Why use OEM? Why not?
October 26, 2018
Why use OEM? Why not?
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Enterprise Manager
Our organization has ~180 Oracle databases and ~200 MSSQL databases. It is used by the DBA team at this time. We use OEM to monitor our database footprint, alerting us to issues such as downtime and compliance levels. At a glance we can the status of any of our databases, uptime, performance, last backups, patch level and other non functional details such as business group, location, application point of contact, and maintenance windows.
- Database status. Being able to see which databases are up/down, at a glance, allows us to quickly react to issues.
- Reporting. We report on last backups, daily status, a host of metrics, and compliance levels of all our databases. With reporting we come into the office with a set of "status" reports and we know instantly if a database has issues.
- Metrics. We have a number of KPI's and SLA's we need to meet. Metrics applied to the databases allow us to stay on top of those requirements as well as fix common issues without a DBA needing to log in to assess the issue.
- 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.
- Positive: Alerting features. Without this we would have to be a 24x7 shop with someone always manning the helm. With the alerting feature we can define levels of alerts and only get the most pressing alerts sent out.
- ROI: OEM is free, so the ROI is whatever you make of it.
I'm not aware of any OEM alternatives. At least, nothing with the kind of features you find in OEM, and nothing that is free.