Oracle Enterprise Manager Reviews

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 most valuable features are the Metric Extensions & Advanced Threshold management.

Metric Extensions

• Extend Oracle's monitoring capabilities to monitor conditions specific to your IT environment
• Provides a comprehensive view of your environment
• Create metrics on any target type
• Can be defined on any target:
  • Hosts
  • Databases
  • Fusion applications
  • BI components…

EM is a one-stop shop used to manage and monitor the entire Oracle E-Business Suite, BI and EPM infrastructure in our company. So, in our BI environment, we wanted to run a script to kill sessions which are running over 60 minutes and wanted to track and tune those sessions. We used Metric Extensions for the same.

Advanced Thresholds allow you to define and manage alert thresholds that are either adaptive (self-adjusting) or time-based (static).

• Adaptive thresholds are thresholds based on statistical calculations from the target's observed behaviour (metrics).
• Time-based static thresholds are user-defined threshold values to be used at different times of the day/week to account for changing target workloads.

We used time-based threshold settings for weekday and weekend load on various environments. This way we could fine tune the alerts for varying loads.

It gives an end-to-end view of our complex IT infrastructure and its health in real-time.

The Adaptive Settings descriptions could be clearer. 95% percentile, etc. is not clearly specified.

I have used it for over five years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

It reduced the number of incidents; we could predict failures.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Quest/Toad, but it did not do end-to-end monitoring across the stack of products.

It is one of the best, state-of-the-art products from Oracle; truly a single pane of glass to manage IT infrastructure.

The performance monitoring is the most valuable feature. We use it for a lot of performance monitoring. It's a good tool. It works well. We use it on a day-to-day basis.

It reduces our downtime; increases our performance. We get to know of any issues coming up before even the users complain about it. We know what's going on in the system using Enterprise Manager.

If it had more drill-down facilities, that would be great. We found that sometimes, if you drill down into certain views, it's slow and it's very costly, so we avoid doing those kinds of things. They need some improvements in that area; to optimize those drill-downs.

It's pretty stable. Once in a while, we do have agents which hang and we have to reboot the agents. But overall, it's pretty stable.

We use it enterprise-wide, so it's pretty scalable. We haven't had any issues.

Usually my team is not the one that looks after technical support, but I'm not sure. We don't support the tool; we just use it.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Go for it. It's very good. It's pretty user-friendly. You just go with the flow. Just click on what you need to see and take it from there. We don't see any specialized training required to use it.

We integrate it with Oracle E-Business Suite and it works fine.

I'm very happy with it.

We haven't fully utilized it yet on a day-to-day basis, but we will put more into it. We do see patching is going to be a big improvement. Day to day, I think we are at 20 percent for now, but that number will increase.

Support definitely can be improved; documentation and support. The documentation is convoluted, very confusing.

I have been using it for four years.

It's stable, so far.

So far, it's okay; it scales.

The support is not good for this product. The enterprise system that I have is kind of complex. Support is very basic; they don't have someone who really is savvy.

Initial setup is okay. It's 50/50.

My company choose to use this product because I can see that it's going to be more aligned with the technology, with the cloud. It's more robust, and we can see it's going to be an essential product for IT.

When I’m deciding whether to work with a vendor such as Oracle, I look for kind of a mix that includes reliability and strategic too: How does it fit into the enterprise system?

I recommend Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single pane of control that gives you the visibility to see all Oracle products, plus the non-Oracle products; hardware, software, middleware. It covers it all.

The benefits to my organization are with administration, plus it centralizes your control.

There are a lot of plugins. I would like to see more and more plugins for different software. Most of them are third-party software. If Oracle Enterprise Manager could provide a standard web service to interface with any application, that would be ideal.

I don't think anybody can walk on water. Software is buggy and that's the nature of the beast.

Stability is excellent now; not so much, before.

Scalability is endless because you can use Oracle technology to expand the back end and also use Oracle technology to expand the front end.

Technical support is very helpful. They were efficient. Usually, Oracle support is very good.

We previously used vendor-specific monitoring or control systems to administer different type of resources; hardware, software. OEM gives me the ability to expand that by putting everything under one control console.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was pretty straightforward. Over the years, they have even simplified a lot of processes. Before, you had to install this and that, but now it's just one single installation that does it all.

For me, choosing this solution was a no-brainer because we are an Oracle shop. From having all different types of vendors for hardware and software, we are gradually becoming an Oracle shop.

Try to understand what OEM can do for you. Exploit it and its feature set. For example, I can modify the back-end storage through OEM. I don't have to go to my ZS4 console to see how much space I have, how to administer it, or how to allocate storage space to a particular project. I can do that through OEM. That's the power of having a single pane for control.

When I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle, support is the most important criteria. Over the years, Oracle product has improved the stability, so that the most important thing now is how fast they can provide solutions when I need their help. That's the most important thing.

What makes it valuable is that we have one single pane that we can access to get all of our information and be proactive, whether it's Oracle Database, SQL Server, MySQL, or whatever, even host related.

Every release, they seem to move the navigation and you have to retrain your entire DBA staff. Maybe the user interface could be more consistent between releases. For every minor and major release, it usually jumps around all over the place.

We've been using it for quite a while, probably since 11g and a little bit before that; so, for 6, 7 years or more.

I think it’s stable. Every once in a while, it's kind of buggy, but for what it is, it's pretty good.

So far, it has been scalable. I think it's going to meet our needs moving forward.

For the most part, depending on who you get, technical support usually is good. Sometimes, it's hit or miss, but it depends on who you get those first few times.

For initial setup, you actually have to have some experience. If you don't, it can get a little tricky. I got a lot of gotchas. Even if you read the instruction manuals, the documentation, there are still things that you need to be looking out for.

I think it provides value for the money. It definitely helps us be proactive in our database administrating. We don't have to spend time reacting to everything. We can find out where the problem is before our customer even realizes they have a problem.

Look into OEM, especially if you have a lot of databases that you want to monitor, or other products. It provides a single pane of information that you can use, and drill down capabilities to find exact problems.

When I select a vendor such as Oracle to work with, I look for them to be reliable, provide value and so on.

The most valuable feature is the automation of the alerting. We can be proactive when we use that program instead of being called in the middle of the night because something’s wrong. You get the alert and the warning before. You can customize every threshold to meet your needs, and have different settings for different database groups.

The company spends less money over time because we are not working overtime hours at the office.

I would like to see better support for Oracle GoldenGate. Right now, it doesn't work well with Oracle GoldenGate. You still have to use GoldenGate monitor if you want to take advantage of the product.

There are some bugs and often we cannot debug the product right there and we have to reconfigure some things. It does the job, as long as you don't encounter a bug.

The stability's not so bad. It's a stable product, a mature product. When we change versions, there are some problems there.

Scalability's good. We went from two databases to over 250. It's working fine.

We have used technical support many times; it is very bad. We often had to dig down ourselves into the source code to find out why it’s not working on our platform. Every time we conferred about that, it became a little more complicated. Their answer is often to just delete the target, rediscover it and it should be fine.

We were pretty much doing our own thing with an in-house script. Since we were growing fast, we could not continue like that.

Out of the box, initial setup is pretty straightforward: You install it, you discover your target and it monitors them. If you want to go further and do custom monitoring, for example, it can become quite complicated. On the other hand, it's very flexible. That's good.

It's been a long time, so I don't remember which other products we were considering. Probably from the beginning, we were considering Oracle because they let us experiment with it first and we saw that it worked. Also, because we kind of expect our versioning to follow the version of the database.

Go only with the out-of-the-box configuration first. Let it run for a while like that to learn the product. Learn a few things before trying to configure everything in it.

When I’m selecting a vendor, price is a big factor. Licensing is a big factor. It has to do the job we need it for. Those are the most important criteria.

I find it nice that OEM provides a graphical way to manage both our database and E-Business Suite. It's great being able to see that all the information you need is in front of you on the screen. There are links that allow you to kill sessions or to check your performance. With other solutions, you just see numbers go by on a screen.

It helps me do my job as a DBA. Even though I may know how to manage it wth the CLI, I'm much quicker at doing things and identifying problems. Having it running and seeing a spike on the graph lets me know that we have a performance issue, I've got something locked up, and I need to address that proactively instead of being reactive. Sometimes I go to the CLI to get right to the thing quicker, but the graphical interface, again, is nice.

It can be a process hog sometimes. When I do leave it running, the CPU fan kicks on, and I can hear it running. Otherwise, it's a great tool.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's been stable. We haven't had any instability issues to speak of.

It's been scaling just fine. We have no issues scaling it for our needs.

It's easy, very easy to set up. You've got to know what you're doing, but it's not a lot. You've just got to follow the documentation and configure it accordingly.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team. It was pretty straightforward.

Follow the directions as the setup and implementation are all nicely laid out for you.