OEM great for Oracle dbs and current hardware; older vendors, not so much
October 14, 2019
OEM great for Oracle dbs and current hardware; older vendors, not so much
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Enterprise Manager
OEM is used to monitor Oracle databases and Exadata machines and perform routine maintenance operations like backups, statistics, etc. It's used by the dba teams for performance monitoring and usage tracking. It functions as a central repository for all Oracle databases within the organization. It has the ability to be utilized by non dba staff for quick database metrics like uptime, storage, utilization, backup duration, etc.
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.
- 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.
Kibana from Elastic is another monitoring tool that claims to provide very similar information to OEM.
It seems to be an information tool rather than a tool that can actually make changes within a database.
I think Kibana is more robust for hardware versus database software so it is more suited to that purpose and does to compare to the Oracle Database monitoring attributes of OEM.
It seems to be an information tool rather than a tool that can actually make changes within a database.
I think Kibana is more robust for hardware versus database software so it is more suited to that purpose and does to compare to the Oracle Database monitoring attributes of OEM.
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