Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control

Monitoring

Console / Dashboard

Performance

UX

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is best in breed to manage and monitor Oracle IT assets including Oracle Database and Oracle Cloud.

It is also able to monitor non-Oracle components as well including non-Oracle storage, middleware, and virtualization technologies.

It has a simple UI that can be used to pretty much do most basic management and IT life cycle management tasks for the full IT stack, both on-prem and cloud.

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.

Job scheduling.

Performance monitoring.

Corrective action.

Too many behind the scenes ports and protocols required to enable full functionality of OEM in most environments.

Out of box monitoring templates are extremely useful. You can use these templates to create your own custom templates.

I am a big fan of new administrative groups. This makes addition of new targets convenient and applies monitoring templates and incident rules directly on them.

Its very sophisticated products with lots of monitoring and administrative tools. The performance monitoring is just great. We totally depend on OEM for performance monitoring.

This product comes with so much features and options that it makes it very heavy, resource intensive and slow.

Global Repeat Notification settings are truly global and applies to both warning and critical thresholds. We wanted to setup different settings of repeat notifications for warning and critical thresholds. This is not possible as of now.

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.

OEM doesn't delete old fault alerts by itself. You have to go to the command line "emcli" to find those problems and faults and delete them manually. This can be achieved by creating and scheduling a periodic shell script as well.

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.

Monitoring the Oracle RAC environment is one area where Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control needs to improve, especially in the area of monitoring database sessions. It is not always clear when searching if you are seeing things for the cluster, or just one instance. You must make a conscience effort to be sure you are looking at the sessions you intend to be viewing. It would be much better if it always showed sessions from all nodes with a column identifying the node they are from...

It would be nice to have a "build your own dashboard" feature in OEM Cloud Control. We monitor many servers and databases. Some are more critical than others. It would be nice to be able to create one screen with the key item from 3 or 4 critical servers showing on it.

Oracle needs to improve the agents for Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. We have run into some bugs that require the agent to be restarted. It would be nice if there was an auto restart feature.