Re: Grid Control - opinions please

Jared,

OEM definitely look more like the tool for enterprise, but some problems are to be resolved:

• Installation is the pain... 10g is more pain than 9i because it includes Application Server and, consequently, all hassle of managing it. Looks like all we are not supposed to know anything about iAS to manage OEM but this is wrong - as soon as you try to troubleshoot any more or less serious issue - you need iAS knowledge.
• Support is awful. I find it mainly because support people are lacking iAS knowledge (and this is why I am opening SR on it - to get help on iAS side). The first this is often a suggestion to recreate a repository (imagine to recover from that action if you have thousand targets in your repository now) or reinstall OMS or agent and etc.
• Upgrade from 10.1 to 10.2 - no way it could fly and no way support were able to solve it promptly. Result - reinstall from scratch and recreate repository. Main issue during upgrade (I suppose) is upgrade from AS 9i to AS 10g.
• Agent is too heavy on nodes with many objects (be that disk devices, number of targets and etc.). For us we are struggling with CPU consumption of agent to be anywhere between half CPU to 2-3 CPUs for 16 CPU machine. Numerous SRs closed on this without significant progress.

We are running all on HP-UX and this is perhaps the main issue. :)

GUI - well, one should accept that web interface is poor compared to desktop client. There are few exceptions though (like GMail) and, perhaps, Oracle will move web interface complete to AJAX technology in the future versions (but boy do I see how buggy it would be in the beginning).

Regarding licensing... well it all depends on your contract and in enterprise Oracle contracts you can easily try to get some of them included in the contract practically for free. Maybe oracle will reduce pricing for them so that more people can use them - I believe that one of big issues is that GC is seriously lacking rich customer base.

There is one cool exciting feature in GC 10g - extensibility. It's really nice what you can plug in into OEM.

Cheers,
Alex

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