OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

Our primary use case for Performance Center is testing the performance of all of our applications.

One thing that always fails at our company is that after you have checked in an application then it usually crashes in some way. You get some strange error message. We found out you can open the test you have set up and usually, it works without the error the second time. So you just close the application test and open it again, and then it is okay. So that is quite confusing if you are new to the product, but you do not care about the inconvenience or even notice it after using the tool for a while. It does not seem very professional and it is really a buggy behavior that should be fixed.

One feature I would like to see included in the next release of Performance Center would be to be able to run more fluidly with True Client so you could put more virtual users in Performance Center. That would help. I'm not sure how easy it is to compile something like that, but it would be valuable.

We've been using Performance Center for about a year.

We have had some problems with instability. At one point Performance Center suddenly went down for two days, but usually, it works. It works okay now and has not been a problem, but it was worse in the beginning. They have changed something, so it is better now than it was, I think.

The scalability is good enough. Sometimes we get a message from the generators that they are at 80% or more capacity. That is an error we get quite commonly. We only have eight gigabytes on the generators and it is recommended to use 16 gigabytes. I guess that is likely the reason why we have this problem. This happens a lot more often when we are running TruClient. The 80% capacity error comes up very fast in that case. We can not run many users with TruClient at all.

It is not usually me who calls tech support but I got the impression that the team is quite pleased with it. Usually, it is good. On the other hand, we have had some problems now that are not resolved. For example, one of my applications is not running at all because we are running on version 12.53. There was some problem with the REST (Representational State Transfer) services and the coding part of our REST services. We were using a very old encoding version that we are not using anymore. We stopped using it a long time ago. But it was still supposed to be compatible in 12.53, and that is what we are using. I know the problem was fixed from version 12.56 and up, but we have not been able to complete the upgrade. 

I'm able to run the tests on the application locally, but not in Performance Center. So we are waiting for this upgrade at the moment to resolve these issues.

We are currently using 12.53 and we are trying to upgrade it to 12.63 but it looks like there's a problem with the upgrade. We would like to switch to take better advantage of some features that are currently difficult to work with. We used LoadRunner concurrently for a while, and while it was a good product there were things about Performance Center that we prefer.

I was not included in the process when they installed the solution, but it took quite a lot more time than I would have expected. I guess, based partly on the length of time it took, that it was not very straightforward to set up and must have been a bit difficult. The other reason it does not seem easy is that the team has tried to upgrade now two times now and both times they had to roll back to the previous version. We'll see when a fix is issued and they try to upgrade again if the issue is solved. It looks like there are problems with connecting properly. The team has a ticket in with Micro Focus about the problem, but we are not sure what the problem stems from and a resolution has not been provided.

I'm not quite sure about the exact pricing because I do not handle that part of the business, but I think the Performance Center is quite expensive. It is more expensive than LoadRunner, although I am not sure how many controllers you can run for the same price. They said Performance Center was costing us around 40 million Krones and that is about 4 million dollars. But I think that was with ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) as well and not only for Performance Center.

Before we used Performance Center at all, we used LoadRunner (Corporate version, 50 licenses). But now we changed over almost entirely to Performance Center and we are phasing LoadRunner out. For a while, we were running both at the same time to compare them. The nice thing is that we do not need to have many controllers connected with Performance Center. The bad thing is that more than one person may want to use the same generator. So sometimes we have problems. I guess we had the same problem before when we used LoadRunner because everyone can't run a test at the same time.

There are some good things and some bad things about Performance Center in comparison to LoadRunner. The good thing is that you are able to share the screen while you are running a test. On the other hand, you do not get all the same information you get with LoadRunner when you run the tests. After you have done the tests, you can just copy the completed file and you get the same test results as if you had run on LoadRunner. So that is not really a problem. But when first running the Performance Center application for testing, I missed some of the information I got from LoadRunner. It is just a different presentation.

The advice I would give to someone considering this product is that they should try LoadRunner first before they start using Performance Center — especially if it is a small company. They need to know and be able to compare LoadRunner to Performance Center in the right way. After you have used LoadRunner then compare Performance Center. If they are part of a small company and they expect to expand they will know the difference. If they are already a very big company, they can save some money by using Performance Center directly. We are quite a big company, so Performance Center makes sense for us.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Performance Center as an eight. It is only this low because we have had so many problems here installing it and upgrading it. Sometimes it runs very slow just to set up tests, or it just crashes. Like when setting up a spike test, you start using the spike test process and it suddenly crashes after you have almost finished everything. Executing the tests were a lot easier and more stable in LoadRunner.

You can manage to make Performance Center work, but you have to be patient.

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.

It provides a different platform for testing in an organized fashion. One of the big things is data warehousing, data analytics, you want to get from being reactive to proactive to predictive. Those are the progressions that we want to make. It's going to be extremely difficult when you start to incorporate testing platforms, testing techniques, to tooling, into pipeline, into any of these DevOps pipelines. If we can't collect the data, if we don't really know what's going on, then it becomes very hard to make testing decisions from tooling to technique to platforms. 

Performance Center innately provides you the ability to manage those assets. And it's also a different type of testing, independent of something that might be more unit based. We want to be able to test at the integration or the system level, which is a completely different approach to testing compared to a developer who may be doing something very, very low-level. Instead of changing the class.

We want to make sure that all these areas of testing are not just being done, but they're also able to be audited. Because, without access to the data, it makes it very difficult to implement solutions going forward. Whether they're new or they may be something that's up for modernization to keep up with DevOps and pipelining.

It has to be fully integrated into pipelines, it needs to be DevOps friendly. It needs to be easily digestible by management, and certainly developers. It's a developers' world, as it should be. They're the ones who create the applications and solve the problems in those applications. So it has to be positioned to be something that allows a team to make better decisions, to move through that progress I mentioned before, from reactive to proactive to predictive. Once you get the predictive you can make better decisions on how you should be teasing things, and Performance Center will have to follow the same trajectory. It has value, but the value needs to evolve and mature along with other aspects of application development.