Re: Thoughts on Enterprise manager

There are several parts to the OEM. First, you have the tools that automate your SQL.
These tools save you typing which is great. They provide the way to learn and to work
more efficiently. Also, they are free. Personally I don't like them, but I cannot explain why
so it does not count. If you find yourself sharing my attitude, have a look at Quest products.

There is a so-called Diagnostics pack. This is a priced option. Again, I do not like it and
it would be difficult to explain why. Again, look at Quest/Precise/BMC/ETC products.

The part you are probably interested in is the monitoring part. We tried to implement it and failed.
First of all, until the latest version there was a trick in licensing, where you cannot monitor
anything unless you buy something else (I don't remember what exactly, I think Diag pack).
I think they changed something and it is ok now but it's worth checking.

I think our biggest obstacle was implementing notifications. For some reason, we could not use
the standard accounts in OEM and we attempted to implement the notifications as fixit jobs or
event handlers. I did not personally look at event handlers, but getting required info from inside
of a fixit job is not trivial. Besides Oracle did not make debugging of TCL jobs any easy. IMO,
BMC Patrol's PSL stuff is, in fact, easier to use and implement.

I only had a few days to research that and I might be missing a lot of things. But I would make sure
that all the monitoring functionality you need is readily available for you to use and your requirements
do not conflict with what OEM developers thought they are.

The DG part looks great on the screen but our system appears to be too critical to test it out.
I would be interested to know how it works for others :).

Regs
AK

steve deno wrote:

> I am curious what people think of Oracle Enterprise manager. Which
> experienced DBA's out there use it to manage databases.
>
> I am setting up an environment with 3 instances(1 data warehouse, and
> one OLTP with a standby) These will all be 9.2 on Solaris 9. Up
> through 8i I often found that keeping agents and data gatherers, and
> alerts running proved to be a sort of a headache so I just wrote UNIX
> scripts for notifications/jobs/backups, etc. What I'm wondering is:
> Are there significant numbers of experienced DBAs who get a lot out of
> OEM? Is it the way to go if you are doing a logical standby database
> with Dataguard?
>
> Any thoughts are welcomeed. Thanks
Received on Sat Sep 21 2002 - 02:28:19 CDT