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Enterprise Manager 13.5 Support Ends on 31 December 2026: The 24ai Upgrade, or Scops in an Afternoon

3 November 2026

Oracle's Lifetime Support Policy gives Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.x its last month of Extended Support in December 2026, and Oracle's Enterprise Manager team has said the same of Premier Support for 13.5: 31 December 2026, with the last quarterly Release Updates before it. After that date 13.5 is on Sustaining Support, which brings no new fixes, no security alerts and no new certifications. There are two ways out: the upgrade to Enterprise Manager 24ai, an out-of-place project with a repository database upgrade inside it, and Scops, which is agentless, needs no Oracle pack and takes an afternoon.

The dates, from Oracle's own policy

ReleaseGAPremier Support endsExtended Support ends
Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.xDecember 2015December 2023December 2026
Enterprise Manager 24aiDecember 2024December 2027December 2029

Those are the rows of Oracle's Lifetime Support Policy for technology products, in the edition effective 2 October 2026. For 13.5 itself, Oracle's Enterprise Manager team wrote in January 2025 that Premier Support had been extended to 31 December 2026 and that quarterly Release Updates would continue through the end of 2026. Whichever line applies to your contract, the calendar is the same: the last Release Update of 13.5 arrives in 2026, and from 1 January 2027 the release is on Sustaining Support.

Sustaining Support is not nothing, and it is not support as a production system needs it. Oracle's policy lists what it leaves out: new updates and fixes, security alerts and critical patch updates, new certifications with Oracle products and third-party versions, and the 24-hour response commitment for Severity 1 requests. A monitoring system that cannot be patched against the next security advisory, and is not certified with the next database release it is supposed to watch, has stopped being a monitoring system.

The upgrade target has its own clock. Enterprise Manager 24ai reached general availability in December 2024, and its Premier Support ends in December 2027: twelve months after 13.5. The release you would spend 2026 upgrading to leaves Premier Support a year after the one you are leaving, and the stage after that, Extended Support, is a separate purchase under Oracle's policy.

What the upgrade to 24ai takes

Oracle's upgrade guide for 24ai Release 1 is precise about the path, and every item on it is a project of its own:

Add the certification matrix, the plug-ins, the connectors and the custom metric extensions, and the work is measured in weeks of a DBA's time, spent on the tool that is supposed to save it.

What stays the same after the upgrade

Oracle's Enterprise Manager FAQ says it plainly: 24ai introduces no new licensing requirements for the base platform or the Management Packs. That is the reassuring way of saying the old ones remain. The base console is free with a licensed Oracle product; the features a DBA actually monitors with are in the packs. According to Oracle's Enterprise Manager licensing manual, the Diagnostics Pack is required for notifications, metric and alert history, blackouts, monitoring templates, metric extensions, adaptive thresholds, AWR, ADDM, ASH and Performance Hub; the Tuning Pack requires the Diagnostics Pack; and both packs can be purchased only for Enterprise Edition. A Standard Edition 2 database in 24ai is watched as it was in 13.5: base features only. Scops vs Oracle Enterprise Manager goes through the pack list line by line.

The alternative that takes an afternoon

Scops is the most capable Oracle monitoring platform, and the part of it that matters on a deadline is what it does not need. It is agentless: nothing is installed on a database server, ever. One Windows server with two services connects through the listener, like any SQL client, with one account that holds CREATE SESSION and SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE, and reads. It needs no Oracle pack: the session history, the SQL statistics, the notifications and the detection come from Scops's own sampling, every 5 seconds for sessions, so Standard Edition 2 is monitored in full and Enterprise Edition needs no Diagnostics or Tuning Pack license for it. There is no repository database to upgrade, no WebLogic, no agent fleet, and the Oracle invoice does not move.

What arrives on the first day is more than Enterprise Manager offers after the upgrade:

A migration that fits in a week

  1. Day one: install and connect. Scops on one Windows server, a read-only account on each database, the databases added through the listener. Live detectors fire from the first hour; the ones that compare against the usual week learn it over the first days.
  2. Days two to five: run both. Enterprise Manager keeps its notifications while Scops proves its own. Every finding in Scops names its cause, so the comparison is quick: what Enterprise Manager reported after the fact, Scops reported as it began, with the object and the fix.
  3. Day five: switch the notifications. Mail from Scops to the on-call list, with exclusions and minimum levels set in Scops's own rules, which need no pack.
  4. After that: retire 13.5. The agents come off the database hosts, the OMS and its WebLogic go, the repository database is one fewer database to patch, and the packs are no longer a monitoring requirement.

Scops Community is free for 2 databases, enough to run the week on the two databases that matter most. Professional is $499 per database a year, each further database 5% less.

Questions

Is Enterprise Manager 13.5 still supported after 31 December 2026?
On Sustaining Support, for as long as the licence runs: access to My Oracle Support and to the fixes made before the date. No new fixes, security alerts, critical patch updates or certifications, by Oracle's own list.

Can I upgrade from 13.4 straight to 24ai?
No. Oracle's upgrade guide lists 13c Release 5 as the only source, with Release Update 22 as the minimum; older sites upgrade to 13.5 RU22 first, then to 24ai.

Does 24ai change the pack licences?
Oracle says it introduces no new licensing requirements, which means the existing ones stay: the Diagnostics Pack for notifications, history, AWR and ASH, the Tuning Pack on top of it, both for Enterprise Edition only.

Does Scops need an agent, a pack or a repository upgrade?
None of the three. One Windows server, one read-only account per database, no Oracle pack, and Standard Edition 2 monitored in full. Enterprise Manager can stay in place while Scops runs beside it.

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