OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) Reviews

Performance Center, in our company, is used for important applications where we have a lot of users, or special needs for performance that are important.

We have a central team that implements the scripts and executes the tests. It depends on the years of experience of the users. The investment goes down, then we have more issues. Then money is spent and then investment goes up. So it is a curve. Everything is going up, as it is in ALM. ALM is still a growing market.

With Performance Center, the version upgrade is easy. You just have to roll out the new patch or the new version. It is much easier. I'm not really the right person to say, because I run the environment. We have a specialized team that does development.

I’ve been using Performance Center since 2007.

Performance Center is more stable than ALM. We roll out a version, and I think it fits for our clients. If it is a very early version, then we have to implement a patch. Afterwards, it is quiet, hopefully, for at least one or two years.

For Performance Center, you have to add additional load generators, and then you can do more. I think it is a matter of the price, in terms of how many machines you can buy.

For such an experienced team as mine, who have been with the product for over ten years, sometimes working with technical support is not that easy. Support does not have our knowledge. It takes a while to train them in what our issues are and we have to connect to second or third level support.

The collaboration between us and HPE, especially over the past ten years, has been very good. This is the most important thing when looking at a vendor. For that reason, I try to bring in more HPE products, if needed.

ALM centralizes everything. It allows you to work out how well you are doing project-wise because you see the number of scripts done, the number of tests run, and whether you have mapped all your requirements to it. You can produce metrics there fairly easily for your line management and higher. So, overall, it is better than people using Excel spreadsheets.

Performance Center is good because it allows you to share resources, which wasn't happening with Load Runner. With Load Runner, everyone was very specific. I've just got these controllers and their mine and I might only be using them five percent of the time but I need them tomorrow. And I can’t allow anyone else to use them because it will disrupt my schedule.

With Performance Center, you start to get into position where people can say, "I need to run a test, how many assets are available? When can I plan to do it?"
It also provides discipline because you stop getting people saying, "We're ready to do performance testing," because they've got to schedule the test. They've got to use that period when they've scheduled it. If they don't we pull it back and somebody else can use it. You get a lot of people screaming they've lost their slot but what you've proven to them is that they're not ready for performance testing.

It's very good from that point of view. It focuses people's minds on actually using their time effectively.

I have been using ALM for eleven years. I used it when it was version 9.2 and continued with a lot of versions, all the way through.

We picked up Performance Center when we started introducing Load Runner. We kept that together until we realized we were had too many instances and it would be better strategically to go with Performance Center. I have been using it for ten years.

HPE Quality Center ALM is stable. It obviously has not got the attractiveness of Octane. As going forward, Octane probably does now take it to the next step.

The one thing I always said about ALM, and I'll say this to everybody. The worst thing about it is it did not have zero footprint on your PC. The amount of effort and the cost to upgrade to the next version, the amount of problems that it gave us in terms of trying to put a patch on, because it was particularly essential, was really bad for the business.

We had many different PC models out there on people's desks, so it wasn't just a case of patching or building a new MSI package for one PC. You had to do it for a whole range and then you had to deploy them at exactly the same time or somebody would find that they couldn't use Quality Center.

Octane, now being zero footprint, is probably going to be one of the biggest cost savings I see.

Performance Center seems to be stable. It's probably being utilized far more readily than, say, even Unified Functional Testing.
There are issues with it that mostly seem to be environmental. You'd be surprised how many people think they know about how to do performance testing and then they start using a server that's in one area of the UK to try and run a performance test on servers in another country.

I’m thinking, “why are you running such a transaction load across our network.” Whereas, they should really be in the local area. So, with Performance Center, most of the issues are more user-based. Technically, it seems to meet the task that you need it to do.

Without a doubt, both Performance Center and ALM are very scalable.

Sometimes support is good. Sometimes it's not so good. Sometimes you hit an issue and trying to get across the message of what the issue is, and then trying to get an answer back, can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. You hit an issue that everybody else has hit and it has a solution, then you get the response back. But in the majority of cases, the people that are on the case for you tend to do their best to try and answer what you've given them.

Adaptability is what I look for in a vendor. It tends to pull the others in. A good contact, ready to listen, to really know how to deliver what you want. Someone who can listen to what your problem is or what your challenge is that you need the tool to resolve. And if you're willing to adapt to that, then the tool might not be 100%, but it might make it's way there. If you're fixed in your ways, and say, "this is what our tool does, this is all that it's going to do," then to be honest, why continue?

The biggest issue is that ALM is a thick client and you can't patch it, because you've got hundreds and hundreds of PCs. Several different standards are on people's PCs. You can’t do it. You leave it until there's a big release and then you take a massive program to deliver it. Get rid of that thick client bit and you could patch on the server and it could be up and running the next day. Which is the neat bit about Octane.

The setup of Performance Center seems fairly reasonable. No real shakes about it. Obviously, you've got to have VuGen on the PC. It tends to have to be a meaty PC, but then you are running performance tests. My biggest challenge with Performance Center is having people who claim to do performance testing or know how do to performance testing and they're still wet behind the ears.
A good performance tester needs to have a good 18 months experience with them. They need to have done things with Performance Center. Delivered projects. They need to use SiteScope. They need to use analysis tools on that network. They need to know how to get the best value out of the tool. Somebody who's just come for the first time has probably done a week or two-week training course and says, "I know how to performance test."
They get results back and say, "We ran it for a 100 users and it failed." Well, okay, where did it fail? Where's the analysis that helps us fix the problem? And we didn't get that, which they would have done if they'd known to implement the additional bits like SiteScope against it.

So, with Performance Center, it's a skill issue for the people that are using it. Again, one of my guys says, “I’d like to see people be able to grade themselves in Performance Center or even in performance testing, "I'm at a Bronze level. I'm at a Silver level. I'm at a Gold level." Then you know how effective that person is going to be.

The most valuable feature is the analysis tool. It enables me to make a good, detailed analysis after a test run.

On a day-to-day basis, we're working very tight with developers. We use this tool to:

• Outline the details in our systems on the test
• Give feedback to our developers and they do changes
• Test again

It's really good

It would be nice if the Citrix protocol could be updated.

Stability is pretty good. We only had a few glitches over the past few years.

It seems to be scalable. In our part of Jefferson Boeing, we are about 5000 people.

I haven’t needed to use technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup and I have no idea how it went. We're not allowed to fiddle around with installations.

It supports an extensive portfolio of protocols. It supports everything from the very basic web HTTP, which is kind of the bread and butter of load performance testing tools, to Citrix, Oracle, and even some Real X, and others. The breadth of the product is very valuable.

It is a very powerful tool. They pitch it as the market leader and it kind of is. It's that big “one-tool-fits-all” kind of option. You don't need to go and get several tools, each of which supports an individual kind of protocol. You can do pretty much everything on the entire stack with one tool. That makes it good.

It centralized our ability to offer a performance engineering service. We’ve been up as a one-stop shop for projects and programs to come in. We know what tools we’re going to use. Rather than custom fitting something for each project, we can say, “This is what we're going to recommend."

I'd like to see a more shared data repository. They have their costs up. I think they could expand it out a bit more so we could have it running across synthetic users and protocol types.

The stability is very good. A couple years ago, you might have been able to point a finger at HPE and say maybe they weren't doing enough with the product; so it was probably unstable. As it is, over the last couple of years, they've innovated a bit more. There's been a bit more change without losing the core stability.

The scalability is good. We got Performance Center, which is kind of the enterprise version of LoadRunner. That solved a number of pinch points for us by enabling us to run multiple performance engineering programs at once; so that is really good.

Technical support is really good. I’ve had stuff bounced around the world to have problems solved.

We were previously using LoadRunner and we moved to Performance Center. Under the covers, they are very much the same, but Performance Center just has a lot more flexibility from a licensing perspective and from a setup and management perspective. It was kind of a natural evolution.

The initial setup was really reasonably straightforward. We pretty much just followed the installation guide.

We also considered Microsoft. We chose HPE because of its breadth of capability.

When we selected a vendor, it was a trade-off between having the best in class and the price. It needs to be cheap and we need to get along with them.

Whether I would advise colleagues to choose this solution is entirely situationally dependent. It fits our needs and our project portfolio, but that doesn't mean that it will meet everyone else's needs.

What I really like is our team's core competence in building good tests that really do find issues, because of our full-time dedication to it. We have Performance Center as a platform to share with others that don't do performance testing full-time, so that they in an agile fashion, on demand can go ahead and get real issue-finding testing done; then to go ahead and have that pulled into trending reports so that even subtle differences or trends over time are found and not just game-changing defects. Again, it's a platform to get expert level things done for the masses.

It allows us to on the reporting end show how even though we don't have a smoking gun on this release, and it made everything so terrible that we've got real quality issues, we know when it started and that it's only getting worse. When you're tracking many subtle interactions, this is helpful.

I know there are integrations with continuous testing. It's got tie-ins to some of the newer tools to allow continuous testing. I'd love to see us not have to customize it, but for it to be out of the box.

I have some concern over its foundation for utilizing cloud testing hosts in the most integrated fashion. For example there is reliance in AWS to utilize default VPC, and also there is not deep knowledge about utilizing *nix hosts though they are supported.

I have used this solution at four different places starting 13 years ago.

It's good. It's been around a long time and we've been using it a long time. It's stable.

We're up to 60,000 users. It's got a good system for being able to take a vast amount of data that you haven't put into a particular report and chug through it. It could take a while, but it's stable at that.

It comes up periodically; typically when we're doing something we haven't done before. We actually have a combination of support through them and one of their value added re-sellers, AVNET. We actually get level one support through them, so it's a partnered supported arrangement.

Typically AVNET can handle anything unless it's truly about requesting a new feature or enhancement. You need to get back to the product management and developers to request such things.

It has many tiers, it's not a single system thing. You definitely have to take the time to architect it correctly, to have a full topology. I've done it a few times.

As professionals, we're supposed to be some what tool agnostic. We'll find a way to get it done. That said, it's a mature player in the space. We do enjoy some long time knowledge about squeezing the good stuff out of it.

Performance Center is actually run by a performance engineering group so in every release you have a performance engineering phase that runs at the same time as UAT. That's pretty much used to ensure that we're going to hit our production stability, scalability, etc., when a product finally goes in.

That is used in a phase gate, it's not continually run. That's one of the things we're eventually going to get to, that you continually run it.

Our performance engineering team has feedback on Performance Center, so they don't utilize as many of the features as they should. They have it, part of it could be training, but they're not using it as much as they should. They use it, but they're not taking full advantage of all the features in it, meaning they are not combining it with UFT, etc.

They just run it to run the virtual users and then load and stress test, and that's pretty much what they're doing. They're not really taking advantage of the whole stack like we do. That's another group as well.

Stable in the fact that it does what it does, it does it well. Why they use other tools, that's where I would say there's some poly-functionality that has to be improved in the product. I'd have to specifically interrogate them on what they're not getting out of it. It's stable, it's up, and it runs, but if you want to look at is it as highly leveraged as it could be, it's not so much.

We're already at enterprise scale, so it's used across the enterprise. I would say that we're at that point.

Originally we were using LoadRunner, and then we had to upgrade to Performance Center because with LoadRunner we didn't maintain currency with the license. That's another group that manages that. They just kind of were using it as it is. Then when we upgraded to version 11, we had compatibility issues and we had to go to Performance Center. I think they just didn't get used to it. I don't know exactly what they are or are not using in that stack, but part of it is we were forced to upgrade.

I have an entire team, so I'm a director and I have an entire tools team that does that. I did get involved in the planning and the strategy of how we're going to do it. My team said that first installation is relatively easy. When we go to upgrade and migrate, that's where there's pain.

We have to use other products like Selenium and a lot of custom scripting, et cetera, but that's the nature of the business. That ends up happening everywhere.

Have a well-defined process, have a strong reporting structure, meaning in your process you want a lot of measurability. If you define your output, the reports and the questions you need to answer from what you're doing, which your process should be managing for you. In our company, we are very specific about what our executives and stakeholders want.

We have a very well-defined set of measurements that we have to take. We then put a process designed to ensure those measurements are always taken. That then allows you to deal with your outputs and your reporting structure, which then allows you to properly architect your tooling. The technology is very flexible. You have to decide as a client area how you really want to use it and that's going to start with what your business needs are the values that you're trying to get out of it.

That's the biggest advice that I have, it's not even on the technology. The technology will do great things for you if you have a plan and a structure and you know what you want it to do for you. Half the time they don't know, they want the tool to do it for them and it's the other way around. So that's what I advise people to do.

Think about it, have a vision, have a plan, tie that to outcomes, and measure those outcomes. If you're answering the right questions and asking the right questions, your technology will really enable you. You've got to look at it from that standpoint.

We still have a legacy LoadRunner, but we are moving towards this tool. For our web applications, we are moving towards Performance Center, because it is more GUI and user-friendly, and with all the latest technologies. It's pretty easy to learn how to use.

I don't know if it is available or it depends on the licenses, but reports from Performance Center need to be improved. If we can improve the reporting structure and we can view the report on a smartphone, that would be huge.

We always have to get connected if there is a report. It's doesn't need to be the full tool, but just like how HPE Discover has an app, if we can have an app just for reports, that would help.

I've been using it for about six to eight months.

We are still learning and evaluating it.

All of our applications are not yet on Performance Center.

It was even before I joined. We were using LoadRunner. LoadRunner is a leading load testing tool in the market. Whenever a customer or anyone looks for a tool, the first thing which comes to mind is HP. We have seen StormRunner and we are here at HPE Discover 2016 to check out tools. We will see how they scale, and probably will make a decision soon.

Nothing wrong with it, but I have to learn more about it to see if it's going to match our needs. Performance Center has everything which LoadRunner offers, plus additional things.

Performance Center allows multiple users to access and work on a project simultaneously. 

Additionally, it keeps a run log and allows for script and scenario versioning. 

I also like the scheduling feature that allows us to manage multiple projects using the same controller and load generators.

I am a performance tester, and I need a product that can maintain my scripts, scenarios, monitors and run logs. Performance Center is my product of choice.

Just recently, I used the command line feature to create scripts that can be used across multiple environments. That feature saved me a great deal of time --thousands in man hours over the last year.

The trending reports do not always work as I would expect them to. I have had issues with transaction times being pulled in correctly. 

Additionally, trending a test run can take over 30 minutes when it should take five.

I've used it for five years.

Performance Center requires regular maintenance in order to remain stabl

No

The company I work for provides Performance Center support.  Orasi has won several awards for their HP support.  I use Orasi support when ever I require customer service for an HP product.  I have never had an opportunity to use HP customer service.

I have had the opportunity to use two other products briefly. Unfortunately, I did not have enough experience to speak to this with any authority.

I was not involved in the deployment of any of the instances of Performance Center that I have used. However, I have been involved in three different upgrades for three different clients. 

When Performance Center is managed properly with proper maintenance, there were no issues with upgrades. I have seen instances of script corruption, user access difficulties and project corruption. 

It is necessary to have an experienced Performance Center administrator providing regular maintenance.

Orasi Software does Performance Center implementation. I am not a member of that team. I have been on projects where Performance Center was implemented by the client and then Orasi was called to correct any issues. 

Again, I cannot stress enough how important it is to have an experienced administrator. It may cost more initially but it will save time and money later.

The return on investment is immeasurable. One of my first clients was an entertainment company that called us after their production site had gone down for a day. The reservation system was down for over six hours. They estimated they had lost in excess of three million dollars an hour. 

Regular performance testing prevents such occurrences. Needless to say they have not been down since.

The price tag on Performance Center is a large one. It can be daunting. There are so many options now with Cloud Controllers, using Cloud Load Generators, purchasing VUser licenses by the day or even hour. Additionally, Performance Center in the cloud relieves you of the essential maintenance and administration requirements.

I was trained on HP LoadRunner and then Performance Center.  I was not involved in any evaluation process.

Performance Center is not difficult to pick up for a beginner. When I was first introduced to Performance Center, I had just started my career as a performance test engineer. It is not completely intuitive though. I believe there are some extraneous requirements. As I mentioned before an experience administrator is recommended.

The command line feature allows you to set a parameter value at the scenario level. It can be applied to all scripts in a scenario. This feature has saved me a great deal of time.