What needs improvement with Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional?

Technical support needs to be faster, and the pricing should be more competitive. The virtual table server feature should be reintroduced. Some AI capabilities should be added. There should be an 'analyze the application' feature to recommend which protocol to use for recording.

Sometimes when we were migrating from one version to another, some of our scripts started failing. And configuration-wise, we used to get support since we had the license with us. We used to just connect with Micro Focus, and the turnaround time was very less. It was very fast. With my understanding and experience, for future releases, I suggest some correlation features that had to be tuned from the tool because, for SAP applications, capturing dynamic values from the responses and other technical things still had to be done manually.

Many times, the scripts are very lengthy, and traffic recording is tough. We're dealing with a huge chunk of data to record the traffic, and what happens is that LoadRunner takes a lot of time post-script validation to create its script after recording traffic from Ruckus. Sometimes, it gets hung because of the high resource utilization, and we have to re-record again if the requests are huge. So, LoadRunner experiences high resource utilization. Even though we have machines with higher configurations, I've observed this behavior. Heavy traffic recording results in the tool hanging. So heavy traffic recording makes the tool slow. To prepare a script, OpenText LoadRunner Professional slows down.

In terms of improvement, it lacks mobile testing features present in some competitors, like GitMatters, which I find valuable. Adding this capability would enhance the tool's versatility, making it more convenient for testing mobile applications directly.

The tool needs to work on capture script feature.

There are a few features that I've seen in other tools that I'd like to see implemented or enhanced. The installation and configuration process could be more streamlined, especially when it comes to distributed systems.

The monitoring technology in LoadRunner could be improved. It depends on another tool called SiteScope, but they only took a part of the features of SiteScope. They need to improve on that. If they don't do so, most of my customers will use another tool for monitoring instead of the LoadRunner package.

The tool should consider releasing a SaaS version since it makes more sense nowadays.

The challenge lies in the time-consuming manual coding and testing. It takes a while to understand it, repeat it with the managers or a business analyst, and then share the reports with stakeholders, and the whole process takes time. So it would be beneficial for us if there is some kind of a dashboard where you can have different rules. A dashboard with different rules would be beneficial for quick approvals and deployment, reducing the need for extensive meetings and email communication. It could be improved in some areas to support the latest web technologies. For example, LoadRunner could be improved to better support single-page applications (SPAs). Another way to improve LoadRunner would be to add better support for testing SPAs. Now, most people are going for WAV 2.0. Most of the applications are single-page applications where the browser is not refreshing.

Everybody is going into using it on a non-Windows-based platform. Currently, it is Windows-based, so the product can improve that to support 64-bit and iOS Mac devices. I recently just got to see LoadRunner Developer, but it is still not fully developed to use.

I do not have any big challenges with LoadRunner. I only have some issues with load generators. It is a very common issue, and I hope it will be resolved in the latest release. For example, when we start to run our tests, users get the message that the load generator exceeded 80% of the CPU utilization. Even when the number of users is less, we get these messages. I am trying to resolve it, but it is not going. It is annoying. It is not a failure, but I hope that it will be resolved. IBM WebSphere MQ testing can be a bit challenging. It can handle that, but I hope that they will build more and more capabilities. We do a huge amount of testing for messaging. Just like aviation, the railway industry is based on messaging. There is messaging to build trains and messaging to create some bills. There are many train movements. Everything involves messaging. I wish that it will be developed more for IBM WebSphere testing. Monitoring is okay, but for testing, I currently have to create Java users. I have to load a lot of libraries from IBM WebSphere and so on.

Compared to some other vendors, there is a lack of community support. It affects the response time when certain information is needed and not many resources are available.

The solution is complex. Integrating the tool into CI/CD pipelines, dockerizing, and containerization is a bit difficult. It is not as easy and user-friendly as doing it in Locust and Gatling. The solution must be more user-friendly. It should provide integrations with Jenkins or GitHub Actions. Processes like docking and containerization must be made easy for a tester to do the process. If a process takes ten steps, it must be reduced to two to three steps. We should be able to integrate with Docker, Jenkins, or GitHub within two to three steps.

I would like the solution to include monitoring capacity.

The support and price are the downsides of the solution. Micro Focus should decrease the cost. So, I'll explain one scenario. So, I work for multiple different clients to whom I provide support on the subject matter. Regarding the cost, if you consider 20,000 virtual user hours, if a user uses it for ten minutes, one virtual user is down. And if a user uses, like, 100 users for ten minutes, 100 virtual user hours are gone. So, instead of 100 multiplied by ten, it should be the number of minutes that get converted into hours, and that is the number of virtual hours that should be gone. In pay-per-use, the cost is more, and the unlimited license, like, an unlimited number of executions, costs even more. And mobile solutions, like earlier, could be integrated with the mobile center. Now mobile centers are very costly. So, doing it per device and testing has become challenging. I need to depend on other tools where I need to convert those scripts to LoadRunner and then run the test on this tool. So I need to pay two different software techs for licenses to solve mobile performance testing. In short, if that is done within that system, it could be helpful for us. The licensing system is not very convenient for me. I would like to increase the number of working hours per license. Also, performance testing on mobile devices could be better. Performance testing on mobile devices requires external software. You have many tools, and you have other tools which support on-device performance testing. So that tools can be integrated with LoadRunner. But, then the cost becomes high. So, if LoadRunner has some specific specialty, like, any on-device testing would be of a single user. If I connect my USB to a laptop and execute the test on a device, and test the application using the number of, like, one user running it for a certain duration of time, then it would be helpful for me to calculate the response time as well as the well device-level metrics like CPU memory or battery consumption. Right now, LoadRunner is lacking in the aforementioned areas. Testing your kind of WebRTC protocols, like if you have a streaming application, and I want to join 5,000 concurrent user sessions. So, it is a one-session ID for 5,000 users joining that video session, and there is a tutor who is, like, teaching the lessons to the students. So this is a scenario. It's a kind of video conversation. I just want to analyze the number of users, the user behavior, video quality, audio quality, and how many users get dropped from the call. I think the latest version for 2023 doesn't support a few particular things causing lagging issues. It has an MQTT protocol, and executing a test on the Kafka messaging queue, I don't think we need to write a custom Java code and then we need to build those Java JAR files or load agents, and then, normally, we can run it. So there is a dependency. So there are a lot of Java JAR files we need to substitute and run. So instead of that, if LoadRunner itself has that entire tool set installed in their location, and if you can just plug and play the request, it would be good. If you go to Apache JMeter, it's simple, so if you go for ActiveMQ, I give the configuration details and then give a custom message. It is a simple step where I can execute and push thousands to ten thousands of messages to the queue. But in LoadRunner, it is a complex thing. It's been three years since we tried to migrate from Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional Version 12.55 to LoadRunner Enterprise 2023, but there is no active support from the team. We did not deploy because of a lack of support. We need a license bundle if all things are to be migrated. We have one TB of data that needs to be migrated to the new system. For maintenance, I think one person is required, and sometimes to update, like, if you do hundreds of activations and browse the tools, which overall has a slowness in general. So maintaining and creating tables and all those stuff requires support, and I think one resource is required. The person should preferably be an administrator, and he should be aware of the database, repository file system, networking, and all such stuff.

On-premies, the step up for professional (in terms of models) is the enterprise version. However, in the cloud version, you almost have the enterprise right away. On-premises should be the same. However, since the cloud version has grown more in importance, they've expanded it without necessarily expanding the on-premises version. That is why we end up using both deployments. They need to do some work within the very development environment. They need to have a better way of replaying what data is captured so it looks more like what the actual application is doing. By that, I mean that web technologies have increased pretty rapidly over the last two or three years. They have something called a runtime viewer that you do use when you're debugging your scripts. And in addition to all the other logging that they have, which is very expensive. There's a reporting part of the cloud that could be improved a little bit. I've been more used to using the analysis program that's on the on-premise software, whether it's LoadRunner Enterprise or LoadRunner Professional. They have three major components of the whole software package is the analysis engine that looks at the data collected by the load test, and that generates a variety of different reports. They do that on the cloud as well. However, I don't know if it's as detailed; however, we maybe do not have much control as to what you want to get.

Improvement wise, the pipeline should be enabled. It should be embedded as part of the tool itself rather than going with third-party tools. Monitoring should be more effective as well.

The licensing is not cheap. However, it the client has specific requirements LoadRunner, will likely meet their application expectations very well. The organizational aspects could be better. There should be more integration with more open-source platforms. It would be great if it could integrate with GitLab, for example. More features could be added to make it more robust.

LoadRunner Professional's parameter data could be improved.

Micro Focus has two separate products for web and mobile applications, which means you have to invest in both. LoadRunner Professional does have a mobile protocol, but it works on very few applications. Merging the two products would be a big improvement, especially if Micro Focus also ensures the on-prem and cloud solutions have the same features. They're also not great with communication, including about important things like new rollouts.

The drawback is that it is very expensive. It is already a well-known tool with a vast number of features. The only issue is what they are actually making up for the asking rate. A lot of people are unable to pay that much money in the industry. I would like them to lower the licensing cost and provide better support. The price is too expensive.

In terms of resource management, you need a lot of high capacity boxes if you need to generate a load of 1,000 or 2,000 users. This solution has AJAX protocol or TruClient protocol, which gives you frontend stats and web vitals with very few details. This could be integrated further to exactly map any other leading tools for frontend analysis. That is, it needs further enhancements. Easy maintenance would be good because now if you want to upgrade the version from X to Y, it takes a couple of days. There has to be downtime as well. Operation processes should be faster and should not have an impact for more than a couple of hours.

Sometimes, we aren't able to see an accurate page view while replying and executing the script. When you are navigating the application side by side, it needs to be displayed on a random viewer. Sometimes we will get a few applications, and we won't get others.

Some form of automation is needed in this product, whether it's integration with CI/CD or providing the facility to import JSON files, so that we can automatically create the scripts. I think it's reasonable to expect that kind of feature.

The installation process and the initial configuration could be a little easier. We'd like the solution to be a bit more user-friendly. For someone that doesn't have a lot of experience with the solution, it might be challenging. Even after five years of using it, I still find it challenging. The solution can be quite expensive. There is slow performance when you are opening multiple instances on one machine.

The pricing model, selling model, and business model need to be adjusted. For non-enterprise organizations, Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional is too expensive and not worth the cost. Technical support also needs to be improved. Everyone wants to make the testing phase easy, and so, the recording feature needs to be more stable for every app and every command application. Right now, the call language is C, and it would be better if it were changed to another language such as JavaScript.

Instead of having too many graphs and tabs, use the analysis section to get a more simplified defect analysis. In the next release, I wanted to make the defect analysis part easier and more compact to view in the tool itself. For example, if there are defects in the test or some issues in the test, I would like the analysis to be more detailed and easier to understand.

If they were to add some kind of specific level monitoring, I think that would be very useful. When it comes to the main load of operation, it stimulates the load by using the underlying mechanism, either the API or some other protocol. If they were able to capture the UI aspect as well, that would be very, very helpful. This is an expensive solution and perhaps they could change their modeling to improve that.

Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional can improve the implementation of digital areas, such as digital testing, UI and native application, and native mobile applications.

The initial start-up of Micro Focus LoadRunner could be improved. When we add 20 or 30 scripts, the refresh is completed one by one. I would like to be able to select all of the script at one time, so it can be completed in a single click, reducing the time required.

The flexibility could be improved. For example, there are some use cases where I prefer to use NeoLoad rather than LoadRunner because of the flexibility that it provides.

My team members predominately used the product to do development but I don't think it needs anything in a way of improvements.

I would like to see easier integration with our CICD pipeline. The product is pretty heavy and should be more lightweight. I would like to see a browser extension where we can start the development. This would be helpful because right now, this solution is good for UTM integration and performance testing, but if we want to scale then it is difficult.

It's a very expensive tool so I think licensing costs could be reduced. I think their monitoring services in real time could be improved and made more user friendly.

If they were able to, I would say that the scalability could be improved. If the costs were not as expensive to upgrade, then we would scale it more. The initial setup could be simplified. I would like to see better licensing costs.

I have not had a really good look at the newest versions of LoadRunner. The problem I have always had with LoadRunner — and even more so with Performance Center — is that it is not very good with agile delivery and it is very difficult to integrate. Software engineers who have been working in agile delivery have been saying this for some time, and have been having success with alternatives. Also, Performance Center has historically been quite unreliable and difficult. It tends to fail at collation. I think that is because of the Load Runner architecture that Performance Center inherited. Everything waits until the end of a test to collate and it does not always work out well. I know that Micro Focus has done something about that in the new version. But that is the worst thing that happens: with LoadRunner or Performance Center you run a big critical test and you can't get the results.

The solution is very costly. The cost is very high, especially considering a lot of other resources are available now and they are less expensive. For a small organization, it is very difficult to sustain the costs involved in having the solution or the related fees. The technical support aspect of the solution could be improved. Their current dashboard and their reporting is still following the earlier waterfall models. If they can add some things in the reporting, and update it so it is more modern, that would be great.

The debugging capability is difficult to use and should be improved. This is one area where some of the other products we use are better.

One of the problems with LoadRunner was always outside sharing. However, now that they are offering a cloud version, this may already work well. The infrastructure support can be improved because there are a lot of limitations with the hardware that you can use. I would like to have better support for adding more users per load generator.

Pricing should be lowered on the solution. Right now it's quite expensive. The solution uses a lot of memory and then it dies. It's difficult to work with the solution sometimes when you run a scenario it dies. They need to make the solution lighter somehow. If the correlation can be adjusted so that it's a dynamic correlation, it could be a little bit better and it would help a lot of users.

The solution needs to reduce its pricing. Right now, it's quite expensive. The solution should offer more monitoring features.

Sometimes I have problems when I want to record a script if the application is a little special, like the login part. I think the TruClient works well and they are developing new things there all the time. So it's getting better. I would like to see an easier way to move things from SoapUI to the same addressed services and postman or something like that. Because the developers will use the other products and then the website and then load them at no cost. So if it was just one step to move from one system to another it would be a great improvement.

Currently the solution doesn't have recording options or sometimes we're not be able to see the recording options. So that needs to improve. I also think the solution should have more screen compatibility, even if you're using a different operating system like Windows 10, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1. Sometimes we find that there is a difference between the desktop screen and the laptop screen. So, it should be compatible for both screens.

The price of this solution should be cheaper.

There is room for improvement of the pilot processing and forwarding results based on the dump analysis. We have a generator, root controller, different agents, and an analyzer, so all of these are very important when it comes to LoadRunner. LoadRunner also has to create a low-cost version that supports simpler testing and only some of the simple features would be included. This would allow people to use LoadRunner and get support from LoadRunner in terms of application testing. It is a principle that if people will get to use LoadRunner for free, LoadRunner will get more business and major payback. I would rate it 6 out of 10, because LoadRunner is a vast thing, starting from those scenarios and then getting more into users, putting more points, correlation, load testing, and benchmarking. I have this part and hope it works well with the system. All of this is very complex. It takes a long time to learn the system well.

Support for Microsoft Dynamics needs improvement.

If they can make LoadRunner more comprehensive, it would really help. My main recommendations for improvement for LoadRunner are: * It would be good if LoadRunner can categorize the different transactions based on the time taken to do the test, against the transactions first. * The reports should be a little more comprehensive, more detailed. * There should be a way to use the default monitoring tool integrated with LoadRunner. For example, if I have to look for monitoring I have to always integrate an extending tool to LoadRunner and then monitor my task. If LoadRunner is not driving and they can afford to have their own monitoring enabled, that would help. The LoadRunner report also needs more information other than the straightforward notes, like response time.