Test Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
2024-10-23T22:25:00Z
Oct 23, 2024
While I don't see any issues with LoadRunner's functionality, the cost of the tool is a major factor. Many of my customers have had to switch to different tools due to the cost of LoadRunner, despite its advantages, leading them to alternatives like JMeter and RPT. Additionally, the packaging of the product, where different protocols come with separate plans, is not very convenient compared to other tools where licenses include all protocols.
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.
It would be beneficial if LoadRunner could optimize resource usage, especially for protocols that require significant resources, like TrueClient, which interacts directly with the UI. If they could improve resource usage, like ingest or for the load generator, using less CPU or RAM memory, that would be great. That's where I have problems. In real time, when they ask for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users, I have to provision a lot of virtual machines to define this load. Then there are situations with certain platforms, especially document management platforms, where the technology is so weird that normal LoadRunner protocols cannot detect it. So, in that case, I have to use that special TruClient protocol. I have to use the TruClient protocol, which actually clicks on the object. Despite the SQL technology, I can still create a script and test for performance. So what I would appreciate a lot is if this protocol would require less resources on a normal virtual machine. I can use fewer concurrent users with TruClient protocols as opposed to almost one hundred with HTTP/HTML. As opposed to many more with HTTP/HTML from, let's say, JMeter. So, optimization at that level for resource consumption by OpenText would be much appreciated.
Some minor issues, like controller crashes and script generation, take time. Sometimes, the code is not generated when we record the scripts in the backend. After clearing the cache, the solution sorts out issues, like identifying the root cause. LoadRunner integrates with specific tools seamlessly. We do have plans to integrate with Dynatrace or Splunk.
The tool must improve the ease of gathering and reporting when larger datasets are generated. It must provide better and more direct information. There's a lot of digging around to try and address issues when they arise. Anytime we bring up a window, and it's waiting to do something, it must give a visual indication that it's doing something.
Learn what your peers think about OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
After they get over the acquisition, the first improvement is going to be tailoring it for their existing stack of other products. How would LoadRunner work for Documentum? How would it work for Business Network? How would it work for other apps? They can have a pre-package or a guide because they are all in the same family as opposed to being outside. When I spoke to the LoadRunner guys, I said, "You are not a part of the family. You have a simple content server test pack, and you have some accelerators that will get me going with your LoadRunner on another OpenText product." They said, "We just started building those because we have just formally become part of the family." That is going to come out. That is going to add value as I roll out LoadRunner and put it on the mix for other customers and new prospects. When those accelerators are there, I would trust them more. I trusted it previously when they were outside or not inside the box. Now that they are both inside the box, I am expecting synergy to be there.
The last few years I haven't seen the need for any improvements to the tool other than fancy stuff or maybe moving from client-server to PC or LoadRunner enterprise. There are a lot of tools in the market nowadays where you don't need to spend much time on scripting. Focus on improving the scripless capabilities. There is not much value added when upgrading/migrating from older versions to newer versions. OpenText should focus on important features and make end-users like us go for Loadrunner/OpenText products as soon as they are in the market.
Senior delivery manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
2023-08-29T03:21:00Z
Aug 29, 2023
Offering a direct integration feature would ensure a completely smooth experience. Until now, we had to use different tools running in the back to get a perfectly detailed analysis.
Program Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
2023-03-29T15:28:38Z
Mar 29, 2023
Some areas for improvement in the solution are mainly based on the fact that right now, in the market, there are emerging low-code or no-code platforms, like NeoLoad. In Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise, we have to work on scripting. So, I need a skillful resource if I want to hire anyone. In the case of NeoLoad, a low-code environment, and platform, I don't have to search for a skilled resource. I can provide cross-skill training to the existing workforce, and they can work for me. In Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise, I need to spend a lot of time training people, while on other low-code or no-code platforms, I need not invest that much time.
Senior Test Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
MSP
2022-10-24T18:01:08Z
Oct 24, 2022
While they keep on working on improving the tool level, the tool has instability in terms of loading and processing. There are a lot of times hanging issues up until version 11 or 11.2. After that, the productions are pretty stable. They changed the GUI. They had wanted to change the GUI to improve the look and feel. However, since that time, we see a lot of hanging issues. The implementation process can be a bit complex. Even with 15 years of experience, I have trouble finding things. They need to make scalability functionality better. We've raised hundreds of bugs in the Ajax TruClient protocol. I don't know how they are doing testing. However, they should test it in other scenarios. When you're releasing a protocol, the test coverage should be more. They need to do a better job at releasing a full product instead of releasing something half-done and fixing it along the way. The solution is expensive.
Performance Test Consultant at Deloitte at Deloitte
Real User
2022-08-16T06:02:00Z
Aug 16, 2022
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.
Right now, we are in research mode, and we are yet to adopt the solution. The installation has not been straightforward, and we have had so many problems. We have had to re-install, try to install on a different machine, etc. We have not been able to launch the LRE server itself yet. It's not a consistent solution. Sometimes, it's executes well, and at other times, graphics will not show up, or we'll need to restart the services, for example. If I change my host controller, then my graphical report goes missing. I'd like to see this improved so that the graphical report is brought to the analysis. Only the LRE server is codable to give the HTML report. Also, instead of uploading the script, it would be good to have a check-in/checkout option. At present, because the script is uploaded, the version control is missing. Version control sessions would be nice to have as well.
DevOps Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2022-03-14T16:07:20Z
Mar 14, 2022
I believe the data that demonstrates the automated correlations should be corrected. In addition, because it requires a lot of hardware, true client-based scripting should be improved. That needs to be improved.
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.
Senior IT Process Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-06-15T17:08:00Z
Jun 15, 2021
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.
Performance Test Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-05-24T17:46:00Z
May 24, 2021
Something that is missing is a platform where I can share practices with my team. I would like to be able to inform my team members of specific best practices, but at this point, I can only share scripts and stuff like that with them. Having a private community for my own team, where I can share information about best practices and skills, would be helpful. Micro Focus needs to improve in terms of support. With the same support plan but when the product was owned by HP, support was more responsive and better coordinated. The monitoring and related analytical capabilities for load tests should be brought up to industry standards. This product integrates well with tools like Dynatrace and AppDynamics but having the built-in functionality improved would be a nice thing to have.
Laboratory Director at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Real User
2020-10-30T15:54:20Z
Oct 30, 2020
I think LoadRunner is still getting into grips with me — maybe, I've not used it that much. It's not that popular on the cloud. Also, we have not tried this on mobile platforms with mobile virtual users.
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.
DevOps Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2020-06-17T10:56:04Z
Jun 17, 2020
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.
Managed Services Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
MSP
2020-02-16T08:27:36Z
Feb 16, 2020
When you are looking at what areas of the product have room for improvement, it depends on the various clients that you have and when the new operating systems come out. It can get interesting. It would be nice to know how much GPU memory we are using because the data points are not there or it's hard to read. Also, it would nice to know what the network saturation levels are. It doesn't do that, although that is not what it was designed to do. We use it with another tool that can gather that information and provide us with the data points.
The solution is a very expensive tool when compared with other tools. The stability in some of the latest versions has not been ideal. They need to work to fix it so that it becomes reliably stable again. The cloud solution of LoadRunner is not user-friendly when compared to BlazeMeter. They need to improve their cloud offering in order to compete. It also shouldn't be a standalone tool.
Senior Consultant at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
2019-11-13T05:28:00Z
Nov 13, 2019
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.
Your globally distributed performance testing teams have the responsibility of driving quality acrossyour enterprise while testing a broad range of application types, managing costs and deploying applications that meet the performance requirements of your business. OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise delivers a collaborative testing platform that reduces complexity, centralizes resources and leverages shared assets and licenses to increase consistency across your enterprise.
While I don't see any issues with LoadRunner's functionality, the cost of the tool is a major factor. Many of my customers have had to switch to different tools due to the cost of LoadRunner, despite its advantages, leading them to alternatives like JMeter and RPT. Additionally, the packaging of the product, where different protocols come with separate plans, is not very convenient compared to other tools where licenses include all protocols.
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.
It would be beneficial if LoadRunner could optimize resource usage, especially for protocols that require significant resources, like TrueClient, which interacts directly with the UI. If they could improve resource usage, like ingest or for the load generator, using less CPU or RAM memory, that would be great. That's where I have problems. In real time, when they ask for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users, I have to provision a lot of virtual machines to define this load. Then there are situations with certain platforms, especially document management platforms, where the technology is so weird that normal LoadRunner protocols cannot detect it. So, in that case, I have to use that special TruClient protocol. I have to use the TruClient protocol, which actually clicks on the object. Despite the SQL technology, I can still create a script and test for performance. So what I would appreciate a lot is if this protocol would require less resources on a normal virtual machine. I can use fewer concurrent users with TruClient protocols as opposed to almost one hundred with HTTP/HTML. As opposed to many more with HTTP/HTML from, let's say, JMeter. So, optimization at that level for resource consumption by OpenText would be much appreciated.
Some minor issues, like controller crashes and script generation, take time. Sometimes, the code is not generated when we record the scripts in the backend. After clearing the cache, the solution sorts out issues, like identifying the root cause. LoadRunner integrates with specific tools seamlessly. We do have plans to integrate with Dynatrace or Splunk.
OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise needs to improve reporting.
The tool must improve the ease of gathering and reporting when larger datasets are generated. It must provide better and more direct information. There's a lot of digging around to try and address issues when they arise. Anytime we bring up a window, and it's waiting to do something, it must give a visual indication that it's doing something.
After they get over the acquisition, the first improvement is going to be tailoring it for their existing stack of other products. How would LoadRunner work for Documentum? How would it work for Business Network? How would it work for other apps? They can have a pre-package or a guide because they are all in the same family as opposed to being outside. When I spoke to the LoadRunner guys, I said, "You are not a part of the family. You have a simple content server test pack, and you have some accelerators that will get me going with your LoadRunner on another OpenText product." They said, "We just started building those because we have just formally become part of the family." That is going to come out. That is going to add value as I roll out LoadRunner and put it on the mix for other customers and new prospects. When those accelerators are there, I would trust them more. I trusted it previously when they were outside or not inside the box. Now that they are both inside the box, I am expecting synergy to be there.
The process of upgrading LoadRunner can be difficult and time-consuming.
OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise doesn't support some mainframe protocols. We had to build scripts to access the interface.
The debugging feature needs to include graphs.
The last few years I haven't seen the need for any improvements to the tool other than fancy stuff or maybe moving from client-server to PC or LoadRunner enterprise. There are a lot of tools in the market nowadays where you don't need to spend much time on scripting. Focus on improving the scripless capabilities. There is not much value added when upgrading/migrating from older versions to newer versions. OpenText should focus on important features and make end-users like us go for Loadrunner/OpenText products as soon as they are in the market.
Offering a direct integration feature would ensure a completely smooth experience. Until now, we had to use different tools running in the back to get a perfectly detailed analysis.
The solution should increase the free users limit to 500 for all Micro Focus products.
Some areas for improvement in the solution are mainly based on the fact that right now, in the market, there are emerging low-code or no-code platforms, like NeoLoad. In Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise, we have to work on scripting. So, I need a skillful resource if I want to hire anyone. In the case of NeoLoad, a low-code environment, and platform, I don't have to search for a skilled resource. I can provide cross-skill training to the existing workforce, and they can work for me. In Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise, I need to spend a lot of time training people, while on other low-code or no-code platforms, I need not invest that much time.
The solution can be improved by adding more AI to the True Client feature. The cost of the solution is high and can be improved.
While they keep on working on improving the tool level, the tool has instability in terms of loading and processing. There are a lot of times hanging issues up until version 11 or 11.2. After that, the productions are pretty stable. They changed the GUI. They had wanted to change the GUI to improve the look and feel. However, since that time, we see a lot of hanging issues. The implementation process can be a bit complex. Even with 15 years of experience, I have trouble finding things. They need to make scalability functionality better. We've raised hundreds of bugs in the Ajax TruClient protocol. I don't know how they are doing testing. However, they should test it in other scenarios. When you're releasing a protocol, the test coverage should be more. They need to do a better job at releasing a full product instead of releasing something half-done and fixing it along the way. The solution is expensive.
The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly, and by including autocorrelation capability.
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.
LoadRunner Enterprise's reporting should be quicker, easier, and more flexible.
Right now, we are in research mode, and we are yet to adopt the solution. The installation has not been straightforward, and we have had so many problems. We have had to re-install, try to install on a different machine, etc. We have not been able to launch the LRE server itself yet. It's not a consistent solution. Sometimes, it's executes well, and at other times, graphics will not show up, or we'll need to restart the services, for example. If I change my host controller, then my graphical report goes missing. I'd like to see this improved so that the graphical report is brought to the analysis. Only the LRE server is codable to give the HTML report. Also, instead of uploading the script, it would be good to have a check-in/checkout option. At present, because the script is uploaded, the version control is missing. Version control sessions would be nice to have as well.
I believe the data that demonstrates the automated correlations should be corrected. In addition, because it requires a lot of hardware, true client-based scripting should be improved. That needs to be improved.
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.
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.
Something that is missing is a platform where I can share practices with my team. I would like to be able to inform my team members of specific best practices, but at this point, I can only share scripts and stuff like that with them. Having a private community for my own team, where I can share information about best practices and skills, would be helpful. Micro Focus needs to improve in terms of support. With the same support plan but when the product was owned by HP, support was more responsive and better coordinated. The monitoring and related analytical capabilities for load tests should be brought up to industry standards. This product integrates well with tools like Dynatrace and AppDynamics but having the built-in functionality improved would be a nice thing to have.
I think LoadRunner is still getting into grips with me — maybe, I've not used it that much. It's not that popular on the cloud. Also, we have not tried this on mobile platforms with mobile virtual users.
The reporting has room for improvement.
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.
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.
When you are looking at what areas of the product have room for improvement, it depends on the various clients that you have and when the new operating systems come out. It can get interesting. It would be nice to know how much GPU memory we are using because the data points are not there or it's hard to read. Also, it would nice to know what the network saturation levels are. It doesn't do that, although that is not what it was designed to do. We use it with another tool that can gather that information and provide us with the data points.
The solution is a very expensive tool when compared with other tools. The stability in some of the latest versions has not been ideal. They need to work to fix it so that it becomes reliably stable again. The cloud solution of LoadRunner is not user-friendly when compared to BlazeMeter. They need to improve their cloud offering in order to compete. It also shouldn't be a standalone tool.
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.
Some features could sometimes disappear without reason. It's extremely recommended to take time to evaluates newer versions before upgrading.