OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

Using the ALM Performance Center resource monitors, you can monitor Windows, UNIX, SiteScope, and SNMP servers on a machine during the test run and determine why a bottleneck occurred on a particular machine. Provides the performance of load test applications and reliably on good reporting.

It is used to empower our organisation in assisting customers, addressing their concerns, finding solutions, and providing value, thus making it possible to put customer success first, and in the process, focus on the business.

• Merging Graphs
• Layout management
• Measurement menu
• The new features are nice, like cloud testing, mobile testing, continuous testing, etc.

• New features have been added in latest version and need to be improved with the DevOps integration.
• We are expecting more flexible to use Jenkins in continuous integration going forward. 

No issues.

No scalability issues.

Support is nice, quick, and responsive.

For a long time, we have been using HPE tools only.

It is straightforward.

We implemented through the vendor, who used highly-skilled professionals. 

ROI is 200%.

It is a bit expensive when compared with other tools.

We evaluated LoadRunner.

• Test and resource scheduling
• Test runs trending
• Network virtualization and the new NV Insights report
• Cloud integration
• New Web UI
• Jenkins integration
• Performance Application Lifecycle

• It made performance testing for global teams work more natural.
• Performance Application Lifecycle allowed us to really build our load test according to the traffic we see in production.
• Trending shows us exactly the performance impact of our latest software changes.
• Using Jenkins, we managed to automate our performance testing as part of the CI.

Features in the Web UI should be enhanced. We should be able to do everything from the Web UI. without ever needing to download the old ActiveX ALM UI.

Four years.

No issues.

No issues.

We easily managed to run load tests of 100K concurrent Vusers on our web application, so scalability was not an issue for us.

An eight out of 10.

A seven out of 10.

I did not rate other solutions.

Pretty straightforward.

In-house.

We considerd SOASTA CloudTest.

Probably its prime advantage, it provides a centralized location for testing.

The stability on the old versions is good. On the newer versions, I think the bleeding edge is still being worked on.

It is very scalable. No issues with scalability.

Premium support is great, but before that, when we just had general support, it was not all that great. We had issues with just trying to get support to call us back on tickets and also with the turnaround time on resolution.

It is not exactly straightforward. Their instructions were not all they could have been, but we still got it installed.

It provides a different platform for testing in an organized fashion. One of the big things is data warehousing, data analytics, you want to get from being reactive to proactive to predictive. Those are the progressions that we want to make. It's going to be extremely difficult when you start to incorporate testing platforms, testing techniques, to tooling, into pipeline, into any of these DevOps pipelines. If we can't collect the data, if we don't really know what's going on, then it becomes very hard to make testing decisions from tooling to technique to platforms. 

Performance Center innately provides you the ability to manage those assets. And it's also a different type of testing, independent of something that might be more unit based. We want to be able to test at the integration or the system level, which is a completely different approach to testing compared to a developer who may be doing something very, very low-level. Instead of changing the class.

We want to make sure that all these areas of testing are not just being done, but they're also able to be audited. Because, without access to the data, it makes it very difficult to implement solutions going forward. Whether they're new or they may be something that's up for modernization to keep up with DevOps and pipelining.

It has to be fully integrated into pipelines, it needs to be DevOps friendly. It needs to be easily digestible by management, and certainly developers. It's a developers' world, as it should be. They're the ones who create the applications and solve the problems in those applications. So it has to be positioned to be something that allows a team to make better decisions, to move through that progress I mentioned before, from reactive to proactive to predictive. Once you get the predictive you can make better decisions on how you should be teasing things, and Performance Center will have to follow the same trajectory. It has value, but the value needs to evolve and mature along with other aspects of application development.

It helps us to test the performance of our applications at load, and what sets it apart is the number of types of applications that it covers from web to back office, and even mobile. Makes multiple protocols available to us.

It gives us advanced reporting. Allows us to compare performance as we make application changes, and scale to the level that we need as a large organization.

I'd like to see feedback from production, to see what scenarios to run, and even better integrations into some other products such as AppDynamics.

I've been using LoadRunner for some 15 to 18 years personally, but at the company I'm at, for about six months.

Yes, I would say it is stable. We haven't had a problem with stability.

I believe it will meet our needs into the future. We heard today that you can scale up to 2,000,000 users even with the sister product, which is StormRunner. We haven't had any issues with scalability.

We use a third-party for tech support and they do a great job.

Straightforward. Very easy to do.

I think it's the best product out there for performance and load testing.

As a tool, it's something that we can use in all aspects of performance testing, whether it's services, whether it's web, whether it's customized APIs, like Citrix. It's the tool for performance testing, and it's definitely the industry leader that I've been using for years. It's a very powerful tool.

Truthfully, I think performance is a fairly mature space now. There are not too many things popping up that we're saying, "You know, Performance Center doesn't do X, Y or Z." It's a pretty mature tool and we're happy with it.

In terms of having one tool it is helpful in terms of training. It has really great reporting features, so not only is it a good tool to do testing with, but when it comes to helping you produce good results that you can present up, it's an all around tool that has everything that you need within it. You don't have to go to other third-party tools for reporting or for different types of testing. It's a tool that is "one size fits all".

I think better or more integration with some of the monitoring tools that we're considering.

We're looking to bring in maybe AppDynamics. I personally don't know the integrations but having good integration tools is going to help us in the future.

I think some of the reporting features could be better. I haven't seen much change in terms of that aspect of it, the report analysis piece. It's been good enough but I haven't seen as much advancement in that space, the reporting analysis.

I find it very stable. I will say that with the changes to virtual machines and things like that, It is harder now to manage. That's one of the reasons we are looking at not only using Performance Center, but also StormRunner. That gets us away from needing to scale up; doing that within Performance Center can be difficult because you have to deal with the aspects of all that infrastructure. It's not the tool itself, but it's the underlying infrastructure that you have to manage. Something like StormRunner is promising because it gets you away from that a little bit. Somebody else is taking care of that aspect of it.

It's an enterprise type tool. It scales very well. Again, it's not the product that we have issue with scaling.

We have challenges with the number of VMs that we have. The issue with scaling up is we come up against our infrastructure team that wants to limit the number of VMs. They have to manage them. The whole VM-type design seems to be a lot more VMs, and when you need to scale up, it's even more VMs. I understand the cost savings with VMs but in terms of management, if you don't have that nailed down in terms of automation and all that monitoring, it's a challenge to scale up.

I think that's where our current Performance Center implementation is probably going to remain, but if we're going to scale up, we're really looking toward something with StormRunner, where we can scale up as we need and not have to worry about the whole managing of the infrastructure, cause that's a challenge.

I have used tech support. Not recently, not in the last 12 or 18 months, but yes, I've used tech support. They're responsive. I've had good support. They get to the point. There's not a lot of hand-holding, they expect you to know what you're doing. I have no problem with that. As long as I can get the answer, get what I need and get it done, I'm happy with that.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, it was pre-existing. We use Performance Center, but as the HPE ALM piece is managed by a separate tools group, that's a challenge because we don't have control over the whole implementation.

I've assisted with the Performance Center upgrade piece a little bit, installing it, but in general, we have a whole separate group that does it.

When looking for a vendor to work with the number one thing is does a tool do what it needs to do? Second, of course, support. Stability and the ability to scale are pretty important but I think that's grouped under the tool itself. It has to be an enterprise ready scalable tool.

Regarding the vendor itself, support, being responsive, having a way to access the support that's not overly obtrusive. I don't mind doing emails or logging onto a website, just as long as it's not too convoluted. Sometimes I feel like you have to go through 20 steps to get somebody to call you back and every customer support or technical support has their process. As long as it's not overly going through hoops to be able to access that.

In terms of advice, you have to do the math. There are a lot of free tools or tools that you write yourself. You just have to make sure that, long term, are those things maintainable, supportable? Do you have the training? Do you have the support? You have to bake all that in before you make a decision. It's not to say those other tools aren't valid, and people do a lot with them but, for example, if the tool needs programming skills, do you have those skills? Do you have a team with those skills? And how much is it going to cost to keep, hire, or maintain your staff with those tools? So you have to do the math to make that kind of decision, what the right tool is.

I think the tool does what it really needs to do and I've never had an issue with their support. I think they're definitely the industry leading product for performance.

The fact that you can have tens of thousands of virtual users and just expand an army of load generators to hammer on whatever application you're testing. It seems to be so scalable, and we haven't approached any limits. We have some projects that have over 100 load generators and they don't have many issues using the tool.

I think better support for cloud-based load generators would help. For example, integrate with Amazon AWS so you can quickly spin up a load generator in the cloud, use it, spin it down. That way, you're only paying for the actual time that it's being used. I know they have some functionality with that right now, but it could be improved because right now, our projects have to bare the cost of that infrastructure, whether it's an AWS or whether it's their own VMs, so that would help out with that.

Personally, I've been using LoadRunner or Performance Center for almost 10 years. But our deployed solution, that's available to projects, has only been deployed for about two and a half years.

I think Performance Center is pretty stable. It's the enterprise version of LoadRunner, which was a very mature tool. In fact, a lot of the components or installation files are still the exactly same. They've added this central, enterprise web front end to it that works pretty well. It's compatible on multiple browsers, on ALM. I would say it's a pretty mature, stable product.

More people seem to know how to use Performance Center, so we don't need as much help with it, but it is a more complicated product. HPE, or Micro Focus, has been responsive.

This is complex. We are hosting some of the components in the Deloitte network. The clients or the projects have to set up their own load generators. You have to configure firewall rules. We have to install these agents and point them at our environment to connect and troubleshoot connectivity issues. And every client has a different need. If you're behind a VPN - the app that you're testing - or it's inside the client network, that introduces some challenges. Just by the nature of the tool and what you're doing, it is complex.

It does everything you could hope for in a performance testing solution. It's not cheap, but that's not necessarily a concern for us because we're a large company. But it does anything you can think of. It's a pretty mature, robust tool.