IBM Rational Performance Tester Reviews

Customization and extensions made in Java is valuable because this can help you set elements to improve your results. 

Additionally, it gives you the ability to have an editor where you can see requests and responses, and the way to correlate it. 

Lastly, the possibility to cross data with your servers measure points such as CPU percentage, disk I/O, paging, etc.

Once we we're doing performance testing for a new system developed in Java, and the people in charge of development wanted to deploy the application as soon as possible for contract requirements, and were proposing to deploy it without performance testing it to gain two weeks. 

We refused to do that and thankfully we did it, because during testing the server launched a CPU page fault error meaning one of the eight CPUs the sun blade had was defective, and needed to be replaced.

I can't suggest anything as I haven't used the latest version.

I've used it for about eight years.

We had open many PMRs for problems found in the products, and I'm not sure if all of them have been fixed.

4/5 - customer service is not bad, but many times they said that for an issue found in the product it "works as designed" and in my honest opinion, they were not correct.

We chose this product because the client had a full contract with IBM for software services.

It wasn't complex as the documentation is vast.

Implementation was neither a vendor team nor in-house. It was done as a service contract. 

The main advice is to not forget to plan early all the testing cycles, and no matter how pushed you may be, don't give up on testing before deployment to the production environment, as this will save you a lot of money.

Real time view and its inbuilt root cause analysis tools is something which I like the most. This feature is something unique to RPT when compared to other market leading tools like load runner.

Like any other performance testing tool, this helped us to identify performance bottlenecks in the application prior to the go live. It also helped us to identify and pinpoint the issues in the applications code by using its inbuilt root cause analysis tools.

User friendliness can be better, as this is one area where it lacks. More over the connectivity options with other IBM in-house products like Rational Clear Quest, IBM Tivoli and Rational Team Concert can be improved.

We've used it for two years.

Yes, the tool seems to be unstable/unresponsive sometimes. The resource utilization by the tool itself is on the higher side when compared to other tools in the market.

Customer support is above average to excellent.

I have used a variety of the tools that are available.

It was straightforward.

It was done in-house, and I would advise you to have more JVM memory allocated for this product than the default amount.

The pricing is similar to Load Runner but the package for virtual user licencing is different. I would recommend this tool for small businesses with only web applications for performance testing.

This tool was the only option with the customer withwhom I worked with.

• Less coding needed
• Easy to understand
• Easy integrating it with existing systems
• I can test more than one performance test type (load testing, stress testing, scalability testing, etc)

Overall, all the features have been improved, especially if you need powerful performance testing tools. But, it would be better if this tool supported database connections directly, instead of importing from .csv file

I've used it for seven months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

Previously, I used JMeter, because if we are talking about the open version JMeter is nearly perfect in usability and reliability side. But, since the organization changed, I needed the more powerful tools.

It was straightforward.

As a consultant, my client implement this tools.

Now, the price slightly expensive especially if you are in small-medium company, but if you are in a medium-high company, and need the powerful tools with IBM great name, just use it. It would be better if IBM release the 'cheapest' version for the small-medium company.

The way how tests are presented in the tool, and the possibilities to edit tests and follow depending data using Data Correlation feature.

The Load Schedule has very nice preview, and the new Load Generator as the agent makes planing of testing environment capacity much simpler.

With each new version, the tool gets better and better features.

The handling of data correlations in the tool has helped us, and sped up our preparation of complex tests with a lot of security features, certificates, generally in enterprise environment. The tool supports Z/OS applications which is very important to our customers, as well.

I've been using it for over 10 years.

Sometimes new versions have bugs.

With each version, it becomes more and more stable.

IBM has very good support in this area, and an accessible knowledge base, so over 90% of issues can be resolved using the web. If you need it, IBM support for the tool is very fast and useful.

It depends on the scope, complexity and expected load. After introducing Load Generator Agent, as I already mentioned, setting up environment and capacity planning became simpler.

We implemented in-house and for our customers, in our lab for performance testing on demand, and we offer consulting services for the tool throughout the world.

IBM separately licenses tool and concurrent users (threads), but for this tool, IBM offers the renting of licenses over SaaS programs. Customers can rent licenses for a fixed time (minimum is one month) and use licenses during a projects duration. Licenses over SaaS are much cheaper and the customer gets IBM support.

We evaluate HP Load Runner and use JMeter. Generating of complex performance test with lot of data correlation was much faster and simpler using Rational Performance Tester. In the case of generating robotic performance testing, we still sometimes use JMeter. For LoadRunner, I would say it is a much more strategic decision when to use the tool.

The Resource Monitoring feature has more flexible options for different OS's such as Windows, Unix and Linux.

It provides the option to collect real-time data using ITM monitoring agents.

Reporting needs improvement to provide more customization options in the performance test analyst to build custom reports. Recent versions like 8.6, and 8.7 has better scalability on user load testing.

When compared to competitors, the reporting module in this version was missing user friendly customization on building report variants such asTransaction Percentile Summary etc. Also, I think time cannot be excluded in the report, and no options to create customized report templates exist for reusability. These are two improvement areas which I can think of and I am not sure if they are rectified in the recent release, since I haven’t got much opportunity to use the latest version recently.

I've used it for over one year.

8/10

8/10

The initial setup was not difficult and proper instruction guides are provided with sufficient step by step instructions.

It's one of the most cost-effective products on the market.

• Test Creation
• Execution

Helped in improving response times in a few of our transactions.

They need to have support for more protocols & frameworks, as well as making it more user friendly.

We've been using it for six months.

It's fair.

It's fair.

It was complex.

It was implemented in-house.

We chose this product because it was a better price than Loadrunner.

• Root cause analysis 
• Provides the response time breakdown at the method level
• Real time monitoring of CPU
• Memory
• Disk utilization

It has improved our visibility of reporting and simplifying performance testing for larger projects/programs. Also, it is being used for functional validation as well as for performance regression testing for on going builds/releases.

Installation and configuration processes, and support from IBM all need to be improved.

I've used it for six months.

Implementation is simple, but exploring the capability of this tools hasn't being marketed as well as LoadRunner/Performance Center 12 has been. More education needs to be provided to users.

The tool supports multiple protocols, such as HTTP, Citrix, and SAP. It enables me, as a consultant, to run performance tests against the most common application environments.

I can manage the complete performance test process from a single interface, which saves me from installing additional software and swapping between applications.

Provides very good user workload modelling functionality, which is important for me to accurately represent real business scenarios when designing my tests.

Very easy to customize and edit tests once recorded with lots of features for renaming, merging, splitting pages, and data driving tests.

Load generation is supported from the cloud via a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, which removes the need for us to provide additional hardware resources and network bandwidth for large tests.

Resource monitoring of the system under test infrastructure is also supported. This enables me to correlate performance statistics with resource utilization figures during analysis.

It supports our agile approach not only philosophically but now practically in enabling us to provide performance testing “On Demand” and earlier in the development lifecycle.

This allowed us to act quickly on several occasions where it was crucial to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks with minimal delay.

The installation and tool setup can take some time, since this involves several components. A review of the licensing implementation would help here.

There could be better process guidance to help inexperienced testers to follow procedures and navigate the tool.

We have been using this for 10 years.

There were no issues with stability, although as this is a Java-based tool. You do have to manage the “housekeeping” in terms of garbage collection and heap size optimization when running large load tests or executing tests for an extended period of time.

This tool is very scalable. This is one of its selling points. For large scale tests, i.e., 5000 virtual users and up, it performs very well.

When needed, I have found the technical support to be very in terms of speed of response and problem resolution ability.

JMeter was used previously, but we found it limited in terms of protocol support, scalability, and lack of support for the entire test process i.e., analysis and reporting.

The installation and tool setup can take some time since this involves several components. A review of the licensing implementation would help here.

This is not the most expensive tool in the market place, but of course, it is not open source.

The cloud load generation option could be a solution for companies not able or willing to invest in an enterprise performance test solution.

I would consider their token licensing option if you are looking into other testing and or development tools since you can optimize license usage by re-using licensees across the Rational tool set.

• Apache JMeter
• RadView WebLOAD
• Neotys NeoLoad

Realize that this tool will require some time and expertise to setup and configure. Make sure that you plan for this.