Oracle Observability and Management - a valuable tool for monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity planning

Rating: 9 out of 10

October 3, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Oracle observability and Management have the toolset to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot Oracle databases and Linux servers. In the past several months, we have seen tremendous enhancements in the service. Being a managed services provider, the tools, especially Operations Insights and Stack monitoring, are valuable to go back and check how the system behaved after-the-fact troubleshooting. Database Management looks good, but we are yet to explore it.

Pros

Stack Monitoring provides discovery and monitoring of an application including its underlying stack whether it is running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or on-premises.
Stack monitoring for EBS provides insight into critical KPIs across E-Business Suite stack. You will see WebLogic, Concurrent manager and JVM utilization in the dashboard.
Operations insights helps to perform proactive performance management and improve application performance by tracking Oracle database SQL running across the enterprise.

Cons

More out-of-the-box configurations, especially various dashboards, will help get the service started quickly.
The stack monitoring set at first seems confusing and a lot of work. It will be easier if the setup and agent deployment is driven through a wizard.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are using the Oracle database or services in Oracle Cloud, Observability and Management is a must-use service. Many components of O&M service are free, and the others are not that expensive either.

Verified User

Strategist in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Great solution for data visualization with robust functionality

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

March 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Oracle IT Analytics Cloud as a data visualization tool for our Oracle environment especially in conjunction with Oracle Peoplesoft Campus Solutions. This gives us a 360 view of how our system and the data within the system is doing. With this, our leadership can make informed decisions that better serve our institution. We also use it to inform different departments about how their students are doing and what pain points they may be experiencing. Scheduled reports are also emailed to certain department heads to analyze the data in a way that can benefit their department and the department's students.

Pros

Ability to aggregate a lot of data sets in a single place, allowing for better visualization of key information. Ability to customize the data views and export to PDF/Excel is great. Love the simplicity of creating dashboards and the intuitiveness, as well as the fast turn-around of projects. Customization of the views is essential for us because every user wants to different view because they consume data differently. This makes our users consume their data effectively.
Great self-service analytics solution with an excellent presentation layer. Easy to generate reports, integrate and customize. The interface is very clear and minimalist which is refreshing. It enables you to pull and analyze data faster than many of the other platforms. The ability to drill down is phenomenal...there are layers to everything and it's amazing to realize how deep Oracle can let you go.
Ability to analyze large data sets and the ability to create intuitive, easy to understand reports. The best feature is its user-friendly and intuitive GUI which I use daily to pull my data from the Oracle database. Oracle Cloud Analytics doesn't have many steps to complete the setup on the cloud and in no time dashboards and reports are made available to users that want to them.
Ability to integrate and pull data from other Oracle applications -Mobile data reporting capabilities to always stay in-the-know related to data and critical applications reporting. Ability to build a portal on top of the Analytics Cloud to create a custom, unique experience for our clients.

Cons

There's a pretty steep learning curve that needs to be overcome in order to properly deploy this tool. So, unless you're a seasoned IT administrator, you may have a fair amount of homework to do. Implementation and maintenance of this takes a bucket of consulting hours from outside consultants to come in and set up the tool and regularly maintain it, in the long run, this could be costly.
The dashboard is not as easy to set up as I would like, however, after setup it will serve your purpose in the best possible way. You may not be able to find out how some data related to another and you can create a report that you think has all the details you need, but it comes up blank because the data really is not connected.
There aren't enough self-learning materials available like tutorials and how-to videos. I would like to have access to more e-tutorials from inside the tool. A steep learning curve for most. It would be nice to have a robust learning portal within the application where users can access self-learning material directly from the application and step to spet guides on how to perform different tasks.
Does not provide the ease of adding additional data sources without lots of complications. Even though it can handle large data sets, rendering of reports can take a fairly long time if the parameter set is large. For some time it seems like processing takes a bit of time when large data sets are being used. This is not the case with other competing tools.

Likelihood to Recommend

Ideal for a complex organization with requirements to build very complex reports. Especially useful for organizations that already have numerous Oracle products and need to pull information from them. This tool works best when plugged in with other Oracle tools and databases. If you're a larger company, and/or if you're managing a lot of data, Oracle IT Analytics Cloud Service is the perfect tool to manage your Oracle deployment. It provides a number of different options for intelligent analysis while not being too overwhelming to manage. Companies that want a robust tool to manage all data and present it in a visually appealing way to users will greatly benefit from this tool. The tool is very customizable and can be tailored to meet the needs of different users.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Efficient application monitoring solution

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 11, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Oracle Application Performance Monitoring is used within the information technology department to detect and resolve issues within our cloud applications before they impact end users. It is also used to schedule routine tasks that should be carried out within the department.

Pros

It helps in the detection and elimination of security threats.
It enables us to detect and resolve IT issues before they impact the end users.
It provides automatic diagnostics.
It improves the efficiency of operations and productivity.

Cons

Oracle Application Performance Monitoring has a steep learning curve for new users.
The user interface can be improved to make it more friendly.

Likelihood to Recommend

Oracle Application Performance Monitoring is suitable for companies that have deployed or plan to deploy cloud applications for which finding and fixing issues that arise before they affect the end user is important.

James Munga

IT Support Specialist in Information Technology at Equity Bank Limited (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Great solution for data visualization with robust functionality

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

March 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Ability to aggregate a lot of data sets in a single place, allowing for better visualization of key information. Ability to customize the data views and export to PDF/Excel is great. Love the simplicity of creating dashboards and the intuitiveness, as well as the fast turn-around of projects. Customization of the views is essential for us because every user wants to different view because they consume data differently. This makes our users consume their data effectively.
Great self-service analytics solution with an excellent presentation layer. Easy to generate reports, integrate and customize. The interface is very clear and minimalist which is refreshing. It enables you to pull and analyze data faster than many of the other platforms. The ability to drill down is phenomenal...there are layers to everything and it's amazing to realize how deep Oracle can let you go.
Ability to analyze large data sets and the ability to create intuitive, easy to understand reports. The best feature is its user-friendly and intuitive GUI which I use daily to pull my data from the Oracle database. Oracle Cloud Analytics doesn't have many steps to complete the setup on the cloud and in no time dashboards and reports are made available to users that want to them.
Ability to integrate and pull data from other Oracle applications -Mobile data reporting capabilities to always stay in-the-know related to data and critical applications reporting. Ability to build a portal on top of the Analytics Cloud to create a custom, unique experience for our clients.

Cons

There's a pretty steep learning curve that needs to be overcome in order to properly deploy this tool. So, unless you're a seasoned IT administrator, you may have a fair amount of homework to do. Implementation and maintenance of this takes a bucket of consulting hours from outside consultants to come in and set up the tool and regularly maintain it, in the long run, this could be costly.
The dashboard is not as easy to set up as I would like, however, after setup it will serve your purpose in the best possible way. You may not be able to find out how some data related to another and you can create a report that you think has all the details you need, but it comes up blank because the data really is not connected.
There aren't enough self-learning materials available like tutorials and how-to videos. I would like to have access to more e-tutorials from inside the tool. A steep learning curve for most. It would be nice to have a robust learning portal within the application where users can access self-learning material directly from the application and step to spet guides on how to perform different tasks.
Does not provide the ease of adding additional data sources without lots of complications. Even though it can handle large data sets, rendering of reports can take a fairly long time if the parameter set is large. For some time it seems like processing takes a bit of time when large data sets are being used. This is not the case with other competing tools.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Oracle Observability and Management Reviews & Insights