Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

• Managing databases via groups
• Running AWR and ADDM reports is simple and quick.
• Performance graphs are good to share with application teams and database users.

Warnings and alerts are sent to the primary DBA.  Primary DBAs address the alerts in a timely manner, instead of waiting for it to become an issue.

Performance tuning tools need improvement.  

We have been using this for five years.

The system has minimal issues with stability. The system has about 1500 databases currently.

There are no issues with scalability. the system is stable with about 1500 databases.

The software was acquired as part of merger.

Software was acquired via a merger and was already online. Our databases were added to the system.

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.

I have mainly used it for management, monitoring and tuning for Oracle databases.

We manage and monitor many databases for customers (some customers have a few hundred databases) and OEM is extremely helpful in performing operations for monitoring and management from one single place. Setting up various jobs including RMAN backups is extremely helpful via OEM. We also use features such as corrective actions, where we can ask OEM to take appropriate corrective actions when an event occurs in the middle of the night.

I have been using OEM 13c which is their latest release and I would have expected that the product would have been more stable and should not have bugs for very simple things like CPU utilisation or amount of physical memory on Linux hosts. These are very fundamental metrics to monitor and should not be an issue. These are not a new features and I would have expected a much better release of the product.

I have been using OEM since 2002.

I have deployed OEM 11g and 12c in High availability mode and was not too complicated to implement. I have not tried HA with 13c. However, installation for all the releases have been fine.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

To me its like a lottery, if I am lucky I get a support engineer who knows what they are talking but many a times you get someone who just keeps asking very fundamental questions until you have to ask on duty manger to be involved and have the SR escalated. But I guess, it is the same across any other vendor.

I have used custom scripts and still do use it for standard edition of databases where OEM cannot be used. However, I prefer to use OEM wherever possible.

Although custom scripts might be easy to setup, the issue is when the person who wrote the scripts leaves an organisation, all the knowledge walks out as well.

Like any product, it is best that the implementation is done by someone who understands it well, whether done in-house or by third party. It saves a lot in long run and you know that its done right.

For any Enterprise edition database customer, I highly recommend that they should implement OEM and at a minimum purchase license for Diagnostic and Tuning pack for database. Amount of time required to perform many activities such as tuning and diagnostics pays off.

Do it once and do it right.

I manage a team of Customer Care and Billing Support Administrators. Earlier in our implementation when we were not quite stable we had to request assistance from our DBAs to troubleshoot performance of our databases. We eventually convinced them that it would be to their advantage to provide us with read only access to the graphs and to run AWR reports in OEM so we could troubleshoot ourselves. We actively monitor the databases and can get ahead of any issues. We are also making preparations for using OEM with Oracle Utilities Application Management which will provide application monitoring through OEM.

We definitely get ahead of issues before they become severe.

The reports are very busy. Once you understand the information it was great, but initially it was not very user friendly.

Five years.

No problems.

No issues.

None.

Good.

Good.

No.

The most valuable feature is that it is very easy for the novice DBA to drill down and find problems that might otherwise be difficult to find.

It has helped developers and novice DBAs drill down and find the cause for problems. There are two pieces. One, it allows people to pinpoint issues easily, and then drill down and get more details of the issue. Previously, this used to be a skillset in the hands of a very few people, but now virtually anybody can do it. Even if they can't fix the actual problem, they could filter down a lot of the issues, and get only the relevant information, which is helping us.

I probably would like to see better SQL tuning advisors that are built into the product. When you know the issue, rather than just pinpoint it, if it could also give you a solution that might work, I think that would help the product.

There are a few things on the wish list. We would hope that it makes some predictions of what we could fix and also the resources for printing that it takes. In some cases, it is not available when we need it the most.

It is mostly stable, but we have found some issues when we are having resource contention or CPU issues. It is not easy to bring up the product because it is a bit of a resource hog. Sometimes when you need it the most, that is when you find it missing, but those are rare and far between.

It is a very scalable product. No complaints there. We use it for hundreds of databases and it grows.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would probably give Oracle tech support somewhere between a 6 and a 7. Often, when you know what the issue is, there is a lot of collecting data for root cause which we might have provided just the previous day. We find ramp up is a bit of a waste of time before we can actually get a solution.

We were covered by the Oracle enterprise license agreement and it made more sense for us to go with this product as opposed to looking for another one. They have had it for a very long time.

It is a very straightforward setup and also we had help from Oracle as part of our enterprise license agreement with my company. They helped set it up and it has been working pretty well.

It was an easy choice. The Oracle Enterprise Manager is pretty well known and I don't think anything else, an external product, matches or comes even close.

Look at the reputation and the size of the company. These products are often very expensive. It is better to go with someone who has been around for a long time and who would continue to be in business, as opposed to flavor-of-the-month products.

When I am looking at a vendor such as Oracle, the most important criteria that I am looking for from them are market reputation, the scale of the company, and the stability.

I've used the solution for monitoring. It looks at if something is slow, which processes are taking the most resources, if it's up or if it's down, et cetera. 

I like how you can drill down to a problem, like which specific query is causing the most workloads, which user has issued that query, what's taking up the most resources, et cetera. 

It's easy to implement as it's made by Oracle for Oracle. Yeah. It's very insightful when it comes to what you can check healthwise on a database. 

Technical support could be faster. 

I've been using the solution for three years. 

It's fairly stable. It doesn't disappoint. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product is scalable in terms of how much better business you can monitor. You can really just keep adding them.

I know of six users of the solution in our organization. That said, I am sure we can add more if we need others. If we add new employees, we will increase usage. 

Technical support is good. That said, they take a lot of time before they start acting upon an issue. 

I did not handle the initial setup of the solution. 

That said, I understand that it is simple to implement. 

I can't speak to the deployment or how long it took. 

The entire implementation was done in-house. 

There is a license that is required, however, I cannot speak to the exact cost.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. We are quite satisfied with its capabilities. 

Database Management, SQL Tuning, Performance Management, SQL Monitoring, Performance Tuning Pack, SQL Diagnostic Pack, ADDM, AWR, and real time SQL monitoring.

it would be helpful if OEM is integrated with OBIEE reports and free report viewer without a license.

We have been using the overall OEM for over eight years.

There were no deployment issues.

We used DBArtisan, Embarcadero technologies, and Quest tools.

You can get a healthful overview of all your targets in one snapshot in Enterprise Manager. You can see what's up or what's down and then take corrective action. It's a valuable tool for an admin like me.

Another feature of the Enterprise Manager is a plug-in, which crosses multiple teams. I've seen multiple teams coming to us and then asking for the tools to be deployed for their team. It's a cross-team effort, which streamlines a lot of things in terms of monitoring.

Also, since it's an Oracle-based product, it can talk to the Oracle-related products very well. The plug-in extension extends the functionality. I see a lot of benefits in terms of monitoring costing less effort; streamlining the monitoring has helped.

There are functional areas were you have extensions. Those extensions, or plug-ins, are one way to incorporate more products.

There are extensions that are available.

It's too early to know about stability, because right now we have 12c and we're looking to go to 13c.

We'll see what we can do in terms of scalability and operational deployment. We are still evaluating it. We're working with Oracle on that.

We're fortunate to have direct access to the product managers and the product support managers. They have been on our case for Enterprise Manager deployment.

It was already deployed to some extent when I entered into the team. I'm extending the deployment with the other team members. We did have some hiccups in working with Oracle.

At our company, we have multiple monitoring tools, so we do look at Precise as one other tool. There are a couple of other homegrown tools also. We'll be evaluating against all them next.

I didn’t choose Oracle. It was already picked for me.

PoC is a good starting point. It doesn't hurt to have a PoC and have some of the environmental test or something monitored by that environment. You learn from that. Then you take the best practices, which are already there from the various laws and Oracle published notes and you incorporate that. It's not hard.