OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

I am a managed service provider, a reseller, and a consultant. In other words, I am a total geek. 

I added a whole bunch of features and changes three or four years, but I don't know if they followed my recommendations; however, they did implement some changes that I suggested.

There's an onsite version and there's a cloud version. We typically don't want an enterprise type version because the clients that we work with are fairly large. The last place we used this solution employed 150,000 people.

We have clients that have as few as 10 employees, and other clients that have thousands of employees. I would say the mid-sized businesses that we work with are between 250 and 700 people.

It's all Citrix. We do load balance. We do load testing for Citrix deployments to determine whether or not we're going to get what we expected.

The ability to run long packages for extended periods of time, and actually mimic end users. That's really what we use it for.

We use it for validation. When you put together a system that has two to three thousand people on it, you need to be able to test it. To do that, you need a product that allows you to cast two to three thousand users on a system.

OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise Is very user-friendly.

The reporting has room for improvement.

I have been using this solution, on and off, for roughly six to seven years. 

In the last 12 months, I don't think I've actually loaded it up, but I have had my PS team load it up several times.

It's a stable solution. I'd give OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise a 4.5 out of 5 on stability.

We never experienced any bugs or glitches; those are typically in the actual loads that you're running, but that's not their fault, that's your fault.

Scalability-wise, I have not had any problems. It's gone as high as I needed it to go. There are issues when supporting two to three thousand users. I don't ever go any higher than that.

A typical test is between roughly 150 and 250 users, and the most I've ever gotten is 3000. The scalability has been there for what I needed it to do. I really can't speak outside of that realm.

I have never called their technical support, but their online documentation is pretty good.

We deployed three different solutions. One of them was free from VMware and the other one was Login PSI. We didn't really switch, it's just different feature sets we're looking for or methodology we want to use; whether or not the client wants to spend a hundred grand upfront.

For me, the initial setup is straightforward — I've done it a few times now.

The price is okay. You're able to buy it, as opposed to paying for a full year. You can just on-demand purchase it for your users for a day or two, which is nice in an MSP business like mine. If I need to use it for separate clients, I don't have to have a huge layout of capital upfront.

Make sure you know what your use case is before you buy it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine. It's very good at doing what it needs to do. I think that the reporting needs a little bit of work, but that's pretty much it. I think every reporting system needs a little bit of work, so take that with a grain of salt.

The primary use case for clients is that they often have large application development teams and application development projects that they needed to scale. So, for instance, if they were developing a new banking website and they needed to check that the application that sits on that website was scalable from a few hundred concurrent users to many thousands of users, they could test the load response using LoadRunner.  

That is what LoadRunner does, it does the performance testing and measures load-bearing response.  

I think, for me, the most valuable part of the product is the way you can do the basic testing. You can create the test script and then simulate thousands of users very, very easily. Instead of having to have lots-and-lots of systems that would emulate users, you just needed a couple to emulate tens of thousands of users. So the scalability of LoadRunner while it was testing scalability is really valuable.  

To improve the product, I think the integrations could be a little bit more slick. It does handle a lot of great integrations, but then some of them can be a little bit clunky to implement. The integration with third-party tools needs to be stepped up a little bit.  

As far as other things that need to be added, it has changed quite a lot recently, and I have not had vast amounts of experience with the latest version. So I am afraid it would not be fair for me to go further in expounding on that question. Things that I talk about may already have been included.  

I was a presales consultant and so I was kind of a technical consultant as well. I was working with the solution end-to-end for about seven years. My main focus was not LoadRunner for the entire time, but I gained knowledge of LoadRunner and I gave presentations about it. It has been about eight to twelve months since I last did anything serious with it. However, I am still familiar with the product.  

The scalability is really very good. In some ways, it is the purpose of the product: testing by use of scaling loads.  

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. But I have got to say, having worked on-and-off with LoadRunner over a period of time, I knew kind of instinctively how to set it up after a while. In other words, in my case, I would say it was simple. On the other hand, I think it the first time I tried to set it up it was a nightmare. After that, it was easy because I learned a lot about it. If I had to score it out of ten for initial setup with ten being the best, it would probably be seven-out-of-ten. It is not really going to be super easy for first-timers to deploy.  

The deployment could take quite a while, even when I was used to doing it. Getting the software installed and running is pretty quick and that is not a problem. But creating the projects and creating the test scripts can take a little while. To get up and running and doing stuff within it, it is probably just around a week. Doing it professionally with the integrations and with all the correct testing scripts, it can take a month and more. It really all depends on the purpose and how you want to use it.  

My advice to people considering LoadRunner is that if you are going to use the product, use it as part of your everyday application development lifecycle. Do not just use it right at the end, because it gives you some great insights during the development phase as well as at the end. You will end up writing cleaner application code with it. So bake the use of LoadRunner into your full application life cycle.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this solution as between and eight and nine-out-of-ten. I could be slightly biased, having worked for the company that sells it. But it is a very good, professional solution. With the latest updates, it is very comprehensive and one of the best products of the sort. Let's say nine-out-of-ten because there is always room for improvement.  

We use LoadRunner for performance testing.

This is a product that has a lot of capabilities and is the most mature tool of its kind in the market.

In the DevOps model, performance testing has become a bottleneck. This is because, after the completion of a sprint, people are in a hurry to send it to production but it first needs performance testing. Whenever there is a code change, it takes a lot of time to rescript and debug the script.

The TruClient protocol works well but it takes a lot of memory to run those tests, which is something that can be improved. Basically, it is too resource-intensive.

Performance testing needs to be better integrated into an agile framework.

There should be a way of automatically increasing the load generators on the cloud, without specifically having to spin up the agent and configure it. There is a third-party tool that does this. 

I have been using LoadRunner Enterprise for nine years.

Although it is stable, the whole performance testing process becomes very slow because of its complex scripting and having to rework the scripts. Ultimately, this will become obsolete if it is not improved.

LoadRunner is a scalable product. We have a team of four or five people who use it.

The technical support is very bad. It seems that people will ask a lot of unnecessary questions just to bide the time. We are very frustrated with the support team.

This is the only tool that I have used for performance testing. It is the tool that I use most of the time in my role.

The initial setup is fine. Deploying LoadRunner is quick but to set up the performance testing itself takes a lot of time.

When it comes to organization, people compare automation testing with performance testing. Automation testing is something that is very easily integrated within an agile and faster delivery framework. The scripting in automation testing is robust because it is GUI-based. When it comes to performance testing, it is request-response-based and the scripts are not very robust in some of the application platforms. Because of that, people feel that performance testing is a bottleneck and it takes a lot of time.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is a very user-friendly tool, especially when you compare it to a competitor like BlazeMeter.

The custom meter is nice. It has a lot of features.

When compared with BlazeMeter, I use the plain data. In the cloud after one year it has been very good.

With reporting, we will see the door unlock on the main portal very quickly, because LoadRunner has very good analysis tools. You can analyze data and get the error data as well. You can merge them together and dig down into specific points of time. It's great for correlating drafts within the number of users, between accounts, and with support. These functionalities are not there in BlazeMeter.

The solution is a very expensive tool when compared with other tools.

The stability in some of the latest versions has not been ideal. They need to work to fix it so that it becomes reliably stable again.

The cloud solution of LoadRunner is not user-friendly when compared to BlazeMeter. They need to improve their cloud offering in order to compete. It also shouldn't be a standalone tool.

I've been using the solution for about one year now.

In terms of stability, it depends on what you are using. Sometimes version 5.3 and the newer versions are not stable. The latest versions we are finding are not so stable when compared with the previous versions we've used, so some glitches are there. They need to rectify that. It was stable for two years, and now it's not.

The solution is scalable, and it's based on the number of licenses you have. In comparison, with BlazeMeter, I ran thousands of users, because it's very cheap and we could scale up the number of users easily with very little overhead.

In my experience, I've used BlazeMeter to scale up to 5,000 users. With OpenText, there are not more than 2,000 users.

In OpenText, I have worked with various types of clients. Some clients have platinum customer status, and some have gold. For those levels, the support will be there. At platinum, technical support is very helpful at updating their support and the support is good.

I also use BlazeMeter.

With LoadRunner, I use it with a paid tool, and since I am following the protocol, I need it to be easy to use. Whereas with BlazeMeter, we use it with JMeter. We need to use it sometimes if we want support. We need to configure some properties or some customers' ratings before we can use it.

The solution needs to reduce licensing costs. Its main competition, for example, is free to use, so I'm sure it's rather difficult to compete with it on a cost level.

We're partners with OpenText.

I haven't found many products in this particular niche that have compared to JMeter and BlazeMeter tools.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I suggest other potential users review OpenText. If the client has the budget for the solution, I'd recommend it. If they don't have a budget, I'd suggest they instead opt to look a freeware solution, and I'd suggest they evaluate JMeter or BlazeMeter.

Even if the protocol and API doesn't cover your need, you can always find a solution. That means you can always handle any situation with a piece of code, whatever the target application is.

For me, it's the best product for a performance team covering a large range of technologies and constraints.

The controller and analysis engine are a piece of cake, configuring the scenario and gathering results are the most important to me.

From my 15 years experience, I measure that I spend only 5% of my time to script, other tasks are more consuming: understanding the business process, making the dataset relevant and reliable with workflow (with VTS for instance which is very great), finding how and what to measure and so on.

Some features could sometimes disappear without reason. It's extremely recommended to take time to evaluates newer versions before upgrading.

We have used Performance Center for Java and .NET applications performance testing with a user load of 2000 users.

It has improved our organizational performance. We are delivering fine performance results and performance recommendations using Performance Center.

• Analysis of results
• Schedule of test
• We can book load generators.
• We can choose LGs based on the required configuration. 
• IP Spoofing can be done using Performance Center.

• Monitoring tools which are available in Performance Center.
• More real-time monitoring should be available for the system under test. 
• Dashboard creation should be implemented, so we can get the results in a desired format.

Using the ALM Performance Center resource monitors, you can monitor Windows, UNIX, SiteScope, and SNMP servers on a machine during the test run and determine why a bottleneck occurred on a particular machine. Provides the performance of load test applications and reliably on good reporting.

It is used to empower our organisation in assisting customers, addressing their concerns, finding solutions, and providing value, thus making it possible to put customer success first, and in the process, focus on the business.

• Merging Graphs
• Layout management
• Measurement menu
• The new features are nice, like cloud testing, mobile testing, continuous testing, etc.

• New features have been added in latest version and need to be improved with the DevOps integration.
• We are expecting more flexible to use Jenkins in continuous integration going forward. 

No issues.

No scalability issues.

Support is nice, quick, and responsive.

For a long time, we have been using HPE tools only.

It is straightforward.

We implemented through the vendor, who used highly-skilled professionals. 

ROI is 200%.

It is a bit expensive when compared with other tools.

We evaluated LoadRunner.

• Test and resource scheduling
• Test runs trending
• Network virtualization and the new NV Insights report
• Cloud integration
• New Web UI
• Jenkins integration
• Performance Application Lifecycle

• It made performance testing for global teams work more natural.
• Performance Application Lifecycle allowed us to really build our load test according to the traffic we see in production.
• Trending shows us exactly the performance impact of our latest software changes.
• Using Jenkins, we managed to automate our performance testing as part of the CI.

Features in the Web UI should be enhanced. We should be able to do everything from the Web UI. without ever needing to download the old ActiveX ALM UI.

Four years.

No issues.

No issues.

We easily managed to run load tests of 100K concurrent Vusers on our web application, so scalability was not an issue for us.

An eight out of 10.

A seven out of 10.

I did not rate other solutions.

Pretty straightforward.

In-house.

We considerd SOASTA CloudTest.

Probably its prime advantage, it provides a centralized location for testing.

The stability on the old versions is good. On the newer versions, I think the bleeding edge is still being worked on.

It is very scalable. No issues with scalability.

Premium support is great, but before that, when we just had general support, it was not all that great. We had issues with just trying to get support to call us back on tickets and also with the turnaround time on resolution.

It is not exactly straightforward. Their instructions were not all they could have been, but we still got it installed.