My experience working with grid control has reached its third year in a few environments and operating system platforms. During these years, I have encountered significant improvement in administering the database through the wonderful visualization and manageability capabilities provided by Grid Control. Where many monitoring tools fail to both identify and report backup and recovery issues, erroneously point RAC status, or mistakenly report issues with replication, Data Guard, or message queuing, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control has effectively blueprint effectiveness on how to identify and what to consistently report on the benefit on the DBA and the Database Architect. So, Grid Control does not lie about success or failure of a process. It consistently tells the truth and supports it with evidence.
Manageability of RAC environments allows for optimal visualization of the storage, performance bottlenecks, such as I/O, wait and lock scenarios, allowing for a cluster database to be optimally managed from any cluster instance.
Data Guard Manageability is also improved via the improved visualization of log transport and log application services, and with the simplification of role management services.
Replication via AR and AQ is mostly advantages in comparison with the Client OEM tool, although many DBAs miss it, if no thick client is available.
For conventional administrative and maintenance tasks, Grid Control is far superior to any third-party heavyweight tool. Besides, Grid Control is unique in covering the new features available in Oracle’s recent releases, and greatly simplifies the administration of patch application.
So, in general, the improvements are at hand with the beauty of a thin client.
