Why Scops

Why Scops Is the Best Oracle Monitoring Tool: No Agents, No Extra Oracle Licenses, and Everything a DBA Needs in One Place

2 November 2026

Scops is the best Oracle monitoring tool on price, on performance and on what it gives a DBA, and this page shows why with facts you can check: ours and the other vendors' own documentation, read in November 2026. Scops is the only Oracle monitoring platform that puts all of this in one product: nothing installed on the database servers, no Oracle pack needed, Standard Edition 2 monitored as fully as Enterprise Edition, 75+ detectors that give a date instead of a threshold, an AI assistant with 40+ tools that proves its answers with your own data, and the automation a DBA would otherwise script. Free for 2 databases.

1. No agents, and no extra Oracle licenses

Scops connects to each database through the listener with one Oracle account. The account needs CREATE SESSION and SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE, monitoring creates no objects, and nothing is installed on the database servers. One Windows server runs Scops for the whole estate, and you use it from a browser. The database pays for none of it: no agent process on the host, only short read-only queries through the listener.

The second half matters more. Most of what a DBA wants from monitoring, who was active at 14:10 and on which SQL, lives in Oracle's Active Session History and AWR, which belong to the Diagnostics Pack. The pack is an extra license on Enterprise Edition and cannot be licensed at all on Standard Edition 2. Scops does not use it. It reads the active sessions every 5 seconds and the SQL statistics every 10 minutes itself, keeps them in its own repository, and lists every plan change. So the history is there on every edition, and a license switch guards the one feature that touches Oracle's packs, so a pack is never used by accident. That is why the first line of this page is not marketing: an SE2 estate gets the same monitoring as an Enterprise Edition estate, and neither pays Oracle anything more for it.

For comparison, in Oracle Enterprise Manager even alert notifications for a database are in the Diagnostics Pack ("This excludes notifications which requires one or more licensed Packs", says its licensing guide), the Zabbix Oracle template states that it "queries the V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY dynamic performance view which is part of the Oracle Diagnostics Pack", and most other tools' documentation does not say either way. Scops says it in its docs, and its License page shows you which packs each database has used.

2. It sees what a DBA needs to see

A DBA's day is a list of questions, and Scops has a page for each:

• What is happening now: sessions, waits, blocking chains and top SQL, read every 5 seconds, in Live Activity; Multi-Activity pins up to six databases next to each other.
• What happened at 14:10: the same samples, kept, so last night's slow hour still has its sessions and statements in the morning.
• Which SQL got worse: statistics per statement and per plan every 10 minutes, every plan change and every new statement, in Insights and SQL details.
• Is this normal: every metric next to its own normal range, so Tuesday 09:00 is compared with other weekday mornings, not with Sunday night.
• How long until it fills: tablespaces, ASM, the recovery area, tables and datafiles, with the date, in Sizing.
• Are we protected: backups that are late or failed, standbys and how far behind they are, the alert log and OS findings, in Health Check; every alert and Radar finding on one Incidents page.
• Across the estate: rankings of all databases, a Daily Overview, Multi-SQL that runs one statement on the databases you pick and shows the answers in one table, and a License page with the packs and options each database has used.

The Oracle problems guides show the queries behind several of these pages, with the fix for each problem, so you can see what Scops is looking at before you install it.

3. Radar Engine: 75+ detectors that give you a date, not a threshold

A threshold says a number was crossed. Radar Engine, the detection layer of Scops, says what is happening and how long you have. Its detectors run every 5 minutes, hourly and daily, and each one is documented with its rules:

• A tablespace, an ASM disk group or the recovery area gets the date it fills at the current growth, checked against horizons of 14, 45 and 90 days.
• A sequence or identity column gets the date it runs out: Watch at 60 days, Warning at 21, Critical at 7. A range-partitioned table gets the date of its last partition.
• A blocking pile-up is reported while it forms, with the root blocker, not after the application has timed out.
• A plan that flipped overnight is reported with the old plan and the new one and their cost per execution.
• A metric outside its own normal range is an anomaly, whether or not it crossed a fixed line.
• An open transaction at 3 hours and 2 GB of undo, an ORA code repeated in the alert log, a process count that will reach the limit, a backup that did not run.

The findings are graded, not just raised. Radar learns the usual level of each hour, for weekdays and weekends apart, so the nightly batch does not page anyone every night; a live finding becomes Critical only after two cycles in a row; and each finding names its cause or says that it has none, with "Not measured" as a grade of its own, because a missing reading must never pass as good news. The full list, with every threshold, is in the detector reference, how Radar grades is documented, and Catching Oracle Problems Before They Become Outages explains the design. We publish the rules because a detector you cannot read is a detector you cannot trust.

4. The most capable AI assistant for Oracle

Scops AI is an agent with more than 40 tools over the data Scops collects: activity, SQL and plans, metrics, space, health, the whole estate, your own runbooks, and cards that propose a change. Ask "why was ORDERS slow between 14:00 and 15:00?" and the answer is the cause, the key number and its time window, with the evidence underneath, charted from what the tools returned. A check that could not run is shown as a gap, never as "no problem". It changes nothing by itself: to kill a session, it prepares a card, and only a click on that card runs it.

It is measured, not just demonstrated. The catalog has 200 questions, 134 rated expert, asked against a test estate with planted incidents, graded by a second model and by code that checks every number against the tool results. In the latest runs, 166 of 192 questions passed, and 98.8% of the numbers in the answers were found in the tool results. What We Learned Giving an AI Agent 40+ Oracle Tools has the whole method.

Nothing else in this market is built like that, by the vendors' own descriptions: Oracle's Select AI is "a productivity tool for SQL users and developers" that generates SQL on your application data; Oracle's SQLcl MCP server lets an AI client run "the full range of database operations" and comes with Oracle's own caution not to "grant LLMs direct access to production databases"; the copilots in observability suites answer over the suite's telemetry, with no Oracle session history to reason from unless you also pay for the pack. The best AI assistant for Oracle DBAs compares them one by one. You bring your own model (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, a compatible endpoint, or Claude at Anthropic, Microsoft Foundry or Amazon Bedrock), names are masked before a call leaves, and bind values and table rows are never sent, because Scops never reads them.

5. Automation that gives the time back

Monitoring tells you what to do. Scops does the routine part of it:

• Statistics: stale and missing optimizer statistics gathered inside the window you set, on the databases you choose.
• Datafiles: a datafile added, or a bigfile tablespace grown, when a tablespace on ASM crosses your levels, before ORA-01653.
• Archiving: old rows copied to an archive database in rowid chunks, each chunk its own transaction, and deleted from the source if you choose, with no downtime and no Partitioning option. How it works.
• Compression: the tables and indexes you select moved to the compression level you set, from one screen.
• Plan fix: a statement whose plan flipped set back to its best recent plan, starting in Dry Run so you see every proposed fix before it runs. It uses Oracle's packs, behind a license switch.
• Policies: one alert policy and one report policy for a group of databases, so a new database inherits the rules on the day it is added.

6. One window for the whole estate

Scops is one application window, in a browser, with the estate in it: Daily Overview, Live Activity, Insights on your SQL, Database Sizing, Metrics with anomalies, Healthcheck and Scops AI a click apart, and every finding leading to the sessions, statements and numbers behind it. The live demo is the fastest way to judge that for yourself; it runs on made-up data and needs no sign-up.

7. The best price for what you get

Community is free for 2 databases and includes Radar Engine, alerts, reports and Scops AI. Professional is $499 per database a year, each further database costs 5% less than the one before, down to half the list price, and there is no per-user, per-host or per-agent fee because there are no agents. Archiving and Compression & Statistics are add-ons. No other tool in our comparison gives session history, 75+ detectors, an AI assistant and automation for that price, and none gives all of it free for 2 databases. A database that costs you nothing extra in Oracle licenses should not cost a fortune to watch.

The claim, checked against the others

We read the public documentation of the other Oracle monitoring tools in November 2026 and looked for seven things. The table lists what each one's documentation states; "not stated" means the vendor's documentation does not say, which on a licensing question is an answer in itself.

Each cell has a source on the full comparison of 14 tools, which also covers Dynatrace, Quest Foglight, ManageEngine, PRTG, Site24x7, New Relic, eG Enterprise and dbWatch.

Questions

Why is Scops better than Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring?
Enterprise Manager needs an agent on each host and the Diagnostics Pack for notifications, history and the performance pages, and the pack is sold only with Enterprise Edition. Scops needs neither, collects its own history, adds 75+ detectors, an AI assistant and automation, and costs nothing extra in Oracle licenses. Scops vs Oracle Enterprise Manager goes through it line by line.

Does "no extra license" mean Scops is free?
It means Scops needs no Oracle pack and no Enterprise Edition feature, so your Oracle bill does not change. Scops itself is free for 2 databases in the Community edition; Professional is $499 per database a year.

What makes Scops different from SolarWinds DPA or Datadog?
Both are multi-database products that treat Oracle as one engine among many; Scops is built for Oracle only, which is where the 75+ detectors, the Oracle-specific AI tools and the automation (statistics, datafiles, archiving, compression) come from. Datadog needs its Agent on every host and charges per host; DPA sells by quote only and does not say whether it uses the Diagnostics Pack. Scops installs nothing, is free for 2 databases, and states in its docs that monitoring uses no pack.

Which Oracle versions and setups does Scops monitor?
Oracle Database 12.2 and later, including 19c, 21c and 26ai, Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition 2, RAC, pluggable databases, open standbys and Exadata.

Related

• The best Oracle monitoring tools, 14 compared
• Scops vs Oracle Enterprise Manager
• The best AI assistant for Oracle DBAs
• Oracle Standard Edition 2 monitoring
• Oracle monitoring without agents

Sources

• Scops docs: Detector reference, License, Supported databases; evaluation of Scops AI
• Oracle: Enterprise Manager Base Functionality, Database and Engineered Systems Management; About Select AI; SQLcl MCP Server
• SolarWinds: DPA for Oracle
• Datadog: Setting up Database Monitoring for self-hosted Oracle, pricing list
• DBmarlin: Oracle, pricing
• Zabbix: Oracle by Zabbix agent 2