Licensing

Is Oracle Enterprise Manager Free? The Base, the Packs, the Price

3 November 2026

Yes, and then no. Oracle's licensing manual for Enterprise Manager 24ai says that "The base installation of Enterprise Manager 24ai includes several features free of charge with the purchase of any Oracle software license or Support contract", so the console, the agents and the base monitoring cost nothing to license. The parts a DBA installs it for do: notifications, metric history, AWR, ASH, ADDM and Performance Hub are the Oracle Diagnostics Pack, $7,500 per processor list plus 22% a year, the advisors and SQL Monitor are the Tuning Pack, $5,000 more, and both are sold for Enterprise Edition only. Below is the manual's own split, the price it adds up to, what the free part costs to run, and how Scops gives the whole of it for $499 a database a year, with nothing on the servers and no pack.

What is free

The manual's base functionality page lists what comes with the installation. The monitoring part of it: "Configure thresholds for metrics and view alerts", with a sentence attached that decides most purchases, "This excludes notifications which requires one or more licensed Packs." The free Enterprise Manager can show an alert on its console; it cannot send it to you. The page also states that "Users of Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition databases can use the Base Framework features and the Base Database Management Features", that "Chargeback for VMs and hosts is free and does not require a license", and that "Metric Extensions are available free of charge only for the host target and not for other targets". Two more lines keep the door half open: "Some Advisors may be licensed under Packs" and "Some capabilities under SQL Plan Control may be licensed under Packs."

What needs the Diagnostics Pack

The database management page of the same manual lists the features of the Diagnostics Pack and closes with "In order to use the features listed above, you must purchase licenses for Oracle Diagnostics Pack." The list is the performance half of the product:

Performance monitoring and diagnostics, the Automatic Workload Repository, the AWR Warehouse and the AWR Hub
ADDM, Real Time ADDM and ADDM Spotlight
Active Session History, in "one-second samples", ASH analytics, Performance Hub and Top Activity Lite
Notifications: "e-mail, OS scripts, PL/SQL procedures, SNMP traps, Webhooks and Slack", repeat notifications and administrator notification schedules
Metric and alert history, event history, Metric Extensions for database targets, Management Connectors
Dynamic metric baselines and adaptive metric thresholds, Monitoring Templates and Template Collections
Blackouts, Dynamic Runbooks, Event Compression, bottleneck detection, memory access mode, the Replay Compare Period report and the Exadata pages

Two sentences on that page settle the arguments that follow. "Any and all methods of accessing Oracle Diagnostics Pack functionality, whether through Enterprise Manager console, desktop widgets, command-line APIs, or direct access to the underlying data, require an Oracle Diagnostics Pack license." And: "These management packs can be purchased only with Enterprise Edition. The features in these packs are accessible through Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Express, and APIs provided with Oracle Database software." A Standard Edition 2 database gets the base features and nothing above this line, at any price.

What needs the Tuning Pack

The Tuning Pack list is shorter: the In-Memory Advisor, the SQL Access Advisor, the SQL Tuning Advisor, which "Includes an automatic mode to run during system maintenance windows", Automatic SQL Tuning, SQL Profiles, Real-time Database Operations Monitoring, Real-time SQL and PL/SQL Monitoring, and Reorganize objects. The condition is one line: "The Oracle Tuning Pack requires the Oracle Diagnostics Pack."

The price

Item	Per processor, list	Support, each year
Enterprise Manager base	Free with any Oracle license or support contract	Included
Oracle Diagnostics Pack	$7,500	$1,650 (22%)
Oracle Tuning Pack	$5,000	$1,100 (22%)
Both packs	$12,500	$2,750

The figures are Oracle's Technology Global Price List of 15 September 2026, list price, and the packs are licensed like the database they run on, by processor at the core factor, 0.5 for the Intel and AMD processors in almost every x86 server. A two-socket server with 16 cores is 8 processor licenses:

Estate	Diagnostics Pack	Both packs	Scops Professional
One server, 16 cores, 8 processor licenses	$60,000, then $13,200 a year	$100,000, then $22,000 a year	$499 a year for the database on it
Five such servers, one database each	$300,000, then $66,000 a year	$500,000, then $110,000 a year	$2,257 a year for the five
The five over five years	$630,000	$1,050,000	$11,285

The Diagnostics Pack cost page has the arithmetic and the manual's object list. The free Enterprise Manager is the row missing from this table: a console with alerts you have to go and look at, on Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition 2 alike.

What the free part costs to run

Enterprise Manager is a product of its own to install, patch and upgrade. Its architecture is an Oracle Management Service on WebLogic Server, a Management Repository on an Oracle database, which the 24ai upgrade prerequisites require to be 19.22 or later, and a Management Agent on every monitored host. Oracle's own forum FAQ puts the end of support for 13.5 at 31 December 2026, and the upgrade to 24ai is out-of-place: a new installation beside the old one. None of this is a license fee, and all of it is a server, a database, a WebLogic domain and an agent fleet that someone runs, for a console that, without the packs, cannot email an alert.

What Scops gives for the price of none of it

Need	Enterprise Manager, free	Enterprise Manager with the packs	Scops
An alert that reaches you	Console only; notifications need the Diagnostics Pack	E-mail, SNMP traps, webhooks, Slack	Included: a notification on every finding, with the cause named
Session history	None	ASH, with the Diagnostics Pack, Enterprise Edition only	Every session every 5 seconds, on Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition 2, kept in the Scops repository
Finding the problem	Metric thresholds	ADDM, adaptive thresholds, dynamic baselines	Radar Engine: 75+ detectors that forecast, catch pile-ups and anomalies, each naming its cause
An assistant	Not stated	A generative AI assistant announced with 24ai; which pack, not stated	Scops AI, 40+ agentic tools over the live database, with your own model
On the database servers	An agent on every host	An agent on every host	Nothing; one read-only account through the listener
To run	OMS on WebLogic, a repository database, the agents	The same	One Windows server; the repository is a schema on a database you already run
Price	$0 in licenses, plus the servers and the people to run it	$7,500 per processor for the Diagnostics Pack, $5,000 for the Tuning Pack, plus 22% a year, Enterprise Edition only	Community free for 2 databases; Professional $499 per database a year, each further one 5% less

Scops is agentless and needs no Oracle pack: it samples the sessions itself, every 5 seconds, so the history, the notifications and the detection work the same on Standard Edition 2, where the packs cannot be bought, and on Enterprise Edition, where they no longer have to be. The per-database pack switch is off by default, and the License page keeps the record of every pack and option each database uses, so the review that follows a free Enterprise Manager is one you run yourself, first.

Questions

Is Oracle Enterprise Manager free?
The base installation is: Oracle's licensing manual says it "includes several features free of charge with the purchase of any Oracle software license or Support contract". Notifications, metric and alert history, AWR, ASH, ADDM, Performance Hub, adaptive thresholds and Dynamic Runbooks are the Diagnostics Pack, $7,500 per processor list plus 22% a year, and the advisors and SQL Monitor are the Tuning Pack, $5,000 more.

Can the free Enterprise Manager send alerts?
No. The base functionality page lets you "Configure thresholds for metrics and view alerts" and adds "This excludes notifications which requires one or more licensed Packs." E-mail, SNMP traps, webhooks and Slack are listed under the Diagnostics Pack.

Does Enterprise Manager need the Diagnostics Pack?
To monitor performance, yes: Performance Hub, ASH, AWR, ADDM, metric history and notifications are all on the pack's list, and the manual says any method of reaching them, including "direct access to the underlying data", requires the license.

Can I use Enterprise Manager with Standard Edition 2?
The base features, yes: "Users of Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition databases can use the Base Framework features and the Base Database Management Features." The packs cannot be purchased for SE2, so none of the performance pages apply. Scops monitors SE2 in full, with session history, because it samples the sessions itself.

What does Enterprise Manager cost for one server?
For a 16-core x86 server, 8 processor licenses at core factor 0.5: $60,000 for the Diagnostics Pack and then $13,200 a year, or $100,000 and $22,000 a year with the Tuning Pack, at list price, plus the management server, the repository database and the agents to run. Scops Professional is $499 a year for the database on that server.