OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise Reviews

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, 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.

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. 

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.

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.

• Integration with the majority of enterprise tools
• Scripting
• Reporting
• Admin Console
• Reporting & Analysis tool

This helps us to uncover some very high and critical performance-related defects, and keeping almost zero production issues related to the performance of applications since then.

Almost all the areas improve drastically with each version; however, the correlation of scripts, analysis and reporting can be further improved. Their technical support could also be improved. Recording of the latest applications is an area for continuous improvement.

I've used it for the last 15 years, and for the last nine years at enterprise level.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Mercury support was very good compared to HP, however they are getting better day by day.

It was straightforward initially with v8.1 and various FPs for 8.1. However it was very complex with v10. It was due to the way our security suites were designed that made it very complex. The design stage took one month, and implementation was two months, and we had one month dedicated support from offshore.

It was with a mix of an in-house team and vendor support. The vendor team is necessary for the initial setup, and upgrades can be done in-house, but major upgrades need vendor support.

We carried out various PoCs for different market leading tool sets, and chose HP Performance Center because it offers better test suites for our enterprise tools, ease of integration, and it had more collaboration with our existing tool sets. Also, the technology, current & future demands for various applications, was better than the other opetions and they offered better support arrangements.

It's generally for enterprise level, however they now offer a SaaS version for smaller companies or clients.

This solution is used for performance testing.

The most valuable features are the multiple schedule and load setup preferences in a test scenario. It is also flexible in scalability.

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I have been using this solution for six years.

It is stable.

The scalability is good.

I would definitely recommend LoadRunner for performance testing of any application/system with a wide variety of protocols. It's a great tool for capturing performance bottlenecks and its commendable analysis and reporting.

I would rate it nine out of ten

• It helps you to build custom design application simulation models that enable the performance test engineer to assess an enterprise, multi-tier, heavily-distributed, high-traffic application on how the application for that particular release meets its non-functional test requirements and SLA thresholds, which are key business-transaction response times.
• It tell you your applications' CPU computational power usages under various conditions such as stress, volume, and scalability.
• Its distributed nature will let you choose load generators that can be geographically located anywhere, thus traffic simulations from multiple locations make it possible to create a real production scenario.
• The true advantage of Performance Center is the ability to enable multiple engineers to do design and validate their script locally, but to execute them globally by using global resources spread across an organization.
• The other advantage is the integration with HP SiteScope which lets you to perform deep-dive monitoring of your application under test during your test execution for live health analysis using several readily available monitoring templates.

Some of the key-business and mission-critical applications released earlier into production were having issues in terms of key business transactions running slowly, which were impacting the end-user experience. The slow business transactions were causing grief to several customers, which eventually led to customers being moved onto different competitor products, causing revenue loss. There was increased downtime of applications in production due to poor application performance.

With the help of HP Performance Center and LoadRunner, we were able to critically evaluate the applications performance and stability, and were assured that each application that was released into production was performing better and meeting all SLAs, including transactional response times and system and platform resource utilization.

We have received excellent feedback in one specific instance where a customer came directly to me, and said that they are seeing much better transactional response times, which helped them serve customers faster, and now they are seeing their customers coming back.

Integration with other APM tools like DynaTrace or AppDynamics is a little tedious. Plus, support around cloud solutions and architectures needed to be improved.

I have used several versions of this product for over five years, alongside HP LoadRunner.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

As a person who has been in the performance engineering field for several years, I have used several similar products. However, Performance Center and LoadRunner offer unbeatable support across different protocols, including SAP and AJAX true client.

Also, its ease of use in designing and reusable custom automated performance frameworks is unbeatable. Its support in designing frameworks and scripts for load testing message queues, web, and web-service protocols are quite remarkable.

It offers different types of users for people who come from different programming backgrounds i.e. if you are predominantly a C programmer, you can write a lot of custom API’s using C, and similarly, if you come from Java programming you can use your Java skills in custom API implementation.

It was straightforward.

In-house.

It can lead to the generation of a very high ROI if you have the right people with the right expertise of the tool set.

It is a bit highly priced. However, better products with a better quality can come with a good price.

It is definitely one of the best products available on the market. Definitely programming knowledge around C programming would be greatly advantageous.