OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

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.

The fact that you can have tens of thousands of virtual users and just expand an army of load generators to hammer on whatever application you're testing. It seems to be so scalable, and we haven't approached any limits. We have some projects that have over 100 load generators and they don't have many issues using the tool.

I think better support for cloud-based load generators would help. For example, integrate with Amazon AWS so you can quickly spin up a load generator in the cloud, use it, spin it down. That way, you're only paying for the actual time that it's being used. I know they have some functionality with that right now, but it could be improved because right now, our projects have to bare the cost of that infrastructure, whether it's an AWS or whether it's their own VMs, so that would help out with that.

Personally, I've been using LoadRunner or Performance Center for almost 10 years. But our deployed solution, that's available to projects, has only been deployed for about two and a half years.

I think Performance Center is pretty stable. It's the enterprise version of LoadRunner, which was a very mature tool. In fact, a lot of the components or installation files are still the exactly same. They've added this central, enterprise web front end to it that works pretty well. It's compatible on multiple browsers, on ALM. I would say it's a pretty mature, stable product.

More people seem to know how to use Performance Center, so we don't need as much help with it, but it is a more complicated product. HPE, or Micro Focus, has been responsive.

This is complex. We are hosting some of the components in the Deloitte network. The clients or the projects have to set up their own load generators. You have to configure firewall rules. We have to install these agents and point them at our environment to connect and troubleshoot connectivity issues. And every client has a different need. If you're behind a VPN - the app that you're testing - or it's inside the client network, that introduces some challenges. Just by the nature of the tool and what you're doing, it is complex.

It does everything you could hope for in a performance testing solution. It's not cheap, but that's not necessarily a concern for us because we're a large company. But it does anything you can think of. It's a pretty mature, robust tool.

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.  

It's the most flexible and best solution for our people who are both offshore and onshore because of the reporting capabilities. When we hire new employees, we look for people who have used this tool for testing experience.

It's allowed us to really focus on load testing and to get some results that we've reported to our business managers.

Another thing we really like is that it takes advantage of our monitoring tools when we're performance testing. They work well together.

The migration from LoadRunner to Performance Center was not as smooth as I would have liked. Some of it was not the tool but us, but it still could have been smoother and taken a little bit less time.

We started off with LoadRunner and we've been using that for probably a year, and then we just recently converted over to the Performance Center, which is their staff solution, in the last year.

We've had no issues with deployment, other than the initial migration.

It's stable now.

For situations in which we've had to scale up a little bit, they've been there to help us. We didn't have any trouble scaling.

I have not been as impressed as with their other products. They do respond, they do have the knowledge to do this but it hasn't been the same as what I've seen with other products. A little more challenging.

We were challenged in out setup, making it more complex, because we didn't us HP cloud and were using AWS instead. Some of the connections weren't set up properly.

Make sure you figure out what you want before you buy. Determine how many and what types of licenses you need.

Although there may be other products out there that do an amazing job, they don't necessarily have the skill set in the industry that makes it worth me going out there and looking at them.

During implementation, make sure you're talking about a cloud solution. You may be implementing in multiple areas, so planning is very important.

The most valuable features to us are--

• Ease of uploading the scripts, and
• Script maintenance.

• Multiple users from different locations can login.
• We can view tests at run time, which has helped us to execute tests from different time zones.

Sometimes the Book Time Slot option hangs if I cancel any test or time slot. Also, if the results file gets corrupted, then we need to contact HP to get the raw results.

• Standalone PC – six years
• SaaS PC – two years

We encountered no issues when deploying.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've scaled without issue.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

I have used Borland SilkTest, JMeter and LoadUI. JMeter and LoadUI have limitations in terms of the protocols. SilkTest is not as user friendly as Performance Center.

It was not complex, but I needed to consult HP support a couple of times for clarification and for help in registering the load injectors.

We did it in-house.

If the organization is going to test multiple protocols like Ajax, TruClient, Citrix, and SAP frequently, then there is definitely a high ROI in using this tool. If it's only the HTTP protocol being used, then other less expensive tools will be sufficient.

It is quite expensive.

We can centralize and execute various performance tests for business units across the globe.

We are able to run performance tests for Asia, EU, and the US from a centralized controller where each team can come together in their respective time zones, build and run the tests, as a test manager can review, and suggest various improvements along with infrastructure teams.

It's expensive, so could be cheaper. Also, it should have third-party tool integration.

I've used it for two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We switched due to common licences.

It was straightforward.

It's expensive, but useful if the usage is across the globe; others are pay-as-you-go type license which can be used to minimize the costs.

For me, it's the fact that I can train my team on a single tool. It really is kind of our Swiss Army Knife in that it can handle so many different types of protocols and technologies, and I don't have to train my team on multiple tools to handle each of those.

It's really given us a lot of insight into, especially as we've moved into DevOps now, incorporating that into our CI lifecycle. We can start the performance testing earlier on, carry the same results through, and have it as part of our release cycle.

Mobility, I think, is the biggest for us right now. We're really getting into mobile app testing, native mobile app testing, so native Android and IOS devices.

As far as scalability goes, we're able to spin up load generators to handle an incredible size of load, so really we're just limited by the amount of hardware that we can spin up for it.

We use a third-party partner to do tech support and it's been fantastic with them.

We have, ourselves, gotten to Mircro Focus on a couple of issues that have been actually escalated all the way up to the team back in Israel, I think that's where they're located.

That was fantastic. We actually had them, they came out on site with us, some of the developers for Performance Center, and talked to us about some of the ways that we were using it. Some of the features that they thought customers no longer needed that we were actually telling them were still valuable to us, and they wound up bringing back a few features that were on the chopping block.

I wasn't directly involved in the decision to invest in Performance Center because we'd been using it since it was LoadRunner, and I've been using it for pretty close to 20 years now. So that was before my time.

I was involved in it. I'd say it was fairly straightforward for us because we used our support partner to help us out, guide us through some of the pitfalls of the initial setup. But he gave us a two-week timeframe that he said we'd be able to get it set up in, and we easily had it set up within a week.

When looking at vendors, support is the big one. Also, ease of training people on the tool, and just the variety of technology supported.

In terms of advice, I would say the biggest choice is that Performance Center really is for a very large enterprise. So I'd say evaluate if it's really what you need for the size of your organization. But if it is, it really can support pretty much any kind of technology you throw at it.

Performance Center is really our go-to tool for anything that we have to test. It's just our default tool for whatever technology we have.