OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

We employed OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise for a diverse range of applications and objectives. Since we are in the healthcare industry, this solution helps us to manage the digitalization of the data and ensure successful end-to-end workflow.

It delivers multiple benefits across various aspects. We can efficiently monitor all of the system resources and network usage. It also helps us to identify performance bottlenecks, and optimize application performance.

The most beneficial features of the solution are flexibility and versatility in their performance. It is seamlessly handling a wide range of protocols and technologies.

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.

We have been using the solution for a couple of years. 

The stability is at a very high level. I would rate it nine out of ten.

If we put aside the licensing challenges, OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise can stimulate numerous virtual users, making it suitable for testing large-scale systems. I would rate the scalability eight out of ten.

We didn't have many situations that required us to request assistance, but when we faced certain minor issues, they provided excellent support.

Positive

We used to utilize Apache JMeter, and it is a good solution, but OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise offers better features that are suitable for our business. Its flexibility in terms of building a CI/CD pipeline across the platforms is a benefit.

The initial setup process is straightforward for a simple type of server architecture. But if you are integrating separate test generator engines between the setups, it will require support from the supplier. It is important to have a strong understanding of performance-testing concepts. 

The suitability of the solution depends on the specific needs and requirements of an organization or project. It also depends on which model will be integrated and used, as does the price structure and the licensing. We are content with the pricing and find it to be reasonable in terms of value for money. The only challenge is when it comes to large enterprise companies that are working with multiple suppliers. The integration of licenses is very difficult or in some cases, impossible.

OpenText LoadRunner is the leading solution as of now. There are definitely other tooling options available in the market, but if you are searching for an enterprise-level solution, LoadRunner is the number one product.

Overall, we are pleased with the solution as it satisfies our requirements and meets our expectations. I would rate it eight out of ten.

We are using the solution for performance/load/stress testing of in-house business applications. We have various environments like web applications, cloud-based, SAP, and ERP products. Loadrunner will be used based on end-user requirements.

The main purpose of usage of this tool is to validate the performance of newly developed applications before they are deployed on production. This tool will help us to mimic end-user actions and measure response times from various locations in addition to checking the maximum concurrency supported.

The tools help us to validate the scalability of applications and the limitations of the end-user apps. The main purpose of usage of this tool is to validate the performance of newly developed applications before they are deployed on production. This tool will help us to mimic end-user actions and measure response times from various locations in addition to checking the maximum concurrency supported.

We have used this tool on multiple applications to measure the performance of the system under test. Loadrunner became our enterprise solution for performance testing.

The host performance testing of any application using a host/controller is the most valuable feature. This feature helps to replicate virtual users, configure multiple test scripts, and configure multiple simulators from various geographic locations to run a single test. There are a lot of configurations available to replicate browser cache/with no browser cache and network-related features prior to triggering any test.

The beauty of the host is that any tester can launch it and check the status of runs, monitor test statistics, etc.

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. 

We have been using the tool for the last 10+ years.

We did not previously use a different solution.

OpenText/Microfocus productions are costly. They need to focus on minimizing the cost.

We did not evaluate other options. 

We primarily use OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise for performance testing. There are three main components: the Fusion Loader, the analysis part, and the Vision, which we use to record diverse scenarios. We configure it for multiple users. The controller is used for load testing, stress testing, regression testing, or bundling various scenarios. Once the tests are complete, we analyse response time.

Depending on the requirements, LoadRunner enables load testing for distributed applications or services. Generally, we execute load tests for around three hours. Performance tests can span eight to nine hours but vary depending on project specifics. We have three different approaches for performance testing based on project requirements.

We have a different option. We can schedule our scripts to execute at a specific time based on the requirement with a specified number of users. LoadRunner offers such facilities which other tools lack.

OpenText helps us identify the amount of load testing impacts on overall performance. We can measure metrics like hits per second and detect deviations or issues through graphs. We can filter out response times based on timings and identify spikes in the database or AWS reports. We can also analyse long-running queries or reasons behind response time degradation. By filtering out details like 90th or 95th percentile response times, we gain insight into when and why transactions degrade, providing detailed information.

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.

I have been using OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise for 7 to 8 years.

The product is stable. There is no downtime, but sometimes some scripts get corrupted, and the script code generation takes time. There have been environmental or data machine issues.

We have three different instances of LoadRunne. If we're using 1000 users in one of the environments, we use the same hardware for the other environments.

We have one standard license key for all users. 10-15 people have access to this solution.

Customer support is good. We get support for whatever issues we have raised.

Positive

The initial setup is easy because I have already spent seven to eight years.

First of all, we need a license key. Then, we need to download the LoadRunner Enterprise software. We require specific specifications. The machines should have a minimum amount of RAM and CPU. We need to fulfil three requests before we can download the LoadRunner file. The installation usually takes around three to four hours.

We have a separate team for support. For example, if we require more CPU, RAM, or drive size on an IBM machine, we seek support from them. However, one person is sufficient for the installation and setup process.

There is another team responsible for maintenance.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for doing automation testing, and there are various teams that use it for performance testing, load testing, etc. For ALM, we use it to create requirements, test labs, and test plans and get our test results in.

LoadRunner Enterprise has helped our organization in being able to document everything and maintain the history. This way, in the future, if the product gets enhanced or new features get added, you know what was tested previously, and then you also have the new stuff. You have the history of those changes and all the testing that has been done.

We use the TruClient feature for browser-based testing, but I am not the end user for it. My guess is that it is helpful for reducing scripting work.

LoadRunner Enterprise has affected our users. Testing is obviously a must before you release a software product. The fact that you can automate some of the testing, and you can do stress testing, performance testing, and simulate a load as if users are actually using it helps a lot. You better understand how the application will operate when it gets into production, and if there are issues, you can spot those early on.

LoadRunner Enterprise has helped streamline our testing processes. We have a process in place for users who need access to it. There is a governance team for the rules and how the product should be used and not. There is a little bit more structure. Based on what I have heard in the organization, it does appear to help them. LoadRunner Enterprise makes it easier for them to be able to do their tasks. They can automate things without them having to manually do it.

LoadRunner Enterprise has helped save us time, but I do not have the metrics.

LoadRunner Enterprise has helped improve our product quality. We can spot issues early on. That helps a lot. This way, we are aware of the issue before we go live in production. We can remediate it before the product goes live.

With ALM, being able to write our test scripts and being able to document our test results are valuable. That comes in handy. This way, we have a record of the things that have been tested. There are also workflows that we can create, which are very helpful. 

With LoadRunner Enterprise, doing various types of performance testing, load testing, and automation testing has been very helpful for some of the teams.

I work more on the administration side. I am not a daily user, but especially during this conference, we are seeing that everything is going to the cloud. We are trying to see what are some of the benefits of going to the cloud.

I have seen some users report some issues, but I have personally not had any issues.

My organization was already using it when I joined, but I have personally been using it for over three years.

I have not seen any stability issues. I have seen some users report some issues, but we will usually open a case if we cannot figure it out.

With LoadRunner, you get load generators. You can add more as needed. Its scalability is fine.

We get our support through another vendor.

When I joined the team, they were already using it, so I do not know what they were using before.

I have been involved in the upgrades. If it is a patch or something small, it is less time-consuming, but if it is a major upgrade, it takes more time and more planning. We need to assess how long it will take, what resources are needed, and do we need to request new servers.

My guess would be that we have seen an ROI.

Overall, I would rate LoadRunner Enterprise a nine out of ten.

We do have an address to the client protocol we are using, and web streaming and web services. 

With LoadRunner, 80% of the cases will be supported. It has everything. It supports most features. It's very feature-rich.

The solution offers helpful guidelines and has good documentation.

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. 

I've been using the solution for ten years. 

The solution does have some instability and hanging issues. It has to be improved as it is causing a business loss for them.

Scalability-wise, it has to improve in certain protocols. If you take Ajax TruClient, the memory consumption was very huge in the terms of the particular protocol. That needs to be somewhere where we can minimize the memory consumption to have more virtual users run on the system. 

People need to buy too many load generators to run their tests. Even for file users, we need a lot of load generators to run that.

We have seven to eight team members using the solution right now. 

We have been using it for the past 10 years with the same client. We have all the version upgrades happening from LoadRunner ALM products onwards. We went into the ALM Enterprise. And we were the people who raised hundreds of bugs in the Ajax TruClient protocol. 

We've dealt with lots of bugs, and we scheduled a meeting for support. They take some time to get to a solution. They'll sometimes take months to get a solution in place.

I understand it is not a small thing when you are launching a new protocol and all. However, they should have, before launching, fewer bugs. They need to take care of a lot of things before launching the product.

We've used JMeter, WebLOAD, and NeoLoad.

While Micro Focus' competition does offer a lot of tools, this solution does a better job of laying out guidelines.  There are examples and use cases, and they respond to questions. Those are the reasons people are still using them.

The installation process is a little complex. There has been confusion in terms of the Enterprise version and whatever they have in the exhibition suite. We call it ALM. The UI is not as user-friendly now with the changes they have made. It would help if they simplified their interface a bit. It might make implementation easier. 

It used to be simpler. Now we have a separate team that handles the setup.

We have two people available that can deploy and maintain the product.

We don't see an ROI as we mainly recommend the tool and clients use it.

It's a costly tool. When you are paying for something, there are expectations that it will work properly.

I'd rate the affordability at a two out of five. 

You do need to buy a few extra features that are not included in the main cost.

We are customers.

If a client has a budget, I would recommend the solution. It is a good tool. However, there are stability issues, and it does have a complex UI. It's good if you have specific protocols and specific requirements. When that is the case, there may be no other tool available. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We use LRE to develop script and we use VuGen, a component of LoadRunner, for result analysis. Those two components are responsible for generating load and then injecting it into a particular system. We develop the script on VuGen, and create a smooth scenario on LRE that uses a load generator and controller to run the test. The controller then collects the results and we carry out an analysis. We are customers of Micro Focus.

Creating the script is very easy and user friendly. If you need to simulate a use case, it's easily recorded using VuGen. It also enables the creation of monitors for a particular system which includes FD dashboards. Remote servers can also be monitored while your test is running on the LRE dashboard.

I'd like to be able to carry out transaction comparisons with previous tests. It's a feature of NetStorm that I'd like to see in LRE. Currently, we can only compare averages to transition response time. Having that ability to compare would highlight any patterns, comparing them with results at regular intervals. We'd be able to know what was going on throughout the testing process. 

Some of the scripts we use require some custom JARS. It requires importing something to the script if those have been embedded. If that process could be automated, it would make a difference. Whether it's MQ, Kafka or JDBC, those kinds of binaries could be part of a bundle. 

I've been using this solution for two years.

We had some initial issues that were resolved and since then the stability has been good. 

We haven't used their scalability capabilities yet, but I'm sure it's good.

Their technical support is excellent.

Positive

The initial setup was carried out before I began working in the company but I believe it's very straightforward. We have 70 performance engineers using this solution in my team. 

We are an enterprise company so we have a license with Micro Focus. I believe that if you have up to 50 users, there is an open-source option. 

I would recommend downloading the software for personal use to test it out. The solution solves my needs and provides everything required to carry out performance load testing so I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

I use the solution in my company for any type of testing that supports LoadRunner's protocols, like your web testing or app.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that the support is good, especially the one I am getting from OpenText. The tool is easy to work with if you know what to do. It has offered me some reliability against other products, like JMeter or some other tools. It has worked better for me anyway, most of the time. The tool makes it easy to implement the scripts.

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.

I have been using OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise for ten years.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

When it comes to how the product's scalability feature has impacted our company's testing capabilities, I would say that it is not something about the product but about performance testing. All the time, your performance testing always improves the quality of the product that you are about to deploy. The reporting in the tool is quite nice. It gives you detailed graphs, making it easy for businesses to understand things.

The licensing that the tool offers allows you to increase or get more licenses as quickly as possible instead of going through a whole process. You can just go to the portal and then download whatever licenses you want. Then, off you go. I think that is a very good model that I have seen since it makes things easier for users.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

In my company, we have a contact with whom I interact so that we can escalate our issues a bit quicker, and that helps a lot. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The product is quite easy to install and involves a straightforward process.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises version.

The solution can be deployed in two to three hours.

I am not sure about the cost savings, but not having to deploy stuff that would not work on production is a reason why it has assisted our company.

The pricing is based on the licensing you require. The prices would differ depending on the number of licenses you need. I wouldn't maybe compare it to any other tools. I rate the price as seven out of ten.

I have compared the tool with JMeter.

I don't have any challenges whatsoever with the integration.

The AI part is something that may be ahead of where I am with the OpenText LoadRunner side because what we have been looking at now is the introduction of ALM Octane instead.

There is no need to do regular technical maintenance for the solution.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We have used it for most of our web-based application testing. We have more than 25 applications that are tested with this tool, with a load of more than 1,000 users as well. It's mostly for the enterprise applications like CRM or Citrix, as well as the Google Toolkit applications, and then there are the different protocols that this particular LoadRunner supports, like through clients or APS services. Those are where we can capture and run our tests with the LoadRunner.

Looking at the load of more of the applications and the testing needs have definitely been met. Even new users or interns can manage the solution, so there's a low learning curve.

It's a market leader and a pioneer. People enjoy working on it. It helps give them a career boost and opens up opportunities. 

What we call the LoadRunner analysis is the most useful aspect of the solution. With it, you could do reports and it does all the statistics, and then you can do the cross-verification or cross-analysis as well to look at comparisons. Those are fascinating.

The installation is quick.

The UI and how they show different methodologies of monitoring need improvement. We'd like to integrate data from different clouds as well as different servers. 

Integration can be tricky during the setup process. 

Technical support in not helpful or responsive. 

They have been doing a lot actually to improve the product right now. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. 

Most of the time, the solution is stable. If our environment is stable, the solution is reliable. 

The solution can scale. We've been using it for most users and have been increasing our servers - and they have LoadRunner installed on them. We are expanding usage. However, the cost may be a deciding factor. 

We have six people using it in our company.

Support is very poor. We've had a very frustrating experience with them. Initially, when you raise issues with them, they always send a link to some sort of document that is useless to us. After two or three follow-ups on our end, we might start getting answers. Once we escalate further, we get to the professionals, and only then will we get to a solution.

Negative

We previously used IBM's Rational Robot, as well Silk Performer.

The installation was quick, however, getting integration and getting the data flowing, that's tricky. We need to rely entirely on the Micro Focus team for that. It's not like we can do it in-house. Though we know how to install it, there are a lot of complications when we try to go through it. 

We had three people deploy the solution and two people are available for maintenance. 

We had the Micros Focus team assist us with the initial setup process. 

We have witnessed an ROI, however, when you take into account how we're costing it's likely not a helpful number to share. 

The solution is pretty expensive. I can't speak to the exact cost. I'd rate it three out of five in terms of affordability.

We did evaluate one or two other options before choosing LoadRunner. We looked at Silk Performer and another solution called Compuware. 

I am not using the latest version of the solution.

While we use on-premises deployments right now, we are starting to look into the cloud. 

I'd advise potential new users to look at their budget. If it's a larger enterprise, LoadRunner will make sense due to the big environment. If budget is a concern for a company, it may be better to look at other options. 

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.