Oracle Enterprise Manager vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Oracle Enterprise Manager
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Oracle’s Enterprise Manager is an on-premises monitoring and management tool. The console is designed primarily to manage other Oracle products, it but can integrate to manage non-Oracle components as well.N/A
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Score 5.5 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) enables deep visibility into database performance and expert advice for performance optimization and tuning. What can you monitor with DPA? Oracle Oracle Exadata Oracle EBS Microsoft SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Database Managed Instance MySQL DB2 SAP ASE Aurora MariaDB DPA monitors physical, virtual,…N/A
Pricing
Oracle Enterprise ManagerSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Oracle Enterprise ManagerSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Oracle Enterprise ManagerSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Considered Both Products
Oracle Enterprise Manager
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
NA
Cannot Disclose
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Datadog is good at collecting metrics, monitoring, and alerting; whereas, with Oracle Enterprise Manager, in addition to all that, we can manage the infrastructure as well as automate certain fixes.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Foglight is great, but expensive. It has great monitoring like OEM, but can negatively impact database performance. OEM is better than Foglight because it is a native application from OEM and has features that Foglight doesn't have.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
They don't stack up against each other. They complement each other.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Oracle Enterprise Manager is better than Toad in that it allows you to do various server configurations that Toad doesn't allow.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
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 …
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Being an Oracle shop using Oracle Database and MySQL, management console from Oracle was a better choice than IBM or Microsoft even though we do use Microsoft Azure and storage/servers from IBM (on-prem).
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Have not used any other products.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
OEM is better at monitoring applications, while SolarWinds is better at monitoring the underlying infrastructure such as networks, switches, and routers.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
I am using Nagios Enterprise monitoring tool also, but as compared to Nagios, Oracle Enterprise Manager is best for our company. Nagios is very weak in some aspects.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
I used many other Oracle products (like Database, Middleware, Identity Management, etc.) but I have yet to review them.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Have not tried via Oracle Enterprise Manager, but CommVault is used by corporate for all backups of storage. However, it is just using Ansible to kick off RMAN jobs.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Toad for Oracle is more suited for individual users who have a strong focus on database development, and it is not as comprehensive as Oracle Enterprise Manager. While it is quite decent in logical database layer tasks, such as schema objects and SQL, it lacks visibility into …
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
OEM Cloud Control base version is free to use if you have licensed Enterprise Edition of one of the Oracle Product. It's sophisticated single point of control, we have used other monitoring products such as Veeam but none of the products have all the features packed together …
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
OEM is better and cheaper at managing Oracle databases.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Since OEM Cloud Control comes free with Enterprise Edition, we have mostly worked on OEM Cloud Control. I did have my fair share of experience with DBArtisan. It's good and lighter than OEM Cloud Control. It sort of removes your need to even go to SQLPLUS command line most of …
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
It is much simpler to install and configure as compared to Spotlight and Solarwinds.
Oracle Enterprise Manager measures performance diagnostics accurately and raises alerts and takes preventive actions. Other products can not take preventive actions even if they raise alerts. It …
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
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.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Oracle Enterprise Manager suited our requirement as the clients were using multiple products of Oracle. They were using several instance of oracle implemented at different geographical locations each in Europe, UK, Canada, and USA. So Oracle Enterprise Manager was best fit for …
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
We have not used any other products to monitor and/or manage our oracle instances. We have always used Enterprise Manager, although we did use a previous version (11g Grid Control), right around the time I arrived at my position. I upgraded to 12c Cloud Control with the …
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
SQL Developer DBA module allows user, space management, SQL Tuning, ad-hoc queries, and schema management. Great free product supported and enhanced from Oracle.
Chose Oracle Enterprise Manager
Oracle Enterprise Manager is easy to install, use and extend the capability of. It supports many Oracle products, which is what it is used for in my company. We selected OEM for its ease of use, intuitiveness and robustness.
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
DPA is a market leader and goes beyond what most products in the space can offer. It's a battle between SQL Sentry and DPA for the lead and everybody has their favorite. I personally prefer DPA for ease of install, management and better tuning and query advice options.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
The main thing was their popularity for the products they are providing. Also, we had great customer support for other SolarWinds products also.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Our organization has not compared SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer with any other products. We selected SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer for the simple fact that we use other SolarWinds products, and we wanted a solution that both compliments and integrates with …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is really good at some scenarios compared to other tools in the market.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer gave us better results and is faster than the competition.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
We have evaluated AppDynamics and Datadog along with Solarwinds DPA and definitely the winner is SolarWinds. We have been using it for the past 5 years. It has better alert functionality and is easy to use while providing great analytics.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
We were a long-time user of Database Analyzer even before it was acquired by SolarWinds. We did look at other applications in the past. As it has been a long period, its not beneficial to mention here. We have seen some other options like from Microsoft and Oracle which are …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
I haven't used any other tool as extensively as Database Performance Analyzer.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
None. We're happy with DPA
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
We use both DPA and Red Gate SQL Monitor (SQM) as third-party tools, and Query Store within SSMS. SQM's alerting and reporting capabilities exceed those of DPA in terms of being able to present single-purpose tiles for a server, where excessive smoothing doesn't hide some …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Solarwinds DPA came with a 30-day trial. We used that to evaluate the product, and when a P1 incident occurred with no DBA available we installed another 30-day trial. Its performance was good enough that we bought it that day!

We didn't try any other similar product before …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Interface, presentation, wait time...
We are more concerned with improving query performance than hardware/resource usage.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
I'm used to Oracle Enterprise Manager and it is one of best for Oracle Enterprise Database.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
There are some overlaps, but DPA has a lot more historical information that allows us to analyze statements over time rather than just see what is going on at that moment.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
I have used Spotlight (for Oracle on RAC) but it has been several years. The dashboard was crisp, clean, and intuitive, but the tool had a significant overhead. However, no competitor made a tool that met our needs at the time. I have also used Idera's SQL Diagnostic Manager in …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
We used Toad SQL Tuning advisor. Compared to Toad, DPA is very comprehensive.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
At the time, we found SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to be easier to setup and to have a richer feature set than Redgate SQL Monitor, plus, from what I remember, the DPA pricing worked better for us over the course of a year. We're very happy with all the features DPA …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
A couple of years ago I did research on a number of products to assist me in providing on-time accurate information about our customer databases. I had a couple in mind back then. I then attended our local Oracle Users Group Annual Conference, where a large number of vendors …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
At the time of evaluation, this product was similar in terms of cost but DPA was far better to access query performance issues which were the most important aspect for us. Redgate at the time was heavier on resource monitoring which was less important at the time.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
I like the web-based interface and wait stats analysis of DPA. Some of the other tools have more features, but DPA feels like a more polished tool, and the features it has work well. It's been a while since I've looked at the competitors' products. DPA works well for us, and …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

The SolarWinds DPA dashboard provides an overview of all monitored instances with detailed response time data captured in the performance data warehouse for every interaction, Database Performance Analyzer helps to identify long-term trends, isolate recurring problems, and …

Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is faster, cheaper and more reliable. It's missing some native features but nothing extra useful.
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds is much more intuitive and really helpful as a starting point for our monitoring purposes.
Even the junior level colleagues can really make sense of the systems which could be facing any potential issues and act accordingly. It also provides some guidance towards what …
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
I have only used DPA, as that were the best to use when running Oracle Standard Edition.
Best Alternatives
Oracle Enterprise ManagerSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Small Businesses
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 9.2 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 9.2 out of 10
Redgate Monitor
Redgate Monitor
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 9.2 out of 10
Redgate Monitor
Redgate Monitor
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Oracle Enterprise ManagerSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Oracle Enterprise ManagerSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Likelihood to Recommend
I wish I had an option to give it a 9.5 :) OEM Cloud Control is very well suited if you have a system with multiple implementations of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. If you are willing to pay for the huge license cost which is typical with Oracle, then you will love to use OEM Cloud Control to monitor your entire ERP solution including web servers, applications, network, storage, and physical servers. It is not worth the buck if your's is a small implementation. Your DBA's should be able to work without depending on OEM Cloud Control.
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I believe that SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a great choice for an organization that does not have a specific DBA or one that is still growing into the role. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is filled with hints, tips, and explanations of the various readings and metrics. This is very useful to help understand what is happening and why, what it means, and what some potential solutions are towards remediating any issues. This is extremely valuable for our development team, allowing them to be more proactive with the queries they write in viewing how they perform and where bottlenecks might be.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • Ability to drill down to wait for the issue and have a clear path as to what may be causing the issue.
  • Ability to quickly add a new target and the ease of installation and upgrades.
  • Reporting features to group my most troublesome customers into a daily report in one email.
  • Excellent customer support on any issues I can't immediately solve.
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • Resiliency of the Monitoring checks after the server underwent maintenance reboot. My experience is the monitor (Action) needs to be started manually. If possible it can automatically detect service/server then start to monitor again when system is back up.
  • Much lighter UI.
  • Granularity up to minutes.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We have relied on this product for a very long time and it continues to exceed expectations. The product is a vital part of our organization at this point, it would not be very ideal for us to abandon it. We use it almost every day and depend on its alerts for critical parts of our business
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Usability
It's great! It does everything and anything you would want it to do. It can monitor things which doesn't comes out of the box by adding plug ins to it, for example, you can even monitor Oracle GoldenGate Replication by adding a plug-in to OEM Cloud Control.
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I don't want to think about managing clusters of SQL servers in the future without this tool. We have demoed other tools and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is the gold standard for usability and insight into what your servers are doing. The UI is a bit dated, but everything is laid out in a logical manner and drilling down into queries or timeslices is extremely intuitive.
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Support Rating
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.
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I have had to use their support on a few occasions, for reasons that I am not clear about until recently I have always had problems upgrading the software (although the last 2 updates have gone without issue which I am very pleased to say). On those unfortunate occasions, the support has been brilliant with either excellently documented guides on how to resolve the issue by myself or have been hands-on with calls and screen sharing to remotely fix the issue. Every time the problem was sorted and more importantly, nothing was lost (apart from a bit of time). And as I stated above whatever the problem was that was causing my upgrade issues appears to have been resolved in the last 2 updates.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Follow the guidelines for the capacity of the servers. We found that the DPA databases were getting rather large and also that there are ways to reduce their size built into some of the options.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
I have used Spotlight (for Oracle on RAC) but it has been several years. The dashboard was crisp, clean, and intuitive, but the tool had a significant overhead. However, no competitor made a tool that met our needs at the time. I have also used Idera's SQL Diagnostic Manager in more than one company. That tool is helpful for a larger environment than we currently have. But I think it is better at alerting than DPA but worse at just about everything else. The good thing is you can flag an alert as acknowledged, so you stop getting emails. The bad thing is I don't think I could use it to troubleshoot issues like I do with DPA. I do not have enough experience to provide helpful feedback on the others selected.
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Return on Investment
  • 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.
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  • Paid for itself in days. We had a stored procedure that could not meet its SLA, DPA highlighted the issue and contributed to the resolution.
  • We had a stored procedure that we were able to calculate as running in 9 milliseconds, unfortunately, we had transactions coming in 7 milliseconds, resulting in duplicate transactions, indicating that a mutex function was needed.
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ScreenShots

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Screenshots

Screenshot of DashboardScreenshot of Alerts and reportsScreenshot of Application-centric view of DPAScreenshot of Blocking deadlock analysisScreenshot of Collaboration across teamsScreenshot of Intuitive performance monitoring