Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

I think the neatest, most valuable feature of Enterprise Manager (OEM) is that single pane of glass for the whole stack, that it gives me as an admin the ability to look all the way up from my storage all the way up to the application tier.

There's a lot of benefits to Enterprise Manager. From the monitoring capabilities is that single pane of glass. It's being able to look at an application and then look at the database component. Look at the storage component on it from a monitoring, troubleshooting. Once you understand what the pain point is, you can easily automate it through thresholds and events, where you get notifications or tickets opened when you see a similar behavior. But, It's not just the ability to monitor, it's the ability for actual change. I can use Enterprise Manager to actually install Bare Metal systems. I can use Enterprise Manager for all my database, to deploy new database instances, or deploy WebLogic instances. That's the value is it's that single pane of glass for the whole enterprise.

What I would love to see in Enterprise Manager is more support for the hardware, more support for Bare Metal. Right now I can do Bare Metal deployments with Linux and OVM and that's an awesome capability, but I would love to see more functionality with Solaris. I'd also see more change functionality in Enterprise Manager. It's a great tool for monitoring an ODA, Oracle Database Appliance, but it doesn't let me change the database appliance, as an example.

I have been using 12 and 13 since they came out.

A few, but usually due to errors on my part

Stability on 13c has been fairly good. I haven't had any major issues with 13c where it's panic for no reason and just gone dead or anything like that. In 12, again, didn't really have any major stability issues there of it panicking or blowing up.

Scalability for an Enterprise Management system, it does scale well. Both 12 and 13 scale well for high availability as well as for handling more agents, more targets.

Great, the three times I have needed to open a ticket!

Oracle's tech support for OEM is fairly good. Again, I've been using OEM heavily since 12 was released, I think four years ago now. I've had to open up, I think, three tickets since I've really been using it, so it's been a very low volume of tickets.

Generally, with Enterprise Manager, the question is when do you decide to use it. My thought is if you're running an Oracle product and you want to enterprise great IT, you need to use it from day one.

From just the monitoring and the provisioning, just all the capabilities of it, it saves you a lot of time. It simplifies a lot of the workload you do day-to-day in an IT shop.

Very easy for the initial setup, up and running in afternoon

The initial setup on Enterprise Manager is fairly straightforward. Actually, on my own personal blog, I blog step-by-step - installing the database, installing the OMS, it takes a couple hours, depending on the speed of disc, but it's fairly straightforward.

OEM helps with the license complexity, you can ask it for each page what licenses are needed, and it can also report on all your license consumption

Enterprise Manager, I'd probably rate it a nine and a half. If you're not running it, install it and run it.

We are using this solution to record our employee's information and all of the daily on-site activity.

The most valuable features are security and speed.

The user interface is not very interactive. It needs improvement.

We have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

We are not using the latest version, but it's not that old. 

Currently, the newest version is 19C and we are using 11G.

Oracle Enterprise Manage is stable.

It's a scalable product.

We have approximately 500 users in our organization.

Currently, we do not have any technical support. 

Technical support is needed.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The user manual is very good and it is very easy to install.

Deployment times vary depending on the features that you want to include. 

If you want to include only the regular features of Oracle, then it will take 35 minutes, and less than an hour if you want to include some more options.

Two engineers are more than sufficient to maintain this solution.

We completed the setup, deployment, and implementation ourselves.

There is only the standard licensing fee. There are no other costs.

We will continue to use this solution.

For any organization that wants a reliable or secure system, this is the product to go with.

I would rate Oracle Enterprise Manager a seven out of ten.

I think the look and feel and the accessibility to the databases, the scale of environment support. Ours is basically like a hosting company and we have a thousand databases and the way you can get to the metrics, quickly figure out the ETA to fix a problem, these are the things that I love.

As I said, ours is a hosting company. We host a lot of customer environments in our data center and pretty much the alerting mechanism and the deviates stay on top of things with using the ... applying patches, for example.

We can do things on the fly and templates and the monitoring, the way the alerts kick in. We can pretty much make generic and customize based on customer needs and it takes less deviate time I would say, even down time or when you want to set those blackouts when you are working without the teams. It is pretty straightforward.

I think maybe we have to streamline further. It is just that everything out of the box. It is not really...

We could use it but definitely with some effort we can streamline much better and sometimes some box here and there, like 13C you have to really wait, but there are great features. Just have to make sure it is a stable product.

No.

No.

Yeah, sometimes we see little things that are getting dragged with Oracle support and all that. I think overall they are fine.

I think training is not required unless you are really low rating all the great features. I would recommend getting them certified, OEM certification, 12C certification. That would help.

Quest products is one that I can think of.

Quest I don't think looks it at such a larger scale and we integrated Oracle's OEM service now and that also helps us. We liked the internal views which pretty much covers all the environments, also the OEM internal which captures the database. We call that database repository.

I would definitely recommend it. Yeah, just get the stable product right now, 12C, and probably 6 months down the line I could even recommend 13C.

Both OS and Hardware Management, Network Boot, Server Pools, and Live migration of LDOMs over Server Pool are Ops Center's most valuable features to me.

It helps a lot in data center consolidation, P2V, and with LDOM live migration. It reduces overall required downtime and is highly scalable, especially with T5 architecture.

The monitoring feature should be improved, so that it may be used as a dependable monitoring solution, as well as a deployment solution for SPARC-based hardware and operating systems.

I have used the product for three years.

No, I didn’t encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

I will rate technical support at 9.

I have had the opportunity to work with various other UNIX as well as Linux systems, but among all of them, I found Solaris to be a very stable operating system. Now with the evolution of LDOMs, ZFS and zones, it’s providing a perfect platform for virtualization solutions.

To me installation doesn’t seem complex, but at the same time comprehensive understanding of technology is required.

We performed implementation ourselves, except some time when we requested Oracle’s professional services.

I recommend Oracle solutions like T5 Super-Cluster, T5-8 and Oracle Solaris 11 operating systems, as they are highly scalable and fault-tolerant systems.

OEM gives me, as the DBA, a very graphical representation of what's going on with my Oracle footprint, and it's very quick to display to me where I would have issues and where I can correct them. This gives me the capability to see when there are issues happening, which means that I can actually act on the issues pretty quickly before it becomes apparent to the business that there is something going on within the database, that could, for example, have a negative effect on their ability to get a drug out the door.

From my point of view, I've found OEM to be one of the easier products to deal with. It's the product that I use day in daily to view all of my databases, and the fact that I can actually integrate multiple databases and multiple middleware solutions into one single point is perfect for me, so I'm really happy with it.

The features that I'd want to use in Enterprise Manager would be in and around the diagnostics and tuning area of the database. Again, that is an additional license. Whilst I can get Enterprise Manager, I can do certain things with it, the really, really high-value part of Enterprise Manager requires additional licenses. So I'd like to see more advanced functionalities that, frankly, don't require us to spend more money.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's been very stable. I don't recall any big issues with stability.

We've been able to scale it as needed.

It was a very, very complicated product to set up. We initially used it with Oracle Single Sign-On to link Microsoft Active Directory to our E-Business Suite instance. It was difficult to set up, and actually now we've migrated to Oracle Access Manager with Identity Manager, and it's even more complicated. 

Oracle Access Manager is a product that Oracle has brought in. They've took over a company which had their own identity management solution. They took it over and re-labelled it, re-branded it to be their product. We had a few enhancements in it, but when they released it is was absolutely full of bugs, and, actually really, really complicated to set up. 

Later releases and scripts is what have made it a little bit easier, but I would like Oracle before they put these products out to the market, to invest some time in making them easier to set up.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

Read the documentation, because we found and still find it extremely complicated to bind the latest versions of the database into Enterprise Manager. It was much easier in earlier versions, but much more complicated now.

We use this solution to monitor the server, looking at the system, and maintaining it.

I like that it's stable.

I would like to see better pricing.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution.

It's a scalable product. We have approximately seven users in our organization.

We have plans to continue using this solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

We are using Ruckus.

I was not involved in the maintenance.

We have a team of five to maintain this solution.

It's expensive.

We are paying on a yearly basis, but we are currently negotiating for a new license.

We are currently evaluating software such as Eggplant. 

We like Tosca, but we never received a response.

We are also looking into the Robot Framework.

Other than being costly, it works.

I would rate Oracle Enterprise Manager a seven out of ten.

The most valuable is when a client calls us to tell us the performance is really bad, I can quickly go on to OEM and see which SQL is causing the problem. I can drill down. I can quickly apply a profile to that SQL. The only drawback that I don't really like about that is they have to restart their job at the gate. The equipment profile doesn't take affect right away. You have to stop it, and you have to restart it. Other than that, it's fantastic. If they're able to stop it, you tell them to stop it. If not, you have to wait until tomorrow, where you'll see a better performance.

It's very quick, it's very easy to use. Considering the old AWR reports, which are still out there, you can get an AWR report at that particular time in OEM. OEM does data guard; you can set it up. They had a session at a conference I went to. They had the old DBA, which is like me, and the young DBA, which they used Justin Bieber. They were using the OEM, and the old DBA was still using their scripts. They were showing that the young DBA, which had no experience in Oracle whatsoever, was able to troubleshoot the problem much quicker than the old DBA who was running all his old scripts to figure out what the problem was. That's one of the things I really like about it.

Another thing is that you're able to see all your databases. Right now, we have 13 databases, so I can quickly monitor any of the 13 databases.

As I’ve mentioned, the biggest benefit is being able to pinpoint a performance issue very quickly, and be able to react to it very quickly.

One of the things I'd like to see is for profiles to be dynamic. That would be really great, where you don't have to tell the user, "Stop whatever you're doing and restart your job." To me, that would be highest on my list of improvements.

One of the drawbacks that I don't like is, quite often you'll see that the agent will show a status of Pending. When you try to refresh it, it'll stay Pending, which is kind of weird because you can still connect there. I did some Googling and it looks like there's a little issue there, where the agents aren't always up-to-date. Sometimes you have to go and stop the agents and restart the agents.

Other than that, I love the product.

The product is very stable. The only thing that I find is that the agent isn't that stable. Even though the agent doesn't seem to be stable, you're still able to connect. I don't know why, but you are.

I never used OEM before I started with Dynamite. Being with IBM, it was more like a contract we were being sent out on, so it was a different type of environment. It wasn't a performance tool, it was more building the databases and then walking away. OEM didn't come into the picture. Being with Dynamite, it's completely different.

I would give the same advice that I saw at the conference, with the old DBA and the young person that had no clue of what was going on behind the scenes of that database. How that young person, with a little bit of knowledge, was able to resolve an issue a lot quicker than the older person with all their fancy scripts.

Right now, we're at the very same version of OEM, so we haven't changed anything. Our company is very difficult when it comes to change. They've got a mindset that if it's not broken, don't fix it. They always look at us, especially IT, as an expense. Enterprise Manager Express really looks very interesting, and I really would like to try to push that. We'll see how well that flies, money-wise.

I really like the product, but there are some issues that need to be resolved. We're at version 12, and I believe there's a new 13c out, which probably has a lot of those issues fixed.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as Oracle or IBM, support has to be the number one criteria.

We use Enterprise Manager for databases.

We haven't used Enterprise Manager for very long. We mostly work with another solution.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager eight out of 10 for stability.

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager eight out of 10 for scalability.

Installing Enterprise Manager is complex. The time needed to deploy it varies depending on the environment. 

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager six out of 10 for affordability. It's expensive. 

I rate Oracle Enterprise Manager seven out of 10 overall.