OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

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.

Performance of load test applications, reliably, and with good reporting.

We have high confidence that the results are reliable. It's helped catch multiple bugs before they've gone to production. And we're able to more confidently release software into production, just more confidently release code.

I'd like to see better reporting, ultimately, and analysis. I'd like to see the analysis more accurately pin-point where these issues are; a little more feedback immediately in terms of the anomalies that we're seeing during the testing, so we can get alerted much quicker, instead of blowing a whole bunch of our day to test data during a test.

The reporting could be a lot better. It's cumbersome. The VuGen takes a long time to load up, and edit and execute things off those. So a lot of the basic infrastructure.

We've had a few crashes, but overall they seem to be more of the aging architecture, the hardware's not as reliable. A few software bugs in there, which we have to work around. But overall, it's been pretty reliable when you think about how much load goes through it and the number of people using it.

We've scaled it up to, well, to our limits at least. A good 1500 users and some 10 million transactions, or something like, that per hour. It's generally handled that pretty well. We're looking forward to moving into StormRunner next.

The tech support seems to be pretty good. There have been a few problems that they haven't resolved, but they've led me in the right direction to eventually figure it out on my own. It's very difficult for them to understand all the wide range of applications we use. So I'm really impressed with how ultimately knowledgeable they are, given that they don't actually use all these applications that are out there.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I've been involved in all the upgrades. They've done it multiple times. Each upgrade seems to be adding a lot more features. It seems like the pace of development has picked up in the last couple years especially, and we've been impressed with the direction that the product's going.

The upgrades actually were fairly complex for my team. The last one, they were actually giving up for a while. It turned out that there were some database versions that were incompatible. Eventually, once we were able to get connected with the support, we were able to get most of it worked out.

There was a big upgrade with the 12.5 version that was a little slower. But everything else has been very smooth since then. Still, it's difficult. Everybody's come to count on that software being at a certain version.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are, I suppose, support, and the reliability in the industry.

They have a good road map for moving forward. It's going to be integrating with a lot more other products that the DevOps world is starting to push upon us.

It's not quite perfect. It's still the best in the market. It holds up to a lot of the scrutiny that the developers constantly throw at us.

There have been a few issues, especially around the scripting and the IDEs, handling of some of the protocols, that still don't perfectly match with what we have in production. But overall, we're able to pretty well defend it. You can almost always reliably pull up the application, and the response times seem to match what we have coming out of LoadRunner.

I would definitely advise looking at Performance Center, it's still the best in the breed. Just make sure that you have a good team in place that can implement it.

One of the things in the airline business, we see that our number of users varies on a day to day basis, from season to season. So, from an airline business standpoint, we are looking at scalability as one the major things and how can we adapt the solution in an agile fashion. If we want to ramp up the "Our Views" account, from, let's say 10,000 to 50,000, how can we do that? That kind of scalability is the main key thing we are looking at.

One of the key things we use is simulating the actual user experience on the log. We have a huge set of applications from front end to the back end systems. How do we integrate all these systems and how do we simulate the real time user behavior? That's where we see a key value.

One of the things we were looking for is more of a DevOps support, like BlazeMeter has. It would be an ideal scenario to incorporate those kinds of features. I know there are some open software products which have that but it would be ideal to see those features in the product.

As of now, it's working great for us, it's excellent. We don't have any issues. That's one of the reasons we are pushing forward to version 12, to incorporate the other protocols, which version 12 comes up with.

We are at version 11.5 and we are in the process of upgrading it to version 12. We are pretty happy with the solution we have.

We do have a dedicated team. They work with our tech support and with their tech support in terms of the installations and stability of the product and usability. All those issues, they take it up with tech support.

Tech support is pretty excellent. We are getting pretty good responses back from tech support and, as of now, we are happy. We do have a contact too, from the United Airlines side too so I'm pretty happy with that.

Ours is more of a historical basis. We were on version 9, we moved to version 11, and we are right now at version 12. It's more for historical reasons rather that an impulse buy.

I didn't work on the installation of 11.5, but right now I'm working on version 12.

Internally, we have a lot of planning to do on our side, like a database upgrade, LGs, all that stuff but we are coordinating that with HPE and Micro Focus and making sure that our timelines and their timelines match. And we do have upgrade licenses, which should be pretty good to go.

I would say the relations between us and Micro Focus is straightforward because all we are looking at is basically license upgrades. On our side, it's more complex because we have to internally work with various teams to coordinate all this activity.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with are the product, how easy it is to use the product and, again, how scalable the product is and how it suits the needs of United Airlines. And, of course, the customer support, and how technical support deals.

Regarding advice to a colleague, it depends on the industry and what kind of problem they are trying to solve. If it is in the airline industry, I would definitely suggest to them, "Okay, this is a perfect product because of the number of protocols it supports," because we looked at other open source software and we couldn't find a product which matches Performance Center, which supports so many protocols. So, especially in the airline industry, we are using multiple protocols and we need that support. I would definitely recommend that.

For me, it's the fact that I can train my team on a single tool. It really is kind of our Swiss Army Knife in that it can handle so many different types of protocols and technologies, and I don't have to train my team on multiple tools to handle each of those.

It's really given us a lot of insight into, especially as we've moved into DevOps now, incorporating that into our CI lifecycle. We can start the performance testing earlier on, carry the same results through, and have it as part of our release cycle.

Mobility, I think, is the biggest for us right now. We're really getting into mobile app testing, native mobile app testing, so native Android and IOS devices.

As far as scalability goes, we're able to spin up load generators to handle an incredible size of load, so really we're just limited by the amount of hardware that we can spin up for it.

We use a third-party partner to do tech support and it's been fantastic with them.

We have, ourselves, gotten to Mircro Focus on a couple of issues that have been actually escalated all the way up to the team back in Israel, I think that's where they're located.

That was fantastic. We actually had them, they came out on site with us, some of the developers for Performance Center, and talked to us about some of the ways that we were using it. Some of the features that they thought customers no longer needed that we were actually telling them were still valuable to us, and they wound up bringing back a few features that were on the chopping block.

I wasn't directly involved in the decision to invest in Performance Center because we'd been using it since it was LoadRunner, and I've been using it for pretty close to 20 years now. So that was before my time.

I was involved in it. I'd say it was fairly straightforward for us because we used our support partner to help us out, guide us through some of the pitfalls of the initial setup. But he gave us a two-week timeframe that he said we'd be able to get it set up in, and we easily had it set up within a week.

When looking at vendors, support is the big one. Also, ease of training people on the tool, and just the variety of technology supported.

In terms of advice, I would say the biggest choice is that Performance Center really is for a very large enterprise. So I'd say evaluate if it's really what you need for the size of your organization. But if it is, it really can support pretty much any kind of technology you throw at it.

Performance Center is really our go-to tool for anything that we have to test. It's just our default tool for whatever technology we have.

High scalability. Web-based testing. The interface. If you're familiar with the days of using LoadRunner, when you had to have the 32-bit client, using a web-based client is fantastic. You can spin it up relatively quickly despite the fact that it's enterprise software. You can test a huge variety of applications, not just web-based systems, but SAP, Oracle, web services, pretty much anything out in the market place, but it's mobile-based testing.

In my current organization, I honestly don't know so much. But in my previous organization, when I was doing consulting, we helped huge amounts of customers prepare not to fail under scale. So whether you have a large amount of base driven things like Super Bowl, or a major sale, release of a new product like Samsung S8, iPhone 7, etc. Basically when you get a huge push.

Canned reports are always a challenge and a question with customers because customers want to see sexy reports. They want to be able to show something to the CIO. So I think the dashboards are one of the features I'd like to see most.

I think it's more of getting into the world where you've got tableau and dashboarding. I think that reporting needs to be a little bit more fancy, as people expect the sexier reporting. They don't expect just to have, "I ran a test. The test ran for this long." I think the consumer's expectations for what reporting looks like have changed a lot. You do an Excel report or a Word report versus, "No, it needs to be a very pretty dashboard."

The product itself, I think it's pretty good. I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

It's great. I don't have a problem with stability at all, as long as you have it scaled properly and you have sufficient hardware in place. If you're running it all on a VM, you're going to have a problem, but if you run it with the proper infrastructure, it's a very solid product.

The nature of Performance Center is scalable, so you have the application server and then, when you need to have more generators to generate more load, you spin those up pretty quickly. You can use cloud-based generators as well, so that's a huge plus.

It's been a long time since I needed to use tech support. Normally, as a consultant, I am the tech support, so I don't typically have to use tech support. But when I have, I normally am able to get quickly to either R&D-level or a level-two support because it's a real problem with the product, not necessarily just, "I can't figure this out."

I help customers with this process all the time. I'm usually advising them on what, why, when, what the feature benefits are.

Unfortunately, as is human nature, customers decide that they need Performance Center because they've had a disaster. Hopefully not a horrible disaster, but they've had some kind of case where they released a product and it didn't scale. They didn't plan for their own success. A classic example is HealthCare.gov. Politics aside, when you've got the entire American population ready to enroll for healthcare and it tanks, it's a very bad experience for everyone. And that's not an uncommon occurrence across the board.

So then they realize, "Oh, well, we better do performance testing," and then they realize they didn't plan for that in the project lifecycle, so now they need to come and talk to Micro Focus about standing that up, or to talk to a partner at Micro Focus about how to do that for them.

There was a reason, for the longest time, that it had one of the largest market shares of any type of solution in the world, and now that Micro Focus has Silk and the LoadRunner/Performance Center product, they've got that market cornered.

I have set up many, many instances of Performance Center. Recently, it's much more straightforward. A long time ago it was very complex. But it's pretty straightforward. You set up the application center, you set up your generators, you set up your controllers, database.

When selecting a vendor I would judge them on the criteria that I have myself: they've got to have experience, they've got to have done the testing on the solutions that they've worked on. I think seniority is good too, little gray hairs don't hurt anything.

Regarding advice to others, invest in training. Invest in mentoring. Invest in experienced people that have done the job before. Don't go into it thinking that you're going to open the box, get it out, and it's going to be perfect. It's a complicated tool for a reason. You don't want someone operating on you who says, "Well, I read a book on brain surgery." It's complicated for a reason.

• Enterprise-Level
• Centralized Platform
• Mobile
• Cloud
• CI
• Advanced Reporting
• Support

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a recognized leader in the performance testing space, and with every new software release, it continues to solidify it's position as a front-runner and as an innovator.

More features to support testing in DevOps environment(s).

For the past six years.

No issues faced.

No.

No.

A nine out of 10.

An eight out of 10.

No, I have been using it for the past six years.

It gives us a run history of the tests we've planned and executed.

We are able to connect and run tests from different locations with this tool.

Storing the results of our tests requires the use of a lot of memory in our data center.

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I have mixed feelings about HP technical support. A few technicians know what they are doing, but the majority don’t.

No previous solution was used.

We implemented it with our in-house, but we used the help desk during the entire process of implementation. Their help desk needs to know more about their own tools.

No other options were looked at.

I like the tool.