OEM Cloud Control: a must-have for Oracle shops
February 24, 2017
OEM Cloud Control: a must-have for Oracle shops
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control
In our organization Enterprise Manager is used by many groups within IT. This includes the DBA team, Identity Management, Systems Administration and Security. From a business perspective, it allows us to manage our Oracle environment with fewer resources. It has become a "one stop shop" for administrative jobs, proactive monitoring of our environment and performance tuning.
Our Identity Management team takes care of creating new users across our organization whether they be faculty, staff or students. We have tens of thousands of users so having the ability to view settings and create like is invaluable. Systems administrators notoriously use very few GUI tools. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control shows graphical representations of things like CPU and disk usage which is an easier way of reporting resource needs to upper management.
Our security team is constantly running jobs to check for vulnerabilities. Using this tool they can make sure that they are not negatively affecting performance.
Our Identity Management team takes care of creating new users across our organization whether they be faculty, staff or students. We have tens of thousands of users so having the ability to view settings and create like is invaluable. Systems administrators notoriously use very few GUI tools. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control shows graphical representations of things like CPU and disk usage which is an easier way of reporting resource needs to upper management.
Our security team is constantly running jobs to check for vulnerabilities. Using this tool they can make sure that they are not negatively affecting performance.
- Oracle Enterprise Manager is a "one stop shop" for all of our management needs. This is helpful because it minimizes the management of the management software itself. There are less upgrades and connectivity issues to handle. And there are "plug-ins" for additional products we use like Blue Medora's one for PostgreSQL.
- Managing administrative jobs can be burdensome in a shop with dozens of servers and databases. OEM Cloud Control makes it easy since you can view all the jobs for all servers in one place. It is easy to filter on jobs with problems or the like so that you can quickly look at the logs and fix the issues.
- Tuning PL/SQL is much easier using OEM Cloud Control. Most DBAs are familiar with trace files and TKPROF, but not having to do those things at a command line smooths the process out. The graphical interface makes it easier to show developers exactly what the issues are. This makes for less finger-pointing and quicker resolution of performance problems.
- Proactive management is easier using OEM Cloud Control. Before having the gui, I had a collection of scripts that I would have to install on each database server, then set up cron jobs to run them. When Oracle was upgraded, those scripts might have to be updated on each and every server. OEM Cloud Control has those things built in. You can choose exactly which metrics are important to you. And you can keep performance graphs up all day on a second monitor to let you instantly see when something might cause a problem.
- Monitoring the Oracle RAC environment is one area where Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control needs to improve, especially in the area of monitoring database sessions. It is not always clear when searching if you are seeing things for the cluster, or just one instance. You must make a conscience effort to be sure you are looking at the sessions you intend to be viewing. It would be much better if it always showed sessions from all nodes with a column identifying the node they are from...
- It would be nice to have a "build your own dashboard" feature in OEM Cloud Control. We monitor many servers and databases. Some are more critical than others. It would be nice to be able to create one screen with the key item from 3 or 4 critical servers showing on it.
- Oracle needs to improve the agents for Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. We have run into some bugs that require the agent to be restarted. It would be nice if there was an auto restart feature.
- We are a 7x24 shop. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control helps us meet that objective by proactively warning us before issues cause down time. Things like disk space, archive log issues or temporary table space issues.
- Spreading the use of this tool outside of the DBA group has allowed us to not hire additional personnel for those teams. Over time, as folks have retired from our operations team, we are not replacing them. Instead we have used OEM Cloud Control to automate tasks.
- We also now have the tools to measure up-time by using specific measurements inside of OEM. This allows us to report real numbers to management.