OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

Our primary use case for Performance Center is testing the performance of all of our applications.

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.

We've been using Performance Center for about a year.

We have had some problems with instability. At one point Performance Center suddenly went down for two days, but usually, it works. It works okay now and has not been a problem, but it was worse in the beginning. They have changed something, so it is better now than it was, I think.

The scalability is good enough. Sometimes we get a message from the generators that they are at 80% or more capacity. That is an error we get quite commonly. We only have eight gigabytes on the generators and it is recommended to use 16 gigabytes. I guess that is likely the reason why we have this problem. This happens a lot more often when we are running TruClient. The 80% capacity error comes up very fast in that case. We can not run many users with TruClient at all.

It is not usually me who calls tech support but I got the impression that the team is quite pleased with it. Usually, it is good. On the other hand, we have had some problems now that are not resolved. For example, one of my applications is not running at all because we are running on version 12.53. There was some problem with the REST (Representational State Transfer) services and the coding part of our REST services. We were using a very old encoding version that we are not using anymore. We stopped using it a long time ago. But it was still supposed to be compatible in 12.53, and that is what we are using. I know the problem was fixed from version 12.56 and up, but we have not been able to complete the upgrade. 

I'm able to run the tests on the application locally, but not in Performance Center. So we are waiting for this upgrade at the moment to resolve these issues.

We are currently using 12.53 and we are trying to upgrade it to 12.63 but it looks like there's a problem with the upgrade. We would like to switch to take better advantage of some features that are currently difficult to work with. We used LoadRunner concurrently for a while, and while it was a good product there were things about Performance Center that we prefer.

I was not included in the process when they installed the solution, but it took quite a lot more time than I would have expected. I guess, based partly on the length of time it took, that it was not very straightforward to set up and must have been a bit difficult. The other reason it does not seem easy is that the team has tried to upgrade now two times now and both times they had to roll back to the previous version. We'll see when a fix is issued and they try to upgrade again if the issue is solved. It looks like there are problems with connecting properly. The team has a ticket in with Micro Focus about the problem, but we are not sure what the problem stems from and a resolution has not been provided.

I'm not quite sure about the exact pricing because I do not handle that part of the business, but I think the Performance Center is quite expensive. It is more expensive than LoadRunner, although I am not sure how many controllers you can run for the same price. They said Performance Center was costing us around 40 million Krones and that is about 4 million dollars. But I think that was with ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) as well and not only for Performance Center.

Before we used Performance Center at all, we used LoadRunner (Corporate version, 50 licenses). But now we changed over almost entirely to Performance Center and we are phasing LoadRunner out. For a while, we were running both at the same time to compare them. The nice thing is that we do not need to have many controllers connected with Performance Center. The bad thing is that more than one person may want to use the same generator. So sometimes we have problems. I guess we had the same problem before when we used LoadRunner because everyone can't run a test at the same time.

There are some good things and some bad things about Performance Center in comparison to LoadRunner. The good thing is that you are able to share the screen while you are running a test. On the other hand, you do not get all the same information you get with LoadRunner when you run the tests. After you have done the tests, you can just copy the completed file and you get the same test results as if you had run on LoadRunner. So that is not really a problem. But when first running the Performance Center application for testing, I missed some of the information I got from LoadRunner. It is just a different presentation.

The advice I would give to someone considering this product is that they should try LoadRunner first before they start using Performance Center — especially if it is a small company. They need to know and be able to compare LoadRunner to Performance Center in the right way. After you have used LoadRunner then compare Performance Center. If they are part of a small company and they expect to expand they will know the difference. If they are already a very big company, they can save some money by using Performance Center directly. We are quite a big company, so Performance Center makes sense for us.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Performance Center as an eight. It is only this low because we have had so many problems here installing it and upgrading it. Sometimes it runs very slow just to set up tests, or it just crashes. Like when setting up a spike test, you start using the spike test process and it suddenly crashes after you have almost finished everything. Executing the tests were a lot easier and more stable in LoadRunner.

You can manage to make Performance Center work, but you have to be patient.

We use OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise for load testing. 

The tool is very easy to set up and get running. 

OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise needs to improve reporting. 

I have been using the solution for 13 years. 

I rate OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 120 users. 

I rate the tool's deployment a nine out of ten. It can be completed in two to three days. 

I rate the product's pricing a three out of ten. 

I rate OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise a ten out of ten. 

We use the solution for performance testing, including load testing and stress and endurance testing. We have worked with Citrix, Web-HTTP/HTML, Truclient Protocols and Mobile Applications as well. It has a good user interface and is user-friendly.

It helped us to achieve our goals within the stipulated time and is a good solution for load testing. The integration was smooth, and all the help can be found in the Micro Focus help blog. The examples were helpful for new protocols and functions. 

The load testing, site scope monitoring, analysis, and graphs during execution are all useful features. It offers easy integration with third-party tools like Dynatrace, Splunk, etc. It also offers a customizable template for results. 

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. 

I have been working on the LoadRunner Enterprise more than four years.

Technical support is always available and ready to help.

Positive

The vendor is an expert and helps with all the setup and installation tasks.

Overall, I am satisfied with this product.

All of the features are available with Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise.

The user interface is fine. It's intuitive.

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.

I have been working with Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise for the last ten years.

The response time for technical support is extremely slow. They are generally not well-versed.

The technical support is awful.

There were no issues with the implementation process. It was okay.

The price is a bit too high.

I would rate Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise an eight out of ten.

We use LoadRunner for performance testing.

This is a product that has a lot of capabilities and is the most mature tool of its kind in the market.

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. 

I have been using LoadRunner Enterprise for nine years.

Although it is stable, the whole performance testing process becomes very slow because of its complex scripting and having to rework the scripts. Ultimately, this will become obsolete if it is not improved.

LoadRunner is a scalable product. We have a team of four or five people who use it.

The technical support is very bad. It seems that people will ask a lot of unnecessary questions just to bide the time. We are very frustrated with the support team.

This is the only tool that I have used for performance testing. It is the tool that I use most of the time in my role.

The initial setup is fine. Deploying LoadRunner is quick but to set up the performance testing itself takes a lot of time.

When it comes to organization, people compare automation testing with performance testing. Automation testing is something that is very easily integrated within an agile and faster delivery framework. The scripting in automation testing is robust because it is GUI-based. When it comes to performance testing, it is request-response-based and the scripts are not very robust in some of the application platforms. Because of that, people feel that performance testing is a bottleneck and it takes a lot of time.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is a very user-friendly tool, especially when you compare it to a competitor like BlazeMeter.

The custom meter is nice. It has a lot of features.

When compared with BlazeMeter, I use the plain data. In the cloud after one year it has been very good.

With reporting, we will see the door unlock on the main portal very quickly, because LoadRunner has very good analysis tools. You can analyze data and get the error data as well. You can merge them together and dig down into specific points of time. It's great for correlating drafts within the number of users, between accounts, and with support. These functionalities are not there in BlazeMeter.

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.

I've been using the solution for about one year now.

In terms of stability, it depends on what you are using. Sometimes version 5.3 and the newer versions are not stable. The latest versions we are finding are not so stable when compared with the previous versions we've used, so some glitches are there. They need to rectify that. It was stable for two years, and now it's not.

The solution is scalable, and it's based on the number of licenses you have. In comparison, with BlazeMeter, I ran thousands of users, because it's very cheap and we could scale up the number of users easily with very little overhead.

In my experience, I've used BlazeMeter to scale up to 5,000 users. With OpenText, there are not more than 2,000 users.

In OpenText, I have worked with various types of clients. Some clients have platinum customer status, and some have gold. For those levels, the support will be there. At platinum, technical support is very helpful at updating their support and the support is good.

I also use BlazeMeter.

With LoadRunner, I use it with a paid tool, and since I am following the protocol, I need it to be easy to use. Whereas with BlazeMeter, we use it with JMeter. We need to use it sometimes if we want support. We need to configure some properties or some customers' ratings before we can use it.

The solution needs to reduce licensing costs. Its main competition, for example, is free to use, so I'm sure it's rather difficult to compete with it on a cost level.

We're partners with OpenText.

I haven't found many products in this particular niche that have compared to JMeter and BlazeMeter tools.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I suggest other potential users review OpenText. If the client has the budget for the solution, I'd recommend it. If they don't have a budget, I'd suggest they instead opt to look a freeware solution, and I'd suggest they evaluate JMeter or BlazeMeter.

Even if the protocol and API doesn't cover your need, you can always find a solution. That means you can always handle any situation with a piece of code, whatever the target application is.

For me, it's the best product for a performance team covering a large range of technologies and constraints.

The controller and analysis engine are a piece of cake, configuring the scenario and gathering results are the most important to me.

From my 15 years experience, I measure that I spend only 5% of my time to script, other tasks are more consuming: understanding the business process, making the dataset relevant and reliable with workflow (with VTS for instance which is very great), finding how and what to measure and so on.

Some features could sometimes disappear without reason. It's extremely recommended to take time to evaluates newer versions before upgrading.

We have used Performance Center for Java and .NET applications performance testing with a user load of 2000 users.

It has improved our organizational performance. We are delivering fine performance results and performance recommendations using Performance Center.

• Analysis of results
• Schedule of test
• We can book load generators.
• We can choose LGs based on the required configuration. 
• IP Spoofing can be done using Performance Center.

• Monitoring tools which are available in Performance Center.
• More real-time monitoring should be available for the system under test. 
• Dashboard creation should be implemented, so we can get the results in a desired format.