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Oracle Enterprise Manager

Score7 out of 10

116 Reviews and Ratings

What is Oracle Enterprise Manager?

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.

OEM review from an OEM veteran with more than 1000 bugs opened from my SRs

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Oracle Enterprise Management is our central management tool of the whole Oracle inventory. We use many features except Cloud Pack and Data Masking pack.

Pros

  • Enterprise Monitoring
  • DB provisioning and patching
  • Exadata Management

Cons

  • Security subsystem, supporting integration with other PAM products
  • Offer more MGMT views to retrieve needed information
  • Log management, including one-click download of procedure activity log,
  • Support of record management based on admin group, e.g. display incidents based on admin group, save incident records based on admin groups
  • Better support of cross server OEM migration (OMS, repository DB), mostly on post tasks, such as mass promoting targets, mass transfer target properties
  • Better emcli support for mass automation, such as agent cloning
  • Better EM dashboard features to create needed reports
  • Future integration with DEVOPS tools, such as Terraform, Ansible, Bitbucket, K8
  • OEM features can be expanded to support central DB management, such as integrated RMAN catalog, TDE key catalog, etc. Currently, you need a separate DB to handle.
  • Support built-in patching scheduling and auto notification feature

Return on Investment

  • P: OEM and AOM offers entire enterprise monitoring of Oracle inventories
  • N: Comparison feature is available only in Configuration Management, not other features
  • N: Hard to integrate with industry-standard DEVOPS and security tools

Usability

OEM great for Oracle dbs and current hardware; older vendors, not so much

Pros

  • Provides a graphical interface to Oracle database metrics (therefore one does not need to manually execute queries on a database to find information).
  • Provides a graphical interface to hardware metrics (like cpu, memory, network, i/o utilization). This is very important as it allow non system administrators to view and understand information regarding the hardware that an Oracle database is running on.
  • Has built in features to dynamically build databases, implement RAC (cluster), implement Data Guard, and many other optional add on features to Oracle databases.
  • Has the ability to generate performance data (and other) reports that can be also be easily delivered within the organization, all through the OEM interface.

Cons

  • Information can sometimes be hard to find within OEM. There are so many different attributes that it can be difficult to find the exact area where key information can be found.
  • If OEM is running slowly, it can be hard to diagnose where the problem exists.
  • If OEM is having a performance issues and disconnects, all data is lost. This can be particularly frustrating if reports are being generated or a data guard configuration is being implemented.
  • Configuring credential setup can be very time consuming and confusing. There should be a central user that has base level OEM access for any database added to the OEM OMS repository.
  • Manually inputting credentials is very onerous.
  • As a graphical interface, not all query information is provided and therefore it can be difficult to hone a dba skill set. Since not all queries are shown, if OEM is unavailable, one will not know how to retrieve the same information directly from the database.

Return on Investment

  • OEM is key for backup monitoring, scheduling and configuring.
  • OEM notifications are very useful for ensuring hardware and Oracle database availability.
  • Upgrading OEM versions is quite difficult and is a big negative. It is high risk to upgrade because if the upgrade goes wrong, OEM as the central repository can be offline for a long period, in order recover. This is often not allowable as monitoring downtime but be minimized.

Alternatives Considered

elastic.io Integration Platform

Other Software Used

Oracle Database 12c, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Toad for Oracle

The best tool for admins on Oracle Environment.

Pros

  • If you use Oracle (Sparc) environment, This software is essential.
  • Deep visiblity to Hardware, Software and Performance.
  • Manage easily even you are not familier with this enviranment.

Cons

  • Not yet.

Return on Investment

  • You will have a cost benefit If you install it on an Oracle (Maybe x86) server which is under contract of Oracle Service.
  • If you are use Oracle environment, this means you keep a critical service on it. Its availability is important. This software will help you at your monitoring and operations.

Other Software Used

Commvault

OEM is the best!!!

Pros

  • Allows you to manage multiple databases in one GUI.
  • Allows you to run jobs on multiple databases at one time.
  • Helps you maximize Oracle Database tuning and SQL tuning.
  • Also, helps manage dataguard within multiple databases.

Cons

  • Notification emails. Notifications are sending out emails for failed jobs 7 days later of the same error of the same job.
  • Being able to have redundancy for Oracle Enterprise Manager. This is way too complicated to get set up and has too many problems getting it set up. The documentation is not very good. Just making it more user-friendly and easier to install.
  • Starting OMS takes to long. Depending on the machine it can take up to 10 minutes for OMS to start up.

Return on Investment

  • Oracle Enterprise Manager has saved so much time in allowing us to manage servers and databases in one interface.
  • It has allowed us to have email notifications if a job doesn't run without error, which in return allows us to immediately check for problems within the system
  • Oracle Enterprise Manager has allowed us to have a very good service configuration for each database server and application server.

Alternatives Considered

Toad for Oracle

Other Software Used

Oracle SQL Developer, Toad for Oracle, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Good support on Oracle Enterprise Manager

Pros

  • It is used to provide more than others as compared to price.
  • Basically, it is used to check our database connection.
  • Oracle provides quick support on any issue.
  • It manages various activities, and handling is easy to use for good GUI functionality.

Cons

  • Some features are complicated for new users to understand on my first attempt.
  • There is some time connection loss issue.
  • They need to provide better features in some aspects.

Return on Investment

  • Oracle provides compatibility to any operating system.
  • Its best part has been to provide support quickly and better, as compared to others.
  • I am the user for the last three version updates from OEM (11g/12c/13c).

Alternatives Considered

Nagios

Other Software Used

Nagios