions have an audit feature and monitoring together, this one is strictly monitoring only. Oracle does have a separate product for auditing, which is very expensive.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

It is a very stable product.

We have five administrators that are using the solution, as it is only for administrators.

We have access to the support but the product is really easy to use, we have not needed any help.

The setup was easy, we encountered no problems and it took us only three hours.

We did the implementation ourselves.

The solution is inexpensive to purchase.

I have evaluated Imperva and IBM Guardium. 

I am going to continue to use this product in the future.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager a nine out of ten.

Enterprise Manager is a single window plane of glass which allows one to look into every aspect of the systems deployed in an organization. We use it to mange our internal infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics, Oracle VMs, ERP solutions (such as Oracle Applications and Fusion Middleware, like SOA and AIA), and Oracle Linux servers.

This solution allows us to quickly drill down when there are issues. It helps us monitor solutions both in-house and at our customer premises. We use it extensively for performance tuning testing, monitoring, and configuration.It is also the only tool that can monitr all apects of Exadata , Exalogic and other Oracle engineered systems.

The database performance monitoring features are very useful and allow us to quickly zero in on DB-related issues.Exadata storage server and Infiniband switches can be viewed from the GUi in OEM which cannot be done in other tools . The ability to deploy metric extensions makes this tool extensible for our custom monitoring also.

The product is pretty comprehensive, but quite resource hungry. This might be due to the majority of the application seemingly being written in Java. 

Also, better mobile access would be useful.

More than ten years.

There were some issues with the software due to its resource requirements. Be careful to follow the recommended sizing guidelines.

No issues. It is very scalable. Ther are also comprehensive documents for both HA setup and DR setup. One caution is that for DR setup additional licensing is required.

We have not faced any major issues with the product. Auto deployment may be difficult in certain customer environments due to the firwall port issues but in those cases manula deployment of agents is an acceptable workaround. We originally had some timezone related issues due to the fact that my home timezone changed from Asia/Calcutta to Asia /Kolkata but this is no longer an issue

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only solution which can monitor and drill down into the inner workings of engineered systems, like Exadata and Exalytics. Thus, we had to use this system when we deployed those systems. Being system integrators we work with a wide variety of tools however this tool has very wide support across all of oracles hardware and software.

Setup can be complex depending on the options required. There is a simple express install and a much more elaborate enterprise class setup, which is also possible.

Our in-house team has the capability to implement this (with customers).

This solution was the only one which allows us to monitor all our solutions from one interface. However, the optional packs are expensive, hence your mileage may vary. Please take advice before choosing what exactly to purchase. Remember that the base configuration is free to monitor any Oracle product.

Evaluate your requirements carefully. Elaborate DR and HA setup of OEM can become expensive. 

Be careful to only enable the packs for which you have a license as this is an issue we see time and again. I.e., customers who do not understand the licensing model have not turned off access to packs that they are not licensed for, then get into legal issues for it later.

None of the other options out there have the breadth and depth of this solution. This is the only solution which can drill down to the cell level of an Exadata system. Finally, it has modules available for almost every Oracle product available.

If you are an Oracle shop, or even an Oracle SI, then familiarity with Oracle one stop management solution is an imperative. Everything ties into this solution, so it has become a de facto standard for Oracle-based software given that the base is free to use with Oracle products. There is no downside to deploying this solution in your data center.

Our primary use is for monitoring and management of Oracle products. We are running several Oracle products in our environment.

The product gives us as much control as we can have by providing a complete picture of the whole set of Oracle products. We can monitor all of them.

We would like to have a single dashboard for monitoring and controlling all of our products. This would add value, for us, because as it is now, we have to go to different screens to check different products.

We have been using Oracle Enterprise Manager for about seven years, since 2013.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager is pretty stable and we haven't had any issues.

We have not had to contact technical support for this product because we haven't had any issues. However, if we need to then there is a support portal available.

This product is easy to install and we can complete the deployment in a day, including the agent.

We are satisfied with the pricing.

Overall, I am satisfied with this product. It assists us in finding issues through monitoring services.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for a database.

It's the most reliable database available on the market. 

The tried and tested services that Oracle provides is second to none. 

The solution offers excellent support.

The product is very mature. There are a lot of new upstarts, however, this technology has a long history of quality. While other options may not have many use cases available, Oracle certainly does. They have a wide variety of success stories users can look to.

The solution is considered expensive.

We've been using Oracle for the past five or six years. Some of our customers are on the solution.

The solution is quite stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash.

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to increase usage, it can do so rather easily.

As we deal with many clients, the sizes of the companies vary. I'm not sure how many users each company would have on one solution. Whether they need 100 or 1,000 users, we'll design the system to meet their needs.

Oracle does provide very good technical support. They have company support models available. If you are a license holder, you can raise your ticket in the Oracle site and get support. It's my understanding that our clients are happy with the level of support available to them.

We use a variety of solutions, according to our client's needs, as we are service providers.

The solution can be both complex and straightforward to implement. If you area laptop user, it's very simple. However, when you need to configure it as a production server, then it's a complex.

Typically, it takes about one to five hours to deploy the product. It's not too long.

If you are only using a developer edition, it will take a maximum of 30 minutes to one hour to deploy. If you need to set up your entire production, then it will take at least a couple of days due to the fact that there are a lot of activities that need to be done.

One active professional can handle an Oracle setup. You don't need too many people to implement it.

We have our own in-house team that can handle deployments for our clients.

The solution is quite expensive. It's not the cheapest on the market. Companies will have to pay a fair bit for it. The pricing is core and processor-based. The overall cost largely depends on how many nodes your company needs to deploy.

We're working with the latest version of the solution.

We're on the service industry side of the business. Whatever our clients need we work to accommodate. Whether they prefer an Oracle server or a Microsoft option, we'll work with them to meet their needs. We don't exclusively deal with Oracle. We would never push our clients to use specific technologies. We just suggest options and highlight the features that best apply to their use cases. Then, we simply follow their wishes and deliver on their expectations.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. They're very competitive in the market and very good as a product overall. Our clients are happy with it. If the pricing was a bit lower I might give them a perfect ten out of ten.

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.

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.