Likelihood to Recommend I wish I had an option to give it a 9.5 :) OEM Cloud Control is very well suited if you have a system with multiple implementations of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. If you are willing to pay for the huge license cost which is typical with Oracle, then you will love to use OEM Cloud Control to monitor your entire ERP solution including web servers, applications, network, storage, and physical servers. It is not worth the buck if your's is a small implementation. Your DBA's should be able to work without depending on OEM Cloud Control.
Read full review I am highly likely to recommend Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to a colleague. This is assuming they have a decent background in working on cloud servers. If you don't mind digging in yourself to solve problems, then this is a great resource. If you are just learning how to set up servers on your own, then I recommend at least hiring someone to help you use the service. With that being said, Rackspace makes it easy for people you may hire to seamlessly work within your account. They get their own separate developer account.
Read full review Pros Oracle Enterprise Manager is a "one stop shop" for all of our management needs. This is helpful because it minimizes the management of the management software itself. There are less upgrades and connectivity issues to handle. And there are "plug-ins" for additional products we use like Blue Medora's one for PostgreSQL. Managing administrative jobs can be burdensome in a shop with dozens of servers and databases. OEM Cloud Control makes it easy since you can view all the jobs for all servers in one place. It is easy to filter on jobs with problems or the like so that you can quickly look at the logs and fix the issues. Tuning PL/SQL is much easier using OEM Cloud Control. Most DBAs are familiar with trace files and TKPROF, but not having to do those things at a command line smooths the process out. The graphical interface makes it easier to show developers exactly what the issues are. This makes for less finger-pointing and quicker resolution of performance problems. Proactive management is easier using OEM Cloud Control. Before having the gui, I had a collection of scripts that I would have to install on each database server, then set up cron jobs to run them. When Oracle was upgraded, those scripts might have to be updated on each and every server. OEM Cloud Control has those things built in. You can choose exactly which metrics are important to you. And you can keep performance graphs up all day on a second monitor to let you instantly see when something might cause a problem. Read full review Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved. Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services. Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue. Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service. Read full review Cons Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control can do a better job in actively managing (as opposed to monitoring) non-Oracle IT components including non-Oracle database, middleware, and storage. The UI is less responsive and sometimes slow and the user experience could certainly be improved. There is also an issue with positioning as other Oracle products sometimes come with their own versions of management console so it is hard to justify paying for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control separately or as a new attachment. Read full review It would be nice if there were more templates so that beginners could easily create complex monitors I seemed to stumble upon the cloud monitoring service after having Rackspace for a while Read full review Usability I wanted to give it a 10 but the heavily loaded solution makes it slow to load and refresh pages. Even bouncing the OEM Cloud Control takes around 10 mins which is quite long.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Since OEM Cloud Control comes free with Enterprise Edition, we have mostly worked on OEM Cloud Control. I did have my fair share of experience with
DBArtisan . It's good and lighter than OEM Cloud Control. It sort of removes your need to even go to SQLPLUS command line most of the time. But it is way behind OEM Cloud Control in terms of features.
Read full review I also used
Monitis as a monitoring service for our server.
Rackspace 'S monitoring sends immediate notifications while
Monitis might take a couple minutes to understand if a service is down. Since
Rackspace has their monitoring integrated with their support system, it helps us a lot and we don't need to call support all the time.
Read full review Return on Investment Freed up DBAs and SAs by automating much of their antiquated manual processes. We are limited by our own desire to use and learn all of the features within OEM. Read full review I have overpaid in the past for services I didn't need The steepish learning curve might slow things down at first I have learned a lot using Rackspace Cloud Monitoring! Read full review ScreenShots