OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise Reviews

We use the solution for performance testing, including load testing and stress and endurance testing. We have worked with Citrix, Web-HTTP/HTML, Truclient Protocols and Mobile Applications as well. It has a good user interface and is user-friendly.

It helped us to achieve our goals within the stipulated time and is a good solution for load testing. The integration was smooth, and all the help can be found in the Micro Focus help blog. The examples were helpful for new protocols and functions. 

The load testing, site scope monitoring, analysis, and graphs during execution are all useful features. It offers easy integration with third-party tools like Dynatrace, Splunk, etc. It also offers a customizable template for results. 

We'd like the product to include protocol identifiers whenever a tester wants to test a new application. They need to at least capture traffic and analyze and send a recommended protocol. 

They should give insights (passed/failed) with throughput achievable of the load test based on the throughput and errors in our previous tests without using the trend option for load tests. 

I have been working on the LoadRunner Enterprise more than four years.

Technical support is always available and ready to help.

Positive

The vendor is an expert and helps with all the setup and installation tasks.

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.

We are using Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise for performance testing one of the client's ERP solutions.

Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise supports a lot of technologies. The existing performance testing that this tool is capable of is good. The protocols that are available are widely varied when compared to other performance testing tools. 

Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise needs to add more features for Citrix performance-based applications testing. This was one of the challenges we observed. Additionally, we experienced some APIs challenges.

I have been using Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise for approximately four years.

The stability and performance of Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise are very good. It is a very established tool and there are not any issues with the reliability.

The solution is highly scalable.

The support from Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise has been excellent.

We tried NeoLoad previously. We found that NeoLoad is a good competitor to Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise.

The price of Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise could improve, it is expensive.

When comparing Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise with the competitors that are coming into the market, I would look for an open-source version of this tool, if possible. The cost is one thing that is preventing people from using Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise. 

Some of the upcoming protocols are coming into the market, some of these are not supported by Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise. I can easily choose NeoLoad and complete what I need to with it. 

Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise is still evolving in the coming DevOps sector,  once the CICD architecture comes in, we will see more changes. I presume it is not up to date from a CICD support perspective.

I rate Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise a five out of ten.

For us, the features we value and use the most are web and HTTP support. It also has protocols that are easy to use, such as mainframe communication, and provides the ability to schedule functionalities.

For example, we've scheduled a week of performance testing, and when it runs, it does so without breaking. It then provides the resources available and analysis of the results of tests based on monitoring preferences.

It's our main tool for performance testing.

It needs integration with open-source tools. It should also have version control of scripts, SDI, or GitHub. I'd also like to see some kind of EDI integration and open-source support.

It's deployed well for us.

We're using version 11.5 right now and it's OK. The latest version is 12.5, and we need to upgrade ASAP. The previous versions were pretty unstable, but that's been fixed now.

It is very scalable.

The first-level guys are OK, but when you get to the R&D guys in third-level support, they're excellent. But our company policy requires us to go though our IT department as they're pretty experienced with Performance Center. But this takes a long time.

You should be aware of what you want to test. Could you settle for a less pricey solution? It's a very expensive tool, and it has a lot of features you may not need.

It's an expensive tool, so you need to be prepared to invest in training your people and to have patience as they will need to use it a lot to become adept at it.

I use the solution in my company for any type of testing that supports LoadRunner's protocols, like your web testing or app.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that the support is good, especially the one I am getting from OpenText. The tool is easy to work with if you know what to do. It has offered me some reliability against other products, like JMeter or some other tools. It has worked better for me anyway, most of the time. The tool makes it easy to implement the scripts.

The technical support offered by the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. It all depends on how my company manages the technical support offered by the product. My company does not deal directly with Micro Focus and would rather opt for professional services that have subscribed to Micro Focus. Even though the support is good, based on my experience, when I call the support, it goes to junior people first before it gets to a more technical person. I would want to get someone straight who can just be as technical as possible so I can resolve the issue quickly.

I have been using OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise for ten years.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

When it comes to how the product's scalability feature has impacted our company's testing capabilities, I would say that it is not something about the product but about performance testing. All the time, your performance testing always improves the quality of the product that you are about to deploy. The reporting in the tool is quite nice. It gives you detailed graphs, making it easy for businesses to understand things.

The licensing that the tool offers allows you to increase or get more licenses as quickly as possible instead of going through a whole process. You can just go to the portal and then download whatever licenses you want. Then, off you go. I think that is a very good model that I have seen since it makes things easier for users.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

In my company, we have a contact with whom I interact so that we can escalate our issues a bit quicker, and that helps a lot. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The product is quite easy to install and involves a straightforward process.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises version.

The solution can be deployed in two to three hours.

I am not sure about the cost savings, but not having to deploy stuff that would not work on production is a reason why it has assisted our company.

The pricing is based on the licensing you require. The prices would differ depending on the number of licenses you need. I wouldn't maybe compare it to any other tools. I rate the price as seven out of ten.

I have compared the tool with JMeter.

I don't have any challenges whatsoever with the integration.

The AI part is something that may be ahead of where I am with the OpenText LoadRunner side because what we have been looking at now is the introduction of ALM Octane instead.

There is no need to do regular technical maintenance for the solution.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Performance testing is an integral part of the testing life cycle. It determines whether the application being rolled out for end-users is in line with our expectations. It contributes quite well.

Initially, we had a completely on-premises implementation of LoadRunner. In 2018, we moved to cloud. The load generators are still internal, but the rest of the components sit in the Micro Focus cloud environment as a SaaS enterprise solution.

It's quite versatile. As a company, we have applications that span across different platforms and technologies, including legacy. We've been using it for applications on mainframes and with the latest technologies as well. We are able to attain our requirements from a performance testing standpoint. It helps us to be confident and to be aware of where issues are before we release a product to a wider audience.

When you have that scalability, it helps in performing end-to-end testing seamlessly. Our organization has applications that span multiple applications and technologies, to complete a single business process. That type of scalability helps us to achieve our performance testing objectives.

It has definitely helped us to identify the performance bottlenecks. Whenever we get into the procurement of other applications, we consider the historical performance KPIs. That really helps us to define those optimum KPIs with respect to other vendors.

In terms of efficiency, certain features have been introduced that were quite complementary and have really helped us with our delivery.

We have a centralized delivery team and we are able to meet enterprise requirements, which include different types of protocols that are involved, including scripting. The technology supports that and enables us to have a wider range of testing. Enterprise-level testing is something that we are satisfied with.

LoadRunner helps to facilitate sharing of best practices and skills. That's the way we expect any enterprise tool to work. It helps us to follow best practices and share them with other teams as well. It's quite important to have that consistency in terms of the quality of deliverables. It plays a key role. It enables us to have that benchmarking in terms of quality and is one of the crucial requirements for us.

The cross-project reporting and business views are among the valuable features because a huge platform can have multiple projects that are being executed in parallel. In that scenario, the reporting provides a holistic view for the stakeholders.

It would be good if we could look forward at the future technology needs we have. I would like to see Micro Focus provide more customer awareness around how LoadRunner can fulfill requirements with Big Data use cases, for example, where you do performance testing at the scale of data lakes. That also applies to when we need to deal with applications that are adopting the latest technologies, where our company doesn't have a footprint. It would help us to have a better view and be prepared to address those requirements efficiently.

The Micro Focus team has done a good job of introducing us to product owners and product managers, and in talking about the upcoming roadmap and features of the tool. That's been quite good. But when it comes to technologies our company has yet to adopt, I would like to see an indication from Micro Focus of how one does performance testing and what kinds of challenges can we foresee. Those kinds of studies would really help us.

We've been using LoadRunner since 2012.

The current licensing model is something that offers us flexibility, compared to what we had earlier. That's something which is really beneficial.

Any plans to increase our usage of LoadRunner depend on the business demand. Our company depends on a number of IT applications for which implementation is planned and are in scope for performance testing. We will carve out a plan for introducing performance testing of them.

Penetration and performance testing have increased over time and we are growing well. For applications that are already in the maintenance phase, depending on the volume of change that is introduced into them and how critical they are, we introduce performance testing. However, the number of custom applications is quite limited within our company.

So far, Micro Focus technical support has been smooth.

The solution supports multiple protocols such as open source, VuGen, TruWeb, TruClient, and SAP. A few years ago, we also wanted support for IoT. That did not exist. That's something we requested and the product team added it to the roadmap.

Since the early days, we were with HP Performance Center, and then with Micro Focus LoadRunner. We have stuck with the same supplier and product.

We have become very accustomed to the product, using it as long as we have. We have never come across any kind of difficulty and we have received support from the vendor whenever we have required help.

Our migration to LoadRunner Cloud happened in 2018, and took approximately six months. Our company was being cautious because we wanted to ensure business continuity, so we went for a phased project migration approach.

We went with that approach because there were multiple aspects that needed to be taken care of, from a security standpoint. We had to get required clearances because we needed to open certain ports and firewalls. That took some time. Once that was cleared, we did a proof of concept and quickly started moving projects in a phased manner, and we haven't seen many difficulties since then.

The contract that we had with Micro Focus was a bit complex, but now it's much simpler. As a customer, I have clarity about it. That is something that helps us to serve the business better.

It's a tool that really helps you when you have a very varied landscape and you have technologies and platforms and infrastructure which include legacy and new ones, with a mix of SaaS. LoadRunner has the ability to support different protocols and that serves the purpose. It's a one-stop solution.

We wanted to integrate LoadRunner reports to a time-series database, an open-source tool like Grafana. We learned a lot from that integration. The integration of the solution into a CI pipeline is something that we haven't explored widely, but it's an area we are looking forward to investing in soon. We are exploring more in terms of the integration capabilities of LoadRunner with other tools.

Performance testing is a specialized skill and we don't have too many using the solution, but we do have a couple of professionals who have been doing performance testing for more than 15 years. The rest have been into performance testing for the last seven to eight years, with exposure to different protocols and technologies. We are aiming to scale up and cross-train them in multiple protocols so that we can reach some of our goals without any hindrance this year. We would like to have less dependency, in terms of expertise, on specific technologies and protocols.

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.

What I really like is our team's core competence in building good tests that really do find issues, because of our full-time dedication to it. We have Performance Center as a platform to share with others that don't do performance testing full-time, so that they in an agile fashion, on demand can go ahead and get real issue-finding testing done; then to go ahead and have that pulled into trending reports so that even subtle differences or trends over time are found and not just game-changing defects. Again, it's a platform to get expert level things done for the masses.

It allows us to on the reporting end show how even though we don't have a smoking gun on this release, and it made everything so terrible that we've got real quality issues, we know when it started and that it's only getting worse. When you're tracking many subtle interactions, this is helpful.

I know there are integrations with continuous testing. It's got tie-ins to some of the newer tools to allow continuous testing. I'd love to see us not have to customize it, but for it to be out of the box.

I have some concern over its foundation for utilizing cloud testing hosts in the most integrated fashion. For example there is reliance in AWS to utilize default VPC, and also there is not deep knowledge about utilizing *nix hosts though they are supported.

I have used this solution at four different places starting 13 years ago.

It's good. It's been around a long time and we've been using it a long time. It's stable.

We're up to 60,000 users. It's got a good system for being able to take a vast amount of data that you haven't put into a particular report and chug through it. It could take a while, but it's stable at that.

It comes up periodically; typically when we're doing something we haven't done before. We actually have a combination of support through them and one of their value added re-sellers, AVNET. We actually get level one support through them, so it's a partnered supported arrangement.

Typically AVNET can handle anything unless it's truly about requesting a new feature or enhancement. You need to get back to the product management and developers to request such things.

It has many tiers, it's not a single system thing. You definitely have to take the time to architect it correctly, to have a full topology. I've done it a few times.

As professionals, we're supposed to be some what tool agnostic. We'll find a way to get it done. That said, it's a mature player in the space. We do enjoy some long time knowledge about squeezing the good stuff out of it.