Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that helps to asess the load on a database, and determine when and where to take action. Performance Insights helps non-experts to detect performance problems with a dashboard that visualizes database load. Performance Insights uses lightweight data collection methods that don’t impact the performance of your applications, and makes it easy to see which SQL statements are causing…
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Oracle Enterprise Manager
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Oracle’s Enterprise Manager is an on-premises monitoring and management tool. The console is designed primarily to manage other Oracle products, it but can integrate to manage non-Oracle components as well.
When you need to monitor your database at low level metrics such as query load or CPU usage at some point in time. You can also use it to understand which component is a heavy load on your DB. It is a great tool for routine monitoring of your DB and to help plan for capacity. I would not use it as an exclusive source for scaling your DB though since the is not long-term or very granular data to be able to run a thorough analysis on peaks of predictive analysis.
OEM is very well suited for all Oracle products, especially Oracle databases and Exadata machines; even not Oracle hardware, it is very good and displaying high level details. OEM is not well suited for older hardware vendors like AIX, HP-UX, DEC/Digital, Microsoft (sql server). This is a big negative as most large companies have a heterogeneous environment with many different vendor hardware and (database) software products.
Monitoring Templates: There are out of box monitoring templates for each target types, you can customize them or use them as it is.
Administrative Groups: This is a relatively new feature in OEM Cloud Control. This lets you create and manage your targets and monitoring templates smarter and with less re-work.
DB Monitoring: There are so many cool DB monitoring features and visual graphics, that it can be used by both DBA and functional people to see what's going on in the database.
Bugs. Every version we upgrade to has a number of bugs. Some stop us from rolling to production OEM (we have a sandbox OEM), some are simply annoying. If I could improve on one thing, it would be for better QA from oracle before releasing each version.
Flash. I'm told that they are moving from Flash to Jet in version 13.3 and beyond (we are on 13.2 currently). That change cannot come soon enough. The OEM pages load SO slowly due to Flash.
Hierarchy Groups. OEM allows five Hierarchy groups. A Hierarchy group allows a top down metric/rule roll out. However, they limit you to five. I'd like to see them open that up, so that we can have any number of custom groups.
It's great! It does everything and anything you would want it to do. It can monitor things which doesn't comes out of the box by adding plug ins to it, for example, you can even monitor Oracle GoldenGate Replication by adding a plug-in to OEM Cloud Control.
I still rate OEM as a must-have tool for central management of Oracle fleet. The pros and cons of the product is prominent. Meanwhile, I also acknowledge that OEM was design about a decade ago. At that time, it did not have the landscape we have today, such as cloud, DEVOPS, machine learning, etc. I hope in future releases, the design will incorporate those features.
Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a out of the box plug and use solution for AWS with a press of a button, whereas Prometheus would require a lot of configuration and deployment and the learning curve is slower, making it not so user friendly. Datadog on the other hand offers similar capabilities but at a much higher cost. With that in mind, Amazon RDS Performance Insights is the choice to integrate with your AWS services quickly and affordably.
Being an Oracle shop using Oracle Database and MySQL, management console from Oracle was a better choice than IBM or Microsoft even though we do use Microsoft Azure and storage/servers from IBM (on-prem).
We are a 7x24 shop. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control helps us meet that objective by proactively warning us before issues cause down time. Things like disk space, archive log issues or temporary table space issues.
Spreading the use of this tool outside of the DBA group has allowed us to not hire additional personnel for those teams. Over time, as folks have retired from our operations team, we are not replacing them. Instead we have used OEM Cloud Control to automate tasks.
We also now have the tools to measure up-time by using specific measurements inside of OEM. This allows us to report real numbers to management.
