Capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager in Oracle AI Database 26ai

Enterprise Manager's role has grown considerably since its earlier releases, broader, deeper, and genuinely cloud-aware. The current release, EM 24ai, is organized around four themes worth using as a map for everything else in this lesson: platform modernization, operational continuity, AI-driven insight, and performance and automation at fleet scale.

EM 24ai replaced much of the older, monolithic OMS design with a multi-container architecture: separate WebLogic containers mean monitoring and alerting can keep running while the main console itself is being patched, and the console runs on a modern, customizable JET-based UI, fully web-based, with no dependency on Flash or Java applets, both of which have been unsupported in every modern browser since 2021.

The other major architectural shift is Remote Agents: agents deployed on dedicated hosts that monitor databases and other hosts over remote protocols, including SSH where needed, without requiring an agent installed on every single target. Local agents remain fully supported alongside them. Remote Agent HA pools add redundancy to the monitoring layer itself, and Remote Agent HA pools plus support for Oracle Database 19c and later, 23ai and 26ai included, are where this capability actually applies.

The standout operational feature is genuinely zero-downtime monitoring and patching. A Zero Downtime (ZDT) monitoring service keeps alerts, incidents, notifications, and corrective actions running during planned EM maintenance itself; a ZDT job system keeps critical jobs running the same way; and ZDT patching applies OMS release updates, deploy, update, verify, while EM stays operational throughout. Together these target exactly the SLA-sensitive environments that can't tolerate a monitoring blackout just because EM itself needs patching.

Two AI layers sit on top of EM's existing telemetry.

Oracle AI Database Assistant (the current name; earlier EM 24ai release updates, RU4 through RU9, shipped this as "Ask EM") is a conversational assistant built into the console, powered by Cohere's large language model running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It answers natural-language questions about target health, performance, availability, and security, using retrieval-augmented generation over Enterprise Manager's own documentation and live telemetry, and can surface the relevant widgets or dashboards directly.

AI Cloud Extensions integrate with OCI Observability and Management so SQL Insights and capacity planning show up directly on the EM database home page. SQL Insights analyzes an installation's top SQL, roughly the top 2,000 statements per database, collected every 30 minutes. Capacity planning draws on up to 25 months of historical data to trend and forecast CPU, I/O, storage, and memory, flagging over- or under-allocation before it becomes a problem.

Newer still: starting with EM 24ai Release Update 12, Enterprise Manager ships a built-in MCP server, running inside the OMS itself, that lets MCP-compatible AI clients discover and invoke Enterprise Manager operations directly, including a built-in tool for running SQL queries through EM's own Free Query API. It complements the existing REST APIs rather than replacing them, and customers don't need to stand up separate MCP infrastructure to use it.

The core capabilities DBAs have relied on for years are all still here, extended with real fleet-scale and Engineered Systems depth:

• Database performance and lifecycle: real-time and historical diagnostics and tuning, change testing and validation, migration automation, AWR Explorer inside EM, a refreshed SQL Performance Analyzer UI, True Cache monitoring, Data Guard and fleet maintenance enhancements including rolling upgrades, and overhauled Data Masking and Subsetting workflows.
• Engineered Systems: the Exadata Management Pack and Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance (ZDLRA) Management Pack, both separately licensed, cover Exadata monitoring and management, IORM, Exadata Database Service on Exascale, mixed storage VM clusters, fleet dashboards, bulk compliance checks, and Recovery Appliance backup configuration through EMCLI or REST.
• Enterprise monitoring: discovery and monitoring of Oracle and non-Oracle targets both on-premises and in the cloud, static and adaptive thresholds, incident and notification management, and MySQL monitoring alongside Oracle targets.
• Hybrid and multicloud: single-console management of databases across on-premises infrastructure, OCI, AWS, Azure, and GCP, with EM itself deployable on-premises or from OCI Marketplace.
• Security and compliance: CPU tracking, compliance standards including CIS and STIG variants, configuration sprawl control, and privileged access management support.
• Middleware and applications: monitoring for Fusion Applications, Applications Unlimited, WebLogic (including on Kubernetes), and E-Business Suite user experience.

Worth knowing before you plan around any of this: base functionality, agent discovery and management, basic advisors, and the database home page, comes with Oracle software and support at no extra licensing. The deeper diagnostics packs, the Engineered Systems packs, and the AI features are licensed separately. Subsequent 24.1 release updates have kept adding to this list rather than freezing it, MCP support and Exascale management among the more recent additions, so treat EM 24ai as a living release line rather than a single fixed feature set.

Put the four themes back together and the shape of the product becomes clearer than any individual feature list conveys: platform modernization exists so the monitoring layer itself doesn't become a single point of failure, operational continuity exists so patching EM doesn't cost you visibility into everything else, AI-driven insight exists to surface what a human would otherwise have to go digging for, and the fleet-scale capabilities exist because managing one database and managing a thousand are genuinely different problems, not the same problem at a different scale.

Enterprise Manager's own feature set has been evolving for a long time. Oracle 11g, for instance, added integration with what was then called MetaLink, a database repair wizard, and improved RAC and Grid interconnect monitoring, all delivered through a Java-applet-based console UI that, like every Java applet, stopped working in any modern browser once browser vendors dropped applet support in 2021; none of that specific interface survives into EM 24ai's web-based console.

Older material also sometimes references administering "Oracle Parallel Server" from the console. Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) was superseded by Real Application Clusters back in Oracle 9i: RAC introduced Cache Fusion, sharing data blocks directly between instances in memory over the interconnect, which eliminated OPS's older, slower disk-based coordination approach entirely. There's no "Parallel Server" left to administer; the modern equivalent, depending on the deployment, is Oracle RAC itself, including on OCI Exadata, or Oracle RAC One Node for a single-active-instance failover configuration on a cluster.

The next lesson looks more closely at the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control console itself.