Grid Control or 3rd Party products

To a friend, I had this to say:

I would prefer Oracle products like Grid Control dealing with the Oracle
database rather than 3rd party products, especially when tweaking is involved.
No one would know Oracle better than Oracle.

In fact, even reading by 3rd party products may be unsupported. As an
example, take the case of 3rd party products that read Oracle redo logs to
replicate data and dont go through the Logminer interface. Have a loook at
Oracle Metalink Note:97080.1 which says that this is not a supported interface
and the data in the destination database cannot be assured in the case of
unsupported proprietarty interfaces to the log files since Oracle can and does
change the data in the log files when fixing bugs. In such a case, 3rd party
products are not aware of such internal changes in their proprietary interfaces.

Likewise, even if a performance Guru were to write a tool to interact with the
Oracle database, I would still prefer Oracle Grid Control. Why?

Because Oracle know what they are doing. Because they are the ones who have created the database and all the tuning features in 9i, 10g and 11g. Because of the world-class Enterprise level support for the tool, available around the world and around the clock (how many companies can equal Oracle Worldwide support's strengths?). Because of the knowledge that Grid Control is already better (SLAs, Dashboards, Quality Control. etc) than previous releases and will be enhanced more and more by Oracle in future releases.

And because of the knowledge that Oracle will be there for us much more than any other 3rd party company or perfornance gurus.

Just my view, but it is echoed by a lot of other DBAs.