OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise Reviews

As a tool, it's something that we can use in all aspects of performance testing, whether it's services, whether it's web, whether it's customized APIs, like Citrix. It's the tool for performance testing, and it's definitely the industry leader that I've been using for years. It's a very powerful tool.

Truthfully, I think performance is a fairly mature space now. There are not too many things popping up that we're saying, "You know, Performance Center doesn't do X, Y or Z." It's a pretty mature tool and we're happy with it.

In terms of having one tool it is helpful in terms of training. It has really great reporting features, so not only is it a good tool to do testing with, but when it comes to helping you produce good results that you can present up, it's an all around tool that has everything that you need within it. You don't have to go to other third-party tools for reporting or for different types of testing. It's a tool that is "one size fits all".

I think better or more integration with some of the monitoring tools that we're considering.

We're looking to bring in maybe AppDynamics. I personally don't know the integrations but having good integration tools is going to help us in the future.

I think some of the reporting features could be better. I haven't seen much change in terms of that aspect of it, the report analysis piece. It's been good enough but I haven't seen as much advancement in that space, the reporting analysis.

I find it very stable. I will say that with the changes to virtual machines and things like that, It is harder now to manage. That's one of the reasons we are looking at not only using Performance Center, but also StormRunner. That gets us away from needing to scale up; doing that within Performance Center can be difficult because you have to deal with the aspects of all that infrastructure. It's not the tool itself, but it's the underlying infrastructure that you have to manage. Something like StormRunner is promising because it gets you away from that a little bit. Somebody else is taking care of that aspect of it.

It's an enterprise type tool. It scales very well. Again, it's not the product that we have issue with scaling.

We have challenges with the number of VMs that we have. The issue with scaling up is we come up against our infrastructure team that wants to limit the number of VMs. They have to manage them. The whole VM-type design seems to be a lot more VMs, and when you need to scale up, it's even more VMs. I understand the cost savings with VMs but in terms of management, if you don't have that nailed down in terms of automation and all that monitoring, it's a challenge to scale up.

I think that's where our current Performance Center implementation is probably going to remain, but if we're going to scale up, we're really looking toward something with StormRunner, where we can scale up as we need and not have to worry about the whole managing of the infrastructure, cause that's a challenge.

I have used tech support. Not recently, not in the last 12 or 18 months, but yes, I've used tech support. They're responsive. I've had good support. They get to the point. There's not a lot of hand-holding, they expect you to know what you're doing. I have no problem with that. As long as I can get the answer, get what I need and get it done, I'm happy with that.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, it was pre-existing. We use Performance Center, but as the HPE ALM piece is managed by a separate tools group, that's a challenge because we don't have control over the whole implementation.

I've assisted with the Performance Center upgrade piece a little bit, installing it, but in general, we have a whole separate group that does it.

When looking for a vendor to work with the number one thing is does a tool do what it needs to do? Second, of course, support. Stability and the ability to scale are pretty important but I think that's grouped under the tool itself. It has to be an enterprise ready scalable tool.

Regarding the vendor itself, support, being responsive, having a way to access the support that's not overly obtrusive. I don't mind doing emails or logging onto a website, just as long as it's not too convoluted. Sometimes I feel like you have to go through 20 steps to get somebody to call you back and every customer support or technical support has their process. As long as it's not overly going through hoops to be able to access that.

In terms of advice, you have to do the math. There are a lot of free tools or tools that you write yourself. You just have to make sure that, long term, are those things maintainable, supportable? Do you have the training? Do you have the support? You have to bake all that in before you make a decision. It's not to say those other tools aren't valid, and people do a lot with them but, for example, if the tool needs programming skills, do you have those skills? Do you have a team with those skills? And how much is it going to cost to keep, hire, or maintain your staff with those tools? So you have to do the math to make that kind of decision, what the right tool is.

I think the tool does what it really needs to do and I've never had an issue with their support. I think they're definitely the industry leading product for performance.

It supports an extensive portfolio of protocols. It supports everything from the very basic web HTTP, which is kind of the bread and butter of load performance testing tools, to Citrix, Oracle, and even some Real X, and others. The breadth of the product is very valuable.

It is a very powerful tool. They pitch it as the market leader and it kind of is. It's that big “one-tool-fits-all” kind of option. You don't need to go and get several tools, each of which supports an individual kind of protocol. You can do pretty much everything on the entire stack with one tool. That makes it good.

It centralized our ability to offer a performance engineering service. We’ve been up as a one-stop shop for projects and programs to come in. We know what tools we’re going to use. Rather than custom fitting something for each project, we can say, “This is what we're going to recommend."

I'd like to see a more shared data repository. They have their costs up. I think they could expand it out a bit more so we could have it running across synthetic users and protocol types.

The stability is very good. A couple years ago, you might have been able to point a finger at HPE and say maybe they weren't doing enough with the product; so it was probably unstable. As it is, over the last couple of years, they've innovated a bit more. There's been a bit more change without losing the core stability.

The scalability is good. We got Performance Center, which is kind of the enterprise version of LoadRunner. That solved a number of pinch points for us by enabling us to run multiple performance engineering programs at once; so that is really good.

Technical support is really good. I’ve had stuff bounced around the world to have problems solved.

We were previously using LoadRunner and we moved to Performance Center. Under the covers, they are very much the same, but Performance Center just has a lot more flexibility from a licensing perspective and from a setup and management perspective. It was kind of a natural evolution.

The initial setup was really reasonably straightforward. We pretty much just followed the installation guide.

We also considered Microsoft. We chose HPE because of its breadth of capability.

When we selected a vendor, it was a trade-off between having the best in class and the price. It needs to be cheap and we need to get along with them.

Whether I would advise colleagues to choose this solution is entirely situationally dependent. It fits our needs and our project portfolio, but that doesn't mean that it will meet everyone else's needs.

It helps us to test the performance of our applications at load, and what sets it apart is the number of types of applications that it covers from web to back office, and even mobile. Makes multiple protocols available to us.

It gives us advanced reporting. Allows us to compare performance as we make application changes, and scale to the level that we need as a large organization.

I'd like to see feedback from production, to see what scenarios to run, and even better integrations into some other products such as AppDynamics.

I've been using LoadRunner for some 15 to 18 years personally, but at the company I'm at, for about six months.

Yes, I would say it is stable. We haven't had a problem with stability.

I believe it will meet our needs into the future. We heard today that you can scale up to 2,000,000 users even with the sister product, which is StormRunner. We haven't had any issues with scalability.

We use a third-party for tech support and they do a great job.

Straightforward. Very easy to do.

I think it's the best product out there for performance and load testing.

Performance Center allows multiple users to access and work on a project simultaneously. 

Additionally, it keeps a run log and allows for script and scenario versioning. 

I also like the scheduling feature that allows us to manage multiple projects using the same controller and load generators.

I am a performance tester, and I need a product that can maintain my scripts, scenarios, monitors and run logs. Performance Center is my product of choice.

Just recently, I used the command line feature to create scripts that can be used across multiple environments. That feature saved me a great deal of time --thousands in man hours over the last year.

The trending reports do not always work as I would expect them to. I have had issues with transaction times being pulled in correctly. 

Additionally, trending a test run can take over 30 minutes when it should take five.

I've used it for five years.

Performance Center requires regular maintenance in order to remain stabl

No

The company I work for provides Performance Center support.  Orasi has won several awards for their HP support.  I use Orasi support when ever I require customer service for an HP product.  I have never had an opportunity to use HP customer service.

I have had the opportunity to use two other products briefly. Unfortunately, I did not have enough experience to speak to this with any authority.

I was not involved in the deployment of any of the instances of Performance Center that I have used. However, I have been involved in three different upgrades for three different clients. 

When Performance Center is managed properly with proper maintenance, there were no issues with upgrades. I have seen instances of script corruption, user access difficulties and project corruption. 

It is necessary to have an experienced Performance Center administrator providing regular maintenance.

Orasi Software does Performance Center implementation. I am not a member of that team. I have been on projects where Performance Center was implemented by the client and then Orasi was called to correct any issues. 

Again, I cannot stress enough how important it is to have an experienced administrator. It may cost more initially but it will save time and money later.

The return on investment is immeasurable. One of my first clients was an entertainment company that called us after their production site had gone down for a day. The reservation system was down for over six hours. They estimated they had lost in excess of three million dollars an hour. 

Regular performance testing prevents such occurrences. Needless to say they have not been down since.

The price tag on Performance Center is a large one. It can be daunting. There are so many options now with Cloud Controllers, using Cloud Load Generators, purchasing VUser licenses by the day or even hour. Additionally, Performance Center in the cloud relieves you of the essential maintenance and administration requirements.

I was trained on HP LoadRunner and then Performance Center.  I was not involved in any evaluation process.

Performance Center is not difficult to pick up for a beginner. When I was first introduced to Performance Center, I had just started my career as a performance test engineer. It is not completely intuitive though. I believe there are some extraneous requirements. As I mentioned before an experience administrator is recommended.

The command line feature allows you to set a parameter value at the scenario level. It can be applied to all scripts in a scenario. This feature has saved me a great deal of time.

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 ability to monitor and restart load testing components remotely, and the scheduling feature.

Prior to upgrading to Performance Center, my organization used a shared spreadsheet to schedule or reserve resources such as load generators or controllers. The built-in feature of Performance Center that does this, has made allocation of resources much, much easier.

Browser compatibility. IE is no longer the only browser out there, so providing users the choice of what browser to use would be great!

I've used it for approximately one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

7/10 HP support is getting better. Response times from support engineers are pretty good when using the online ticket system. The Knowledge Base still needs work: searches return far too many results, and their support site’s filtering or employment of key words or phrases seems ineffectual.

We previously used HP LoadRunner. Choosing Performance Center was an obvious upgrade for us. We also use other HP products such as UFT and Quality Center, so maintaining the cohesive environment made sense.

It was fairly straightforward, but determining how many servers were needed to host the application took some time to suss out. Performance Center is a resource-intensive app with many “moving parts” or components to consider.

We did it in-house with the help of a consultant.

The UI itself is very user friendly. So even though I support six different applications, I don’t have to go back and re-teach myself.

We've eliminated a lot of production issues because we are able to test so many virtual users at once. It's pretty amazing to run a test environment and have virtual five thousand users. We also need to 24/7 support for our thousands of customers. This solution gets all the bugs out of other applications so when they do go to run, they're ready.

Very stable. Our only issue is that we consistently need more load generators.

It has supported our enormous, continuous growth very quickly compared to other tools we’ve used. We also used IBM Rational Team Concert, which could not support the growth in the same way.

Not as fast as I would like, but they work with our customers in addition to working with us which is great because we don’t always have to be involved.

Technical support is the most important element for us when choosing a vendor.

I would say this is a very good tool as it allows small and huge applications to test with limitless size.