Oracle Enterprise Manager vs. Vercara UltraWPM

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.

Incentivized

If you need to gauge whether your site is up or down, then Neustar will give you exactly what you are looking for. However, if you need more granularity for specific application or sub-systems and their functionality, this product will need to be subsidized with other applications that provide more data or information on how individual components or systems are working.

Incentivized

• Database status. Being able to see which databases are up/down, at a glance, allows us to quickly react to issues.
• Reporting. We report on last backups, daily status, a host of metrics, and compliance levels of all our databases. With reporting we come into the office with a set of "status" reports and we know instantly if a database has issues.
• Metrics. We have a number of KPI's and SLA's we need to meet. Metrics applied to the databases allow us to stay on top of those requirements as well as fix common issues without a DBA needing to log in to assess the issue.

Incentivized

• It allows access to a history of checks, how much time they took, and if any errors were detected.
• It can alert several people, or many in a group, for information related to the application availability.
• When drilling down into the check, the logs can pinpoint the exact time and code events and how long each step took to respond.

Incentivized

• We also use OEM to monitor SQL Server. However, OEM only provided limited features for SQL Server. It would be nice if we can schedule backup jobs for SQL Server in OEM.
• The ability to run SQL queries. You can't run queries in OEM. I have to go to SQL Developer or SQL PLUS to run. queries.

Incentivized

• The interface can be buggy.
• We have experienced false positives of a system outage that was not accurate.
• It's not a true measure of system performance or uptime, but simply judges up or down from a holistic view.

Incentivized

Navigation is clean and neat.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Toad for Oracle is more suited for individual users who have a strong focus on database development, and it is not as comprehensive as Oracle Enterprise Manager. While it is quite decent in logical database layer tasks, such as schema objects and SQL, it lacks visibility into host level and I/O layer performance stats.

Incentivized

To be honest, I am not certain why this product was initially chosen over other products. It was being used when I started working at a new job. I was trained on its use and focused on tracking issues when an alert was given. There are many products that can be used for monitoring site uptime. Neustar definitely has its uses for monitoring if a site is up or down, but its lack of granularity can turn some away.

Incentivized

I work with OEM SCP team. They are great.

Incentivized

• When we were using Oracle GoldenGate, it made our life easy in terms of visually seeing the configuration and identifying issues easily
• It also makes ASM management very easy instead of doing it in the command line
• Creating policies and implementing certain standard configurations across all the databases is easy

Incentivized

• Our company at one time gauged overall system uptime using Neustar WebMetrics to provide this data
• Due to the limitations with the applications ability to show system functionality and uptime we have begun using other methods for determining system uptime for our customers.
• The interface can be a bit tricky to understand during first use. There is somewhat of a learning curve.

Incentivized