OEM: Best Tool for Oracle Databases
November 05, 2019

OEM: Best Tool for Oracle Databases

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Enterprise Manager

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) is being used in dev/test and prod environments. It is widely used by DBAs for monitoring and day-to-day operations. It is also widely used as the dashboard console for the managers to have an overview of the database systems.
  • Dashboard: Options to choose Home Page. Best for DBAs, best for new users and etc. I selected "best for DBAs" as my Home Page. It gives you the status (up or down) of all the databases registered. If you click each database a nice diagram shows up. On the left, you will see Load and Capacity, Incidents and Compliance, Recommendations for findings and SQL tuning, Last Backup and if there are any Jobs running.
  • Performance Home: Overview diagram of host average runnable processes, average active sessions, throughput, I/O, parallel execution, services. It also provides additional links to top consumers, instance locks, duplicate SQL, instance activities and SQL response time.
  • Top activity is another nice feature: details for 5 minute intervals. It further provides top SQL and top session. This is my go-to page for database performance tuning. You click the top SQL to get details on the "troubled" query, statistics, activities, plan and tuning history.
  • SQL tuning advisor is another nice feature: you can schedule a job to run the SQL tuning advisor or run it immediately.
  • AWR Report: when we start having DB performance issues, we run AWR a pare of snapshot reports and then compare them with a baseline report to nail down what has caused performance degradation.
  • Security: users, roles, profiles, auditing settings, data masking, and subsetting, data redaction, transparent data encryption, data vault, label security, virtual private database, and enterprise user security.
  • Scheduling jobs: we have 70 jobs running every day - backup, space, monitoring and sending alerts to email.
  • We also use OEM to monitor SQL Server. However, OEM only provided limited features for SQL Server. It would be nice if we can schedule backup jobs for SQL Server in OEM.
  • The ability to run SQL queries. You can't run queries in OEM. I have to go to SQL Developer or SQL PLUS to run. queries.
  • Positive impact: we have made a huge investment return on OEM over the years.
They don't stack up against each other. They complement each other.
It is a great tool for DBAs and management with limited access. In my opinion, this is not very useful for developers. DBAs can't seem to daily work without OEM.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Feature Ratings

Remote monitoring
10
Network device monitoring
Not Rated
Multiple Server Monitoring
10
Multi-device monitoring
Not Rated
Automated alerts and notifications
10
Patch Management
Not Rated
Service configuration management
Not Rated
Software and hardware inventory
Not Rated
Policy-based automation
9
Performance data reports
10
Customizable reporting
Not Rated
Data visualization
Not Rated
Risk analysis
Not Rated
Data backup and recovery
10
Antivirus and malware management
Not Rated
Administrator access control
10