Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud Review

Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud is a cloud-based load and performance testing solution for agile and DevOps teams. With LoadRunner Cloud, your software development team gets quick access to cloud-based performance testing resources. You won't be held up by a lack of infrastructure or the requirement to deploy updates for on-premises components, insufficient reporting, or a lack of scale. You can take on any project thanks to LoadRunner Cloud’s broad coverage, cutting-edge technologies, comprehensive integrations, and potent analytics.

Together with the other components of the LoadRunner family, your company can build a scalable performance engineering practice. Simply select the appropriate tool for the job at hand while leveraging a connected eco-system that delivers smarter insights, tighter cooperation, and better cost savings.

Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud’s top benefits include:

• You can create a test using the REST API, a CSV file, a HAR file, LoadRunner scripts, or open-source tools.
  
  
• For comprehensive test coverage, the product scales to more than five million virtual users.
  
  
• Using smart reports and dashboards, Agile and DevOps teams can quickly examine performance issues.
  
  
• Product has a flexible testing paradigm that reduces hardware maintenance.
  
  
• Product uses public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises load generators to run tests in multiple locations.
  
  
• Product encourages collaboration through asset sharing, multi-user, multi-test execution, and project management.

Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud also has a great set of features. Here are some that stand out to us:

• Record and playback feature: The record and playback feature is the most valuable feature. It's a script-based tool, whereas you log in to your console and see the dashboard to know how many trades failed and how many trades passed, and what the peak loads were.
  
  
• Endurance testing and load testing: You can do endurance testing as well as load testing. When load testing, it lets you see how much volume you can benchmark in your entire environment, given the resources like CPU and RAM.
  
  
• Performance testing: We now do performance testing as part of the delivery of a new release, which greatly improves our processes.
  
  
• TruClient feature: An application with testing can only be scripted using TruClient, so it's part web-based, but it also has its own protocol combined with HTTP and HTML. So many other tools do not recognize this proprietary protocol. Using TruClient, we can still create scripts that cover everything needed.
  
  
• Integration: The solution supports multiple protocols. In our company, we also use open-source performance testing tools like JMeter, Gatling, and Locust. It's important to be able to embed those scripts as well into a LoadRunner-based performance test.
  
  
• Remote load testing: The most valuable feature is that we do not have to accommodate the load-testing infrastructure in our own data center. With LoadRunner Cloud, the testing will be done remotely using their resources without the need to use our own hardware and on-premises tools.
  
  
• Supports multiple protocols: The fact that the solution supports multiple protocols, such as open source, VuGen, TruWeb, TruClient, and SAP, is very important because these protocols help us to concentrate on what is really needed to produce performance tests. If something is not supported, you have to use other tools or find other ways of assimilating loads.
  
  
• Combinations: We can use a combination of the SAP protocol and TruClient protocol. The combinations are very helpful for performance testing.
  
  
• Supports large-scale testing: The support for large-scale testing is also an important feature in our operations. We have thousands of users and it provides the best solution. You can have an unlimited number of users. In our organization, the maximum number of users is currently about 20,000 to 30,000. I can configure my load on the cloud environment and have 30,000 virtual users on the cloud. I don't need to create the infrastructure locally and I don't have to maintain it. Everything is taken care of by the solution.
  
  
• No hardware needed: Its ability to run unlimited concurrent tests without worrying about hardware availability helps eliminate hardware dependency. You don't need to have the load generators on your network. You don't need to maintain those systems and you don't need to have that kind of network capability. If you're testing on-prem but you don't have the network capacity to scale up to millions of users, LoadRunner Cloud enables you to create virtual networks and use the cloud to generate those kinds of loads. You can then analyze what the impact will be to your system when you have millions of users.
  
  
• Saves money: With TruClient, while you need a performance tester, you don't need a programmer to write scripting. If you know the system, and if you know the objectives of performance testing, you can do the performance tests without programming skills. This gives us leverage. We can use someone with performance testing capabilities even though he might not be the best programmer. That has also reduced our costs significantly.

Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud does have a few drawbacks, though:

• For starters, there are challenges around how you can containerize applications. There are some limitations to some protocols, such as desktop. And when it comes to database testing, there are some things that we can't do through CI/CD.
  
  
• In addition, the solution’s reporting and analysis need improvement. Compared to the old school LoadRunner Windows application, the reporting and analysis are mediocre in LoadRunner Cloud.