The ability to do multithreading. That's available in any performance testing tool, but the number of protocols that this particular tool supports has been very good. The support and the stability of those protocols are amazing. That's why I like LoadRunner.
We use it as a performance testing tool. Obviously, performance testing helps with improving your application's performance, maintaining the stability, and the availability of systems. It's very easy to use. Sometimes, in very rare cases, we also use it for functional testing.
I would like to see the Internet protocols come into LoadRunner because that's the future. Most organizations are going to be heading that way, so I would love to see that added.
If the support of the protocols was the same throughout the other protocols and it was there evenly, then I would rate the product higher.
The stability: It's the best part of the LoadRunner platform.
It's highly scalable. LoadRunner can connect to any number of agents, and you can have multiple controllers, which is obviously a different licensing model.
We have used the tech support. There are multiple levels of it. Most of our tickets get resolved at the very first layer. Very rarely do we have to escalate the tickets to the R&D, but that hasn't been very often. The product has been working well.
We had to promote performance testing at some clients because they weren't doing anything at all. That was one use case. The second use case was they were developing some other tools, and coming from a stability standpoint and also from a quality pedigree standpoint, LoadRunner stands out. It's very easy to find resources, so it all adds up.
We ended up with LoadRunner because it has a big market share. Our company has been using LoadRunner for over 11 years, although we have used other products as well. But in terms of stability of the product and ease of finding resources, ultimately it comes down to the resources. The clients are going to be the ones using the tool. You're not going to find a lot of resources with the other company performance testing tools and resources are very low on the open source tools, so that's why we pitched LoadRunner.
I have been involved with the initial setup at multiple organizations. Because we are a consulting firm, we go and talk to different bigger organizations and we do their setups as well.
The setup of LoadRunner itself is very straightforward. It's just that different clients provide different hardwares, and that's the hardest part.
Yes, because our clients wanted us to consider other solutions, and that's fair enough. You cannot be biased just on one tool, so yes, we did propose some open source tools as well some licensed tools as well, along with LoadRunner.
Other solutions considered:
Don't make a blind decision. Don't just say, "Pick LoadRunner, because we are telling you to."
Look at the other solutions as well. I'm pretty sure they will soon enough determine that Loadrunner is the market leader, and there is a good reason for it.
Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Our company looks for the region and their attention to consider our recommendations in terms of which tools to buy, how to go about testing, and how to avoid testing. You don't want to test too much, as well. These are some of the things. If we get any hints on whether the management is more inclined to work with us. That's what we look for.
Thank you for the useful information about LoadRunner. I am in the process of writing my first LoadRunner script. I did notice that while recording it generates a ton of code. Thanks again for your helpful comment.