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.
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Progress WhatsUp Gold
Score 7.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
WhatsUp Gold developed by Ipswitch (acquired by Progress Software May 2019) offers network performance monitoring and mapping. It supports core monitoring features, including automated workflows and network capacity planning, and monitors across hybrid environments.
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.
[Progress WhatsUp Gold (formerly Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold)] is good for what it is. An inexpensive but accurate monitor for alerting on systems and services. However, it is time consuming to configure, The GUI leaves a lot to be desired and the formatting for txt alerts stinks (I just use it now as an alert to check my email to view the actual alert.)
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.
Monitoring the connection; performance, switching, and issues. We use a broadband connection for our primary and a cellular backup for the secondary. While we use routing protocols to make this switch and WhatsUp isn't used for Syslog monitoring. it alerts us within seconds.
Backup configurations and archiving. WhatsUp does this particularly well. I use it for both Cisco routers and switches.
The diagram feature is nice. Though I don't use it as much because of the size of our structure, it does come in handy for mapping routes of all traffic.
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.
Navigating the new WhatsUp Gold 2018 is a bit complicated and not user-friendly. The best part about using a software is the user's ability to use it with ease.
You cannot click sites being monitored from Map Dashboard View. This feature was previously possible in the older version.
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.
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).
Progress WhatsUp Gold (formerly Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold) is more network focused than some of the other products we looked at, which had basic capabilities but were not as strong on the reporting or programmatic resolution of issues. Progress WhatsUp Gold (formerly Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold) is cost effective compared to some of the other upmarket solutions.
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.
