Eggplant Performance Reviews

We are using the Eggplant software to make sure that our website is up. Eighteen months ago we launched a new product. We provide online life protection quoting, and we wanted to make sure that our website is up 24/7, and that if there are any issues in the website performance, with Eggplant's help, the right people will be notified. 

Within our website is our new product and we wanted to make sure that the quoting, where we bring up prices for the consumer—where we're offering various insurer prices by hooking into all of the largest UK insurance companies to get the pricing—works and that we're returning prices from our insurance partners. We use Eggplant for that as well. We also check, via Eggplant, that all the documentation that customers request is actually working.

We're using Eggplant to make sure that if a customer goes to buy a product, they buy successfully. We're not in control of our partners, but we want to know if they've got a problem, and with Eggplant's help, we know if there's an issue so that we can deal with it straight away.

Eggplant helps us make sure that the products and the services we provide are working, and if they're not working, it will tell us that very quickly, and then we're able to deal with whatever the issue may be.

The interesting challenge for us is that, unlike some businesses, we don't want a big team of people that watch the dials. Instead we want a solution that does a lot for that for us, and that's what Eggplant does. There was an occasion when the Eggplant service team were in communication with us to say, "We think that you might have an issue here that you need to look at." That's exactly the sort of service we have come to love from Eggplant

There are a few valuable features: 

• the alerting system
• the Monitoring Insight
• the support from the wider Eggplant team 

Overall, the key features for us are the usability, timeliness of it, and the flexibility.

It's also really important that Eggplant Performance provides highly configurable performance tests that replicate real-world conditions, because that's exactly what we're trying to do. We're using Eggplant to mimic customers going to our system, buying a product, and looking at documentation. It's really important that we can mimic that. We can't do so manually because the overhead on that is far too high. We need confidence in a solution that does exactly that; mimics an end-user. We do it hundreds of times a day because if that end-user experience is a problem, we need to know about it and deal with it. When we went to market and looked at several competitors, that was one of the things that was crucial for us. To be fair, a number of the competitors could do that, but the way Eggplant does it was one of the reasons why we chose it.

One area I can think of to improve is the usability of the reports that we get. They could be simplified and easier to read. The language in the reports, on occasion, can be too technical and is not always easy to understand.

We've been using Eggplant Performance for about 18 months.

We've always found Eggplant to be hugely reliable. In the 18 months, it's never been down. Three is very little maintenance. That's really important to us.

My impression of its scalability is that it is good. There are other tools and teams within Eggplant that we could utilize, should we decide to do so, such as for greater levels of testing, automating of the testing, and even as far as doing website and product reviews. There is the option to utilize people as resources with skills in certain areas, which was certainly really interesting for us. It's not something that we need right now, but something for us to bear in mind. That was another reason for going with Eggplant: that longer-term partnership and what Eggplant could offer us. Because we're a medium-size business the potential to tap into Eggplant's resources and skills is really interesting for us.

The volume of traffic that we put through will continue to increase so I can't speak entirely about how it copes under a really high load, but for everything we've needed to date, it's been perfectly good.

Certainly, one of the features of Eggplant is the fact that it helps you to understand the effect of peak load conditions on the user experience. That was one of the reasons why we chose it. 

Elliot, our account manager, has been really good. He understands our roadmap and plan and where we're going. We have regular touchpoints. He continues to talk to us about what our plans are and to tell us what new features are coming. That's always a really interesting one for us. If we continue to work closely together, hopefully there's an opportunity on both sides.

We did not have a previous solution. Our product is new, and when we launched it we knew we needed a supplier.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We did some work with the Eggplant guys, but it was not complex.

We did it over a few weeks, but that was primarily because we were waiting for the website to go live. Those few weeks weren't full-time working with the Eggplant guys, at all. The amount of time we spent with Eggplant to get all the alerts in place was probably no more than a couple of days of work in total.

We initially set up the solution to monitor our website and to make sure that the information Eggplant was giving us was useful, relevant, and fundamentally working for us. Once we were comfortable that we could use it for that aspect, we then set it up more complex parts, for the quoting, the documentation, and the consumers buying. We deliberately started with something relatively more straightforward, made sure it worked for us, it gave us the MI we needed, we could use it, and that it was reliable. Having done that, we then set it up for the more complex products. It was a simple and effective strategy.

The Eggplant team was really helpful in terms of configuration and setting up all of our monitoring and our alerts. It was hugely helpful. One of the biggest benefits for us, aside from the product being very good at what it does, was we really liked that Eggplant, from the outset, helped to build all the different tests. Part of what we pay for is that Eggplant has a team. We gave the team our requirements and they built all the monitoring that we needed, both on the website and on the product, when customers are buying or when they're looking at documentation, or they're getting quotes. 

That was where those guys came into their own. It was really important for us even for today. 

Whilst some of Eggplant's competitors offered to do the same thing, it was really clear that the Eggplant guys do this all the time. They have the skill and expertise and dedicated teams to do that. We felt really confident that whatever we asked their team to do, they could do it.

Our account manager, Elliot, was very attentive and made sure that both he and the team fully understood our product, our needs, and our requirements. He was all over what needed to be done, and by when. The onboarding was a really positive experience.

I can't really say what the return on investment is right now. What I do know is that if our website or our products are unavailable, it absolutely costs us money. The longer the website or a product is down, the more money it costs. We've been really fortunate in that we've had virtually zero downtime in all the time we've been using Eggplant. 

To be fair there's not a direct link to [saving] pounds and pence, but the longer our website is down, the longer we don't sell our products. Eggplant helps to tell us when we have an issue or things aren't working correctly. 

But in terms of peace of mind, it's invaluable.

Eggplant came out as the most competitive in terms of commercials (terms and conditions) which was positive. When we did the initial negotiations, Eggplant started at a price but they were open to negotiations and we did negotiate a discount. That was really important to us because it showed a level of commitment to us. 

We did our due diligence and RFP process which went through a number of potential suppliers. We whittled it down to Virtuoso and Eggplant. We went with Eggplant for the reasons I've given.

The commercials for Eggplant were better than Virtuoso, and that wasn't just the initial commercials. It was through further negotiations that Eggplant was cheaper than Virtuoso. That was important to us as the software from each was similar and the usability was relatively similar as well. 

The biggest thing for us was that it was clear that the team that helped set up Eggplant, the monitoring and the alerts, was mature and robust. It felt like a core part of the Eggplant offering. And we needed to be able to say, "Look, can you do that for us whilst we're doing other things?" That worked really well and stood out. Even if Eggplant were a little bit more expensive than Virtuoso, as long as it wasn't a crazy difference in price, I probably would have gone with Eggplant because of that service.

What I would say to someone who is not using Eggplant Performance and who says, "We already have ways to test key, peak load scenarios," from my experience, if you've got any concerns about your current software, and certainly its usability and ease of use, leaving commercials aside, definitely give Eggplant a try. It's a huge business with enormous customers. The support is incredibly good, the commercials are competitive, and my experience has been a really positive one. To anybody who is in my position, I would tell them that I can relax knowing that I've got a good software doing a lot of this stuff for me. It's an absolutely spot-on solution.

On a scale of one to 10, it's a really strong eight. Because we are not using it to its fullest capability right now there are other features and capabilities in the system that we've just not used to date. That's just because we are not ready to use them, rather than that Eggplant can't do so. Until I've really understood how those other aspects perform, I wouldn't want to give anything higher.

Our organization's primary use case for this product is omnichannel functional testing and performance testing. There's an incorporation of robotics for functional testing of wellness devices.

The solution helps us by shifting our performance testing earlier into the last cycle. We've got three levels of performance testing that we do today, L1, L2, and L3. L1 happens at a developer level, L2 happens on our initial integrated testing, and then L3 is the border performance testing for scalability.

The best thing about Eggplant Performance is its integration with our user experience. Under load, we're able to get visibility on what the user experience would be on a physical device itself. It's a combination of Eggplant's ability to combine both performance testing with functional testing together that allows us to understand the impacts to the users themselves when the system is under load.

The integration into the pipeline for support of the technology specs that we're testing has been very good. 

The reporting that comes out of Eggplant Performance is good, and its ability to integrate with Dynatrace quite easily ensures that we get deep insights into the application under load.

The interface and monitoring are very good.

We find the solution stable and scalable.

Technical support is helpful.

On Eggplant's Performance side, it does what we wish and everything we need it to do at this stage. It's integrating very well into the pipeline. Overall, it's helped us. I don't recall any features that are lacking for our use case.

I'd like to see the ability to integrate the user experience through device forms like AWS device forms or source labs.

I've been dealing with the solution for close to two and a half years at this point.

We haven't had any stability issues from a performance or functional point of view at this stage.

For our requirements, it's highly scalable. It meets the requirements. We don't have 200,000 BTU load tests, and therefore I couldn't talk to scalability up to those kinds of volumes, however, for our requirements, it suffices in terms of scalability.

We have three performance testers that are using the solution currently.

We don't plan to increase usage in terms of performance. Performance is a very specialized field, and we have specialists in that area who using performance where there is a big expansion on the Eggplant Functionality part.

Our technical support is excellent. The representatives in South Africa is well versed in the solution, and they're able to provide both training as well as onsite support as required. Support both in terms of maintenance or technical issues as well as the ability to provide onsite consulting services has been excellent.

The solutions that were being used previously were primarily open-source solutions. These included NACE APM, and Gatling for performance testing. We've used Hexawise in terms of exploratory testing and K1 testing. Those were the solutions that were primarily targeted. With case management, there is a solution called Telstra that we utilized.

The initial setup is very straightforward from the Eggplant Performance point of view. What was nice is we were able to also use our functional scripts to drive the performance test.

The deployment took us about a week to get it up and running initially. We were using another performance testing tool, which was Gatling at the time, and the ability for us to create a performance test was pretty straightforward. It's as easy or easier than any of the other performance testing tools we've used in the past.

In terms of pricing, we're happy with the pricing model. It has the ability to use a combination of on-premise or term licensing. We have the ability to say, "Well, I need for this performance test to be able to rent 10,000 versus our standard 1,000 users, and to be able to rent just that difference for a short period of time." That was very attractive to us. They are quite flexible in their cost structure.

We've been asked to expand testing into nine traditional test automation areas. We're looking at the automation of wellness devices, such as physical watches or robotics, which Eggplant supports. We utilize a combination of everything Eggplant. That includes Eggplant Functional, Eggplant 50 AI, and Eggplant Performance.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I would strongly recommend that organizations use the AI capability that comes with Eggplant now. I'm talking primarily from the Eggplant Functional point of view. It's been a revelation to us in terms of its ability to assist us in exploratory testing and to integrate with our current model-driven architecture. We use a solution from Sparx Systems called Enterprise Architect, and we're able to directly integrate the model from Enterprise Architect with Eggplant through its AI engine.