OpenText LoadRunner Professional Reviews

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. 

I appreciate its ability to handle various internal calls and its user-friendly interface.

Compared to other tools I've used, it saves about 20-30% of time due to its flexibility.

I also use the TrueClient feature for browser-based testing. I found the TrueClient feature to be a bit difficult to use and not very user-friendly for automating scripts. So there's room for improvement in that area.

There are a few features that I've seen in other tools that I'd like to see implemented or enhanced.

The installation and configuration process could be more streamlined, especially when it comes to distributed systems.

I have been using this tool for six years now. I use the Developer node.

It is a very old tool. It was originally with HPE, then Micro Focus, and now it's owned by OpenText.

The customer service and support are good.

Positive

We used JMeter. We switched because of the better support and flexibility offered by LoadRunner. It has a very wide range of support, covering most protocols and applications currently on the market.

It is on the higher side cost-wise, but the usability is good. If they reduced the cost, it would help smaller organizations like ours to take advantage of the features it offers.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. One of the biggest reasons is the TrueClient feature. It's very difficult to automate scripts with the TrueClient protocol.

In the banking industry, we utilize OpenText LoadRunner Professional to evaluate how systems handle increased workloads.

I implemented OpenText LoadRunner Professional because I encountered challenges when working with Oracle protocols in the banking industry, specifically regarding ticket resolution during correlation tasks.

What distinguishes OpenText LoadRunner Professional from other solutions is its controller log, which we use to simulate the number of users, and its user-friendly UI settings, which allows us to mimic user activity during performance testing.

LoadRunner has helped us save time. With a proper understanding of how the interface works, we can complete tasks quickly.

Employing LoadRunner has significantly enhanced our product quality, which is of paramount importance to us. With LoadRunner, we can precisely identify performance bottlenecks within our application and implement effective solutions to optimize its performance.

When it comes to simulation and report management, LoadRunner helps reduce our workload.

The front loader and the reporting features are the most valuable aspects of OpenText LoadRunner Professional.

The reporting and GUI have room for improvement.

I want LoadRunner Professional to have the capability to track various statistics from network databases and application servers. Currently, we rely on gathering this information from the respective teams. If LoadRunner Professional could provide this information, it would become our preferred tool.

I have been using OpenText LoadRunner Professional for 12 years.

OpenText LoadRunner Professional is a stable solution.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. While the solution is scalable, there is an associated cost.

While OpenText provides excellent customer support for partners, the lack of a phone support option limits the ways we can interact with them. The only methods of communication are through their portal or via email. If phone support were available, the overall support experience would be flawless. Sometimes, the issues we encounter are complex and challenging to resolve through text alone. Having access to 24/7 phone support would be immensely beneficial, allowing us to connect directly with representatives to discuss these matters effectively.

Positive

I have experience using Apache JMeter, LoadRunner Community Edition, and LoadRunner Cloud Edition. As a support specialist, I continue to utilize these solutions indirectly based on the project requirements, as I am not the decision-maker regarding the specific tool selection.

The initial deployment is straightforward, requiring only basic knowledge of the application and operating system. A detailed manual is available on the OpenText website for reference.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The price is a bit on the high side, but it is still affordable.

I would rate OpenText LoadRunner Professional nine out of ten.

I would only recommend LoadRunner Professional's TruClient feature for browser-based testing if it is for a single application as it is easier for scripting.

The main purpose is to simulate realistic scenarios to define and test the performance of different solutions or applications. For example, if there is a project to launch, a mobile app, and you want to see how it's going to perform when it is used by multiple users, OpenText LoadRunner will provide in-depth reports on potential performance bottlenecks and issues.

Its variety of testing tools for different applications is of great benefit, as well as its integration capabilities with other testing and monitoring solutions.

Compared to some other vendors, there is a lack of community support. It affects the response time when certain information is needed and not many resources are available. 

I have been utilizing OpenText LoadRunner Professional for four years. 

It demonstrates exceptional stability and reliability. I would rate it ten out of ten. 

It is a very scalable solution that supports a wide range of application types and can handle increasing load demands. I would rate it nine out of ten.

I would rate it six out of ten.

Neutral

I was using JMeter previously, it works on a similar basis. LoadRunner has an issue with its limited support, while JMeter has an open source, and it is easy to integrate with different solutions. The downside of the JMeter is that it is inefficient to detect threats in large-scale applications.

The initial setup was fairly easy. I would rate it eight out of ten.

The deployment of the solution was seamless and done very fast, as we only had to install the frame test server. 

It is a high-cost investment, particularly for companies with small budgets or limited testing needs. 

OpenText LoadRunner Professional aligns well with the specific requirements. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Scaling is definitely one of the best features of this solution. There are no issues scaling to 10,000 or 20,000 concurrent users.

This tool gives you a lot of options. It gives you hyper correlation, etc., requiring much lower programming scans. It's very user-friendly.

Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional supports other tools and protocols, such as SAP, Citrix, web services, etc.

Analyses are more in-depth and more detailed, and slicing and dicing is very easy. You can pinpoint load APIs at any point in time. You can know what was happening at a specific minute with regard to your requests, headers, response time, exceptions, etc. It has great reporting capabilities.

In terms of resource management, you need a lot of high capacity boxes if you need to generate a load of 1,000 or 2,000 users.

This solution has AJAX protocol or TruClient protocol, which gives you frontend stats and web vitals with very few details. This could be integrated further to exactly map any other leading tools for frontend analysis. That is, it needs further enhancements.

Easy maintenance would be good because now if you want to upgrade the version from X to Y, it takes a couple of days. There has to be downtime as well. Operation processes should be faster and should not have an impact for more than a couple of hours.

I've been using it for more than eight years.

Technical support is very good. We have a dedicated POC for Micro Focus. Although we have to follow the process of submitting tickets and waiting for a response, if it's a P zero issue, then we can directly connect with the technical person who has been allocated to us.

The SaaS version is quick and easy to set up. The on-premises version has a lot of challenges, especially related to the DB. You need to have a particular DB version to store the user data. Also, you have to depend on additional licensing from a database side. For instance, if you have Oracle, then you would need an additional license for the Oracle user.

The licensing is on a yearly basis and is relatively expensive.

If your team doesn't have much exposure to the development side, this is a good solution because you don't need much customization. You get a lot of automated features.

I would definitely recommend choosing the SaaS option rather than the on-premises option. The on-premises version has a lot of issues. For example, I'm dealing with version 12.63, and very soon, this particular version will be obsolete in terms of support. You will have to keep updating it in order to get the support for your version.

If you're looking for a tool which gives you more insight and you're ready to pay some extra dollars for it, then you should go for Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional. However, if you need a simple, aim-and-shoot tool for load testing and getting stats out, then you probably don't need this tool that has an expensive license.

Apart from the cost, Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional is one of the natural product choices in the industry. So, I would rate it at nine out of ten. If the cost were relatively lower, then I would've given it a ten.

The product gives protocol support to our organization. It is the biggest benefit.

It's a good tool. The solution supports a lot of protocols. The interface is good.

The solution is complex. Integrating the tool into CI/CD pipelines, dockerizing, and containerization is a bit difficult. It is not as easy and user-friendly as doing it in Locust and Gatling. The solution must be more user-friendly. It should provide integrations with Jenkins or GitHub Actions.

Processes like docking and containerization must be made easy for a tester to do the process. If a process takes ten steps, it must be reduced to two to three steps. We should be able to integrate with Docker, Jenkins, or GitHub within two to three steps.

I have been working with the solution for six months.

The tool is stable.

The solution is scalable. We would need more machines based on our script complexity, based on which we need to assess how many load generators we need to run. We can support the cloud load generators if we have a cloud account. Otherwise, we can choose k6 or Gatling because they support more virtual users for a given hardware resource. It is a simple web application. We can choose open-source tools rather than using a paid load testing tool.

Support is very good. I rate the technical support around eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is not complex. We will be able to install it, but it will take a lot of steps. Open-source tools take two to three steps, while paid tools take eight to ten steps for deployment. The implementation is user-friendly.

I have been using the paid version of the product.

Nowadays, most of the features supported by LoadRunner can be obtained in JMeter. Many development-driven tools like Locust are coming up in the market, which are easy to integrate with CI/CD tools. Dockerizing, containerization, and running the performance test through the CI/CD pipeline are pretty much easier with development-driven tools like Locust and Gatling.

LoadRunner and WebLOAD support a lot of protocols that other open-source tools are not able to support. However, most features supported by these tools are available in the latest tools. Correlation can be done within five to ten minutes in LoadRunner. Whereas, in JMeter, it would take half an hour. JMeter’s UI is simple compared to LoadRunner’s.

To start working on performance testing, we need to use LoadRunner to understand all the concepts. LoadRunner helps us understand how the actual user distribution happens. After using LoadRunner, we can work on JMeter. JMeter doesn't have any script writing so we can manage it with the elements in the tool. Later, we can shift to any of the developer version tools.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for enterprise performance modeling and validation of enterprise networks as well as tax applications.

The scripting or programming that you do to run within either the on-premises or cloud environments are the same. They take the same types of programs that allow you to run the performance modeling operations you need to run. 

There are various languages that they allow those programs to be written in, whether you want to use Java or something else.

On-premies, the step up for professional (in terms of models) is the enterprise version. However, in the cloud version, you almost have the enterprise right away. On-premises should be the same. However, since the cloud version has grown more in importance, they've expanded it without necessarily expanding the on-premises version. That is why we end up using both deployments.

They need to do some work within the very development environment. They need to have a better way of replaying what data is captured so it looks more like what the actual application is doing. By that, I mean that web technologies have increased pretty rapidly over the last two or three years. They have something called a runtime viewer that you do use when you're debugging your scripts. And in addition to all the other logging that they have, which is very expensive.

There's a reporting part of the cloud that could be improved a little bit. I've been more used to using the analysis program that's on the on-premise software, whether it's LoadRunner Enterprise or LoadRunner Professional. They have three major components of the whole software package is the analysis engine that looks at the data collected by the load test, and that generates a variety of different reports. They do that on the cloud as well. However, I don't know if it's as detailed; however, we maybe do not have much control as to what you want to get.

I've used the solution for over ten years. 

Technical support isn't the best. It depends on who you get. Every company has different levels of technical support. They have level one, level two, level three, and then the AR and D after that. If you're dealing with a simple question, maybe the level one or level two folks can handle it. However, if you have something that's really technical, you need to get to level three, and sometimes it takes a little more of a push to get that type of case elevated to the right person.

They have customer success managers or customer engagement managers that help customers do that - if you are paying for that level of support. It is the staff that can help move things along where improvement is needed. 

This is not an open-source product. You do have to pay for the solution. However, there are open-source solutions available. 

The cloud is probably competitive in terms of pricing. However, if you're talking about the on-premise stuff, the professional licenses or the enterprise licenses are on the high side of prices. They're not they're not cheap.

The biggest thing about the cloud, and, for that matter, whatever application you're talking about, is that they take care of the headache of you maintaining the infrastructure needed to support your performance testing environment.

I've been with LoadRunner long enough to know what it's like to maintain one of those types of environments since the cloud wasn't around ten years ago. Therefore, I've witnessed that the cloud offers significant savings in time and effort from a customer's point of view, even if you pay for it.

That said, they don't give it away for free. You have everyone that's doing all the maintenance for you, including setting up your servers and making sure they use to start up the servers appropriately with the right level of software and keep the software up to date and all that stuff. That costs, and that's not free. There's a careful balancing act you have to have between how much you're going to use the cloud, and what you're gonna do on-premise.

We're customers and end-users.

We have both the professional version as well as the cloud version.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

In terms of the cloud version, it definitely takes care of the issue of maintaining all the servers for you, ramping them up consistently. There are very few outages as far as that goes.

LoadRunner handles the testing of complex multi-user scenarios. It was not complex. It's pretty easy. 

The reports have been effective in identifying system bottlenecks. It offers very good reports.

Sometimes when we were migrating from one version to another, some of our scripts started failing. And configuration-wise, we used to get support since we had the license with us. We used to just connect with Micro Focus, and the turnaround time was very less. It was very fast.

With my understanding and experience, for future releases, I suggest some correlation features that had to be tuned from the tool because, for SAP applications, capturing dynamic values from the responses and other technical things still had to be done manually.

In my previous job, I worked with OpenText LoadRunner Professional.

I used it for almost 14 years. 

Around 14 people used it. 

There were some technical challenges, but the support was pretty good.

They could work on some more things because there are some more complex applications, like SAP applications, wherein some of the challenges were capturing dynamic values and other things that had to be done manually.

Positive

I already put forth the proposal for LoadRunner Professional in my current company. 

The implementation was very straightforward and not an issue. To get comfortable with LoadRunner, it was just three to four months for me. 

Within four to five months, I was totally comfortable with it and started doing all the activities.

The license was a bit expensive. That was the reason we used to depend on the customer to fund it.  

I would recommend it to other users. I recommend LoadRunner for every company where performance testing is considered a key value.

Because I have some experiences wherein some companies will not consider performance itself as their key thing. So wherever performance is being concentrated, I'll propose LoadRunner as the first thing.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution for load testing. 

The executive management is more confident when they go for production. They know that the performance issues are already addressed. 

The tool's most valuable features are scripting and automation. 

The tool should consider releasing a SaaS version since it makes more sense nowadays. 

I have been using the product for three to four years. 

The solution is stable. 

OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise's pricing is reasonable. 

OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise has helped us save time by five to ten percent. The tool has helped us improve product quality. 

We use the TruClient feature, and it has helped us reduce scripting. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten.