Oracle Enterprise Manager vs. Vercara UltraWPM

OEM is very well suited for all Oracle products, especially Oracle databases and Exadata machines; even not Oracle hardware, it is very good and displaying high level details. OEM is not well suited for older hardware vendors like AIX, HP-UX, DEC/Digital, Microsoft (sql server). This is a big negative as most large companies have a heterogeneous environment with many different vendor hardware and (database) software products.

Incentivized

If you need to gauge whether your site is up or down, then Neustar will give you exactly what you are looking for. However, if you need more granularity for specific application or sub-systems and their functionality, this product will need to be subsidized with other applications that provide more data or information on how individual components or systems are working.

Incentivized

• Monitoring Templates: There are out of box monitoring templates for each target types, you can customize them or use them as it is.
• Administrative Groups: This is a relatively new feature in OEM Cloud Control. This lets you create and manage your targets and monitoring templates smarter and with less re-work.
• DB Monitoring: There are so many cool DB monitoring features and visual graphics, that it can be used by both DBA and functional people to see what's going on in the database.

Incentivized

• It allows access to a history of checks, how much time they took, and if any errors were detected.
• It can alert several people, or many in a group, for information related to the application availability.
• When drilling down into the check, the logs can pinpoint the exact time and code events and how long each step took to respond.

Incentivized

• Bugs. Every version we upgrade to has a number of bugs. Some stop us from rolling to production OEM (we have a sandbox OEM), some are simply annoying. If I could improve on one thing, it would be for better QA from oracle before releasing each version.
• Flash. I'm told that they are moving from Flash to Jet in version 13.3 and beyond (we are on 13.2 currently). That change cannot come soon enough. The OEM pages load SO slowly due to Flash.
• Hierarchy Groups. OEM allows five Hierarchy groups. A Hierarchy group allows a top down metric/rule roll out. However, they limit you to five. I'd like to see them open that up, so that we can have any number of custom groups.

Incentivized

• The interface can be buggy.
• We have experienced false positives of a system outage that was not accurate.
• It's not a true measure of system performance or uptime, but simply judges up or down from a holistic view.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

To be honest, I am not certain why this product was initially chosen over other products. It was being used when I started working at a new job. I was trained on its use and focused on tracking issues when an alert was given. There are many products that can be used for monitoring site uptime. Neustar definitely has its uses for monitoring if a site is up or down, but its lack of granularity can turn some away.

Incentivized

I work with OEM SCP team. They are great.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Our company at one time gauged overall system uptime using Neustar WebMetrics to provide this data
• Due to the limitations with the applications ability to show system functionality and uptime we have begun using other methods for determining system uptime for our customers.
• The interface can be a bit tricky to understand during first use. There is somewhat of a learning curve.

Incentivized