RE: OEM justification -oem Poll

Well, speaking as a thoroughly biased software vendor whose product is often compared to certain pieces of Grid Control, I have spent a fair bit of time looking at Grid Control and working with customers who use Grid Control, here's my .02:

• Grid Control is good at what it is free for (basic monitoring). Nice graphs, useful pictures, good alerting, well done Oracle.
• For just about everything else, it varies wildly.

I've spoken to many customers who say that Oracle pushed Grid Control heavily into their environment. Among people who have tried to implement it, experiences have ranged from "couldn't get it to work, oracle flew an engineer from corporate in, they spent a month, they couldn't get it to work" to "worked great out of the box". It seems, again, simply from the people I've talked to, that the diagnostic and tuning packs work pretty well. The provisioning and configuration management packs don't work at all (at least, never met anyone who has successfully gotten them to work). Even in the 10gR3 Grid control, provisioning and patching have huge swaths of issues.

In general, I think the big test should be - can you set up grid control in your lab, get it working, and get all of the packs you're going to spend money on working? Does it meet your needs? Are you better off picking best of breed technologies for different areas?

Again, I'm biased - we make a automation, provisioning, patching, and configuration management product for database environments. But none of this is my opinion, its just based on what I've seen people doing in different environments.

Matt

--
Matthew Zito
Chief Scientist
GridApp Systems
P: 646-452-4090
mzito_at_gridapp.com
http://www.gridapp.com



-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org on behalf of Spears, Brian
Sent: Mon 3/26/2007 11:18 AM
To: Joel.Patterson_at_crowley.com; oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: OEM justification -oem Poll
 

I started the OEM poll and I will give a summary when I get a break in work
load..

But in response to your question..



- OEM is great for proactivity

- OEM is great for scalable monitoring

- OEM is great for Rapid tuning and problem detection (the newest guy in the

dba group can do it)


- OEM is great for helping with historical data growth

- OEM has a Waits Graph on system performance.(when u learn how to use.You

can immediately spot issues)


- OEM is great for looking at impacts of historical trends...cpu,disk,memory



We have hundreds of databases so it kicks butt in helping us be proactive...
We could script most stuff..
But then you create something that is homegrown and not industry supported.
Quite a few people have written some kick butt stuff and can manage pretty
well without OEM for the basic stuff. But when it comes to it.. It wont
match oem for scalability..if it does.. You are just trying to create your
own OEM.

OEM is quite extensible... It enables all kinds of time saving options...

Examples: We set up oem accounts and oracle accounts in our databases and
let others manage various repetitive duties like unlock account etc. Nothing
to install.. Give them the link to point to and they are off. We have too
much project load so we gave a limited access (one database with read only
on their tables) to OEM to look at their own crappy sql and fix it..(when
you are starving for time...this is a real breather)

We have been using OEM for years and everyday we get new ideas of how OEM
can save us time.. Just put in OEM jobs in the scheduler to automate
bounceing/start/stop all dbs per server with hand off pages/emails to
various groups ( In larger companies ...this can be a nightmare... Unix guys
wont let you hook the startups in the startup directories  ) The OEM
scheduler is quite good ... And I see the technology improving in quality
each release and that oracle is putting effort to make this a critical
management tool....FINALLY!

I find OEM like the Rabbit hole.. Mentioned in Matrix... You just never know
when you reach the end of functionality.. I find a new screen everytime I go
in... ( ya it suchs a bit on the user interface... Its not self educating or
intuitive but one can manage)

It goes on and on... You can monitor the app/web servers as well as the
oracle database and know where the problem is coming from... Without wasting
time...

There is some great features like comparing hardware setups to check for
differences.. Cloning dbs, patching dbs' with hook into Oracle metalink do
down load patches etc. Could it be that they are they copying Microsoft auto
patching (he he)?... I can see down the road this can create incredible
functionality and time saving.

Bottom line...

Does your company need to be that on top of issues? We get new databases
going in all the time so it really helps with problems of change. All this
stuff takes some spin to do the benefit/cost proposal but
Personally after I was forced away from most of my scripting... I have come
to respect and value it (although that took a few years...and still some
minor reservations).
If your company is not that big on proactivity and they pay great... Drop me
a line! Part of why we got into it was the that company wanted to reduce the
risk of all this dependancy of dba scripting and have an industry common
frame as well as vender supported.

Where do I get my check from Oracle?

Brian 



-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org]
On Behalf Of Joel.Patterson_at_crowley.com
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 8:33 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: OEM justification



I creating a justification for OEM.  (Should I?)

The company used to license the packs for EM console, but stopped a year
ago.   I want them to license OEM Grid.  For what I guess is $40,000?
per 4 processor server?   It would monitor 5 servers, 2 of them
development, (maybe more... especially if it were to be extended).

ADDR, Accounts for various activities... e.g. Refreshing Dev or Test
databases from OEM himself without DBA :) (cloning).  Managers, operations,
can see real time graphs of how the database is doing.
Jobs: RMAN backups, Tuning, and on and on.

What is the impact of Not having OEM.   The databases will humm along
like normal for a couple more years... but?

Just Listing all the benefits can be over the top -- they would also have to
understand... and overcome the hurtle posed by the fact that we are doing
'fine' now -- aren't we?


Any feedback?

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