OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) Reviews

My experience with OpenText LoadRunner Professional over the years began with Mercury, then HP, Micro Focus, and now OpenText.

Currently, we are using the cloud version of OpenText LoadRunner Professional.

The most valuable feature of OpenText LoadRunner Professional is the analysis part that is really good, along with the support for multiple protocols.

The scalability feature of OpenText LoadRunner Professional is good, enhancing my testing capabilities.

The dashboard and technical support of OpenText LoadRunner Professional are good currently; if anything is required, I will let you know.

Our use case is very complex because our company uses a lot of tools. We have more than 500 applications. Some of them are legacy applications created 40 or 50 years ago. We have applications created with different platforms such as Visual Basic, .Net, and C++. We have different platforms. We have mainframes, but LoadRunner is always perfect. It is able to handle everything.

LoadRunner Professional has helped a lot. Very often, I get a request from the release team, and I have one or two days to prepare a script and run the test. It is very fast and robust. LoadRunner does not need a lot of time to prepare results and drill down. It is very good. I also like network virtualization and service visualization.

LoadRunner Professional saves time because I know how to start, what I need to prepare, and what I need to put in conditions. It is very old. It saves 50% to 70% of my time because I have extensive experience with it.

It has helped improve our product quality and application quality. It helps to make decisions about whether to go or not go for something. We are a railway company, and we are not producing software. We develop software or solutions based on the existing solutions. For example, when we have an OpenText new release, we have to run performance tests against OpenText servers to validate that everything is okay. It is the same with other applications such as SAP and so on.

LoadRunner has helped to reduce our workload. I now have virtual users doing these tests. It is very good and flexible. For example, LoadRunner can now support Windows Server 2016, 2018, and 2019. I know that some other companies do not do that. It sometimes saves almost 100% of the workload because I have different applications, and I have to jump from one type of application to another. It is very good.

A few of our developers use LoadRunner Developer to start and run small unit tests, but they are application killers because all kinds of problems are seen at a very early stage.

We used the TruClient feature for browser-based testing. It helped me a lot. I remember when COVID started, we started to test an Amazon chatbot for our employees and customers for questions and answers. Amazon is using pretty tricky encryption, and LoadRunner was perfect. It saved me a lot of time. It was the first tool that worked with that level of correlation, security, and encryption. It was perfect for me.

TruClient has helped reduce scripting work. Very often, I also use TruClient for functional testing. It sometimes reduces even more than 80% of scripting work.

Our application performance is much better after running the tests. I can present monitoring results. I can present server results and database results. We can correlate them. We can correlate transaction failures, and we can correlate and see what went wrong on the server side or the database side. For example, for Oracle or SQL Server, we can monitor cursors and memory leaks. We found a lot of memory leaks with servers.

We primarily use it for load testing. We were seeking AI-enabled load testing, where we could input functional requirements. The idea is that the tool suggests test cases based on those requirements. 

This would help us streamline the process and reduce the time due to our limited staff for load testing, considering we handle around 200 projects a year. Our use case is to address resource constraints.

We do not have these unexpected outages because we didn't size our infrastructure feature based on the load. So we made an assumption or a guesstimate. When it would go live in production, things started breaking. 

That's where LoadRunner comes into the picture. We can run a realistic user load and see what functions are breaking. Because in IT, some functions work up to a little certain load. After that, they become fragile and stop working. 

We have a lot of distributed applications. That creates a lot of channels because we use ten different APIs and functions to provide one service for a user Outlook phone service. 

LoadRunner has helped us save time. If we don't do load testing, we'll end up opening seven or eight tickets and then redoing everything for the next six months. It definitely saves us time—approximately 30 to 40 days per project in man-hours.

Fewer outages mean better product quality for our customers and for our development team. Because then the development team doesn't need to focus on fixing what broke today and why it broke. 

Sometimes, when a function starts breaking under load, it's hard to determine the root cause. We might think that the function is not working properly, but it's actually working as per our requirements. It's not working for 20,000 or 10,000 users when we only tested it for 5,000 users. Then, database and server limits start popping up, issues that cannot be fixed quickly or easily. That's where load testing adds value. It allows us to break our product before a customer breaks it and then see what kind of issues we'll see under extra load. That's where LoadRunner comes in.

LoadRunner has helped us reduce our workloads. We avoid all these outages. We don't realize it until it breaks. We think, "Oh, we're not going to have any problems." But once it breaks, we have to bring in our resources, which should be working on a new project, but now they're stuck with this problem because we didn't do load testing. So, it all ties together. 

We primarily use it for scripting and creating workload models. These are the two things we use it for. We use it in finance, specifically not in banking.

Recently, we had a test run for a finance application. We designed our scenario using LoadRunner Professional, where we tested around 500 users. The incremental load was easy to design, thanks to the scenario templates and workload modeling provided by LoadRunner.

The scripting capabilities of LoadRunner Professional are good. We can record most protocols with LoadRunner scripting, which is a good point. We do not have to rely on other tools or convert them to LRC scripts. It also features a good option for converting HAR files to load scripts, which helps a lot when traffic requests are missing in our recording. It's pretty good.

Until now, we have only integrated it with the internal product itself. We haven't tried integrating with external products much.

My use cases span various industries, from banking and energy to health care and now in telecommunications. The requirements encompass tasks such as load generation, finding response times, UI interaction, and identifying network issues.

LoadRunner Professional installation is pretty straightforward. I encountered challenges mainly when working for an energy organization as part of a COE (Center of Excellence).

In such scenarios, handling projects varied, sometimes involving SaaS platforms or terminal emulators for different protocols. Dealing with less common protocols could be tricky, and that's when we require support.

LoadRunner has improved our processes in the sense that once you record a script, even if you have to run a small generation, a developer can run it. They can even use it for their regression testing, you can use it. With parameterization, we can reuse LoadRunner to run in different environments just by changing the URL. You don't have to rescript.

LoadRunner is a tool you need to invest in beforehand. Once the installation is done, the major investment goes into scripting. You have to customize the script.

Once the script is customized, it's reusable. In a day, you might need to run multiple performance tests, so you can just keep running them as many times as you can through, like in the pre-prod environment, and then the prod environment. It definitely saves a lot of time. 

Moreover, LoadRunner Professional has improved our product quality because, with the shift-left testing, we can detect early issues. We can run the test and then smaller bugs when it goes into production. The quality definitely improves.

It has also reduced the workload in the sense that when I was working in healthcare, we had to do a trend analysis report, and we wanted to run the test interactively. If we put the scenario in our auto-scheduler, we can check the report in the morning and we don't have to babysit it. We just run it.

It's mainly used for performance testing. One of its features called TrueClient has helped us see how users interact with our applications.

It also contributed to improving the quality of our products. By saving time, we're able to identify performance issues and address them more quickly, which ultimately leads to better quality.

It helped reduce our workload overall. The customization options make it easier to manage tasks.

We're now able to identify and address issues that arise during peak loads. We are able to figure out things and handle peak loads now. 

My use case is for load testing and fine-tuning the system to prevent risks from going to production.

It helps save a lot of time compared to manual performance testing. It is like a robot that helps run the scripts. And other tools, such as free tools or IBM, are mostly programming-based. LoadRunner has more functions than other tools, and that also saves a lot of time compared to those tools.

The time savings mean it has reduced my workload. Using another tool, we could produce a script in about two days. But with LoadRunner, we can do it in one day or even less than one day. LoadRunner has also helped improve our product performance.

We use OpenText LoadRunner Professional primarily for performance testing. We are able to test applications with various user loads and scenarios.

The use of the virtual table server feature allowed us to invoke calls to the database and pull data during execution, providing valuable insights during our testing phases. However, this feature was revoked in 2015, and its absence has been noticed.