Item: Oracle Enterprise Manager
Rating: 8
Author: Kevin Zhang

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Oracle Enterprise Management is our central management tool of the whole Oracle inventory. We use many features except Cloud Pack and Data Masking pack.

Pros and Cons

Enterprise Monitoring
DB provisioning and patching
Exadata Management

Security subsystem, supporting integration with other PAM products
Offer more MGMT views to retrieve needed information
Log management, including one-click download of procedure activity log,
Support of record management based on admin group, e.g. display incidents based on admin group, save incident records based on admin groups
Better support of cross server OEM migration (OMS, repository DB), mostly on post tasks, such as mass promoting targets, mass transfer target properties
Better emcli support for mass automation, such as agent cloning
Better EM dashboard features to create needed reports
Future integration with DEVOPS tools, such as Terraform, Ansible, Bitbucket, K8
OEM features can be expanded to support central DB management, such as integrated RMAN catalog, TDE key catalog, etc. Currently, you need a separate DB to handle.
Support built-in patching scheduling and auto notification feature

Return on Investment

P: OEM and AOM offers entire enterprise monitoring of Oracle inventories
N: Comparison feature is available only in Configuration Management, not other features
N: Hard to integrate with industry-standard DEVOPS and security tools

I still rate OEM as a must-have tool for central management of Oracle fleet.
The pros and cons of the product is prominent.
Meanwhile, I also acknowledge that OEM was design about a decade ago. At that time, it did not have the landscape we have today, such as cloud, DEVOPS, machine learning, etc. I hope in future releases, the design will incorporate those features.

Key Insights

Do you think Oracle Enterprise Manager delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Oracle Enterprise Manager's feature set?

Yes

Did Oracle Enterprise Manager live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Oracle Enterprise Manager go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Oracle Enterprise Manager again?

Yes

Usability

Navigation is clean and neat.

Professional Services

I work with OEM SCP team. They are great.

Likelihood to Recommend

In short, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) is designed for frontline DBA rather than DBA managers who want to get ad-hoc information. For frontline DBA, it is easy to see an incident and take actions. Almost all details are captured and organized in tabs. That is beautifully done. As a manager, it is hard to get a complete picture of operational status based on his selection criteria. In large EM deployments, mostly, targets are organized by using admin group. Besides, the incident records displayed by clicking on [Get Results] cannot be saved as Excel sheet. If that can be one, we can use Excel features to compare. Besides, OEM is inconsistent in log management. Certain results can be saved in offline format and certain cannot. It is extremely important to save procedure activity log in an offline html that preserves the format for internal auditing requirements. This proves a task is done successfully in OEM.

OEM review from an OEM veteran with more than 1000 bugs opened from my SRs

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Enterprise Manager