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LoadRunner Professional

Score8.9 out of 10

68 Reviews and Ratings

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What is LoadRunner Professional?

A solution simplifies performance load testing for colocated teams. With project-based capabilities, so teams can quickly identify abnormal application behavior.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features LoadRunner Professional has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 68 ratings of LoadRunner Professional's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Integrated performance data

    Cross-analysis of data gathered from all the components of the application

    Category average: 9.2

  • End to end performance management

    Identify end to end performance bottlenecks, not just web application response time

    Category average: 8.9

  • Deployment model flexibility

    Software can be deployed in testing lab, and also in cloud

    Category average: 7.1

Areas for Improvement

  • Automated anomaly detection

    Automated anomaly detection helps detect exception conditions that can be the cause of performance degradation

    Category average: 6.1

  • Real time monitoring

    Real time monitoring means monitoring the entire application environment while under load

    Category average: 8.3

Reviews

What users are saying about LoadRunner Professional.
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Reflecting on features of Micro Focus LoadRunner

Incentivized
Chris TrimperView profile
Enterprise QA Lead Automation Analyst in Quality Assurance at Independent Health (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We leverage the Micro Focus LoadRunner tool suite to validate that our applications (internal and external) can support the expected load to run our day to day business as well as future spikes in volume. We are able to easily perform various load scenarios against our applications with the toolsets using various technologies including SOAP, Rest and Web Browser.

Pros

  • Easy to provide varying and dynamic test data
  • Continually easier to test browser apps more realistically
  • Simple config to make 'any' scenario
  • Ability to manipulate near any input type
  • Ability to easily interrogate responses for accuracy

Cons

  • Working with large request bodies can be cumbersome
  • Would love to see a C# version

Most Important Features

  • Easy web service scripting
  • Ability to obtain detailed results from a test for trending
  • Easy browser scenario scripting
  • Simple to use data/parameterization
  • Easy scenario building and configuration

Return on Investment

  • We've been able to prevent possible performance impacts of applications
  • When a degradation does exist in production we can replicate and triage with driving traffic to our test regions
  • By adding validation to our transactions we can measure both for response time as well as accuracy in functionality
  • As we develop various integrated systems we can ensure they exist well without negative impact upon each other

Alternatives Considered

Micro Focus AppPulse Active, SoapUI Open Source, supported by SmartBear, Postman and Apache JMeter

I Love HP LoadRunner

Incentivized
Mayank ThiraniView profile
Research Assistant in Engineering at University of San Francisco (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Support of multiple protocols like HTTP, RDP, Citrix, SAP, Oracle Database 12c, AJAX Tru Client, SOAP-based calls and others which is why it is used widely in our organization as we are using various applications in an industry for different usage.
  • Supporting the mobile agents which means it is not only used for web applications but also for mobile applications.
  • Latest version of HP LoadRunner makes the scripting easy by replacing dynamic changes in the script using correlation parameters. This means less coding and we can focus on major issues if needed.
  • Controller enhancements by specifying the cloud provider like Digital Ocean. We can provision our load generators with Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean and others.
  • Analysis provides a nice HTML report on the test executed with all the necessary metrics. We can simply put more analysis if needed and it will be automatically embedded in an HTML report.

Cons

  • HP LoadRunner with new patches and releases sometimes makes no longer support older version of various protocols like Citrix, which makes the task time-consuming when using older versions of LoadRunner for some of the cases. So it should support older version as well while upgrading.
  • Configuring HP LoadRunner over the firewall involves lots of configuration and may be troublesome. So, there should be a script (power shell script for Windows or shell script for Linux users) to make it easy to use and with less pain.
  • I would like to see the RunTime Viewer of Vugen in HPLoadRunner based on the browser I selected in the run-time configuration to make it feel more realistic as a real user.
  • Licensing cost is very high when we need to perform a test on application for a specific group of users.

Return on Investment

  • As the response time numbers captured from HP LoadRunner seems to be more accurate, more clients trusted this tool for their application performance managements and they also used it for their benchmark/ baseline test.
  • Support from HP was tremendous whenever we got hung up in certain situations in some of our short term projects which had a tight deadline, which keeps those projects ongoing and we as a performance engineer team can deliver the result with minimal delay. This leaves a good mark on our clients.
  • As HP LoadRunner is upgrading and expanding every year, sometimes the new updated version for LoadRunner does not provide support for some critical older version protocols. In those cases, it had a negative impact on our business.
  • Enhanced Analysis feature and its correlation metrics between different runs in the analysis report (HTML) makes a high positive impact on our clients.

Alternatives Considered

JMeter and NeoLoad

Other Software Used

JMeter, NeoLoad, WebLOAD

Perfect solution for on-premises load testing

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Separation of generators, controller, and script builder
  • Ease of access of different components

Cons

  • Better configuration availability for script setup
  • Better customer service

Return on Investment

  • Go to tool for load testing on on premise servers
  • Used for 80% of applications with performance scope

Alternatives Considered

Akamai CloudTest (formerly SOASTA) and JMeter

Other Software Used

Dynatrace, Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring, Akamai CloudTest (formerly SOASTA)

Load testing with HP Performance Center

Incentivized
Anil Kumar MokaView profile
Senior QA Lead and Automation Consultant in Quality Assurance at Wipro Technologies (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Ease of use and configuration settings.
  • Super cool performance test reports with various load parameters.
  • Flexible load selection using vuGen and option to steadily ramp up and ramp down the load.
  • Minimal coding in C which allows you to parameterize many inputs.
  • Load runner integration with HP Performance Center makes life easy for management to review the performance test results.

Cons

  • Monitoring tools like SiteScope, AppDynamics should be used apart from HP Performance Center. Would be great if the tool can give good monitoring on app and db servers.
  • As the load goes high, the cost increases. In the open source world, it's not a bad idea to consider the licensing cost.

Return on Investment

  • It has been a huge help for our team to determine the impact our application was going through each release. With performance testing and with the tool as good as HP performance center, it enabled our team to build lighter software with good tech and system reviews happening for each release. Although I can't measure ROI in number, I would definitely say that we are building better software using the inputs from this tool.
  • It's ease of use and many inbuilt functionalities makes a performance tester's life a lot easier and efficient.

Alternatives Considered

JMeter, Parasoft SOAtest and Apica LoadTest

Other Software Used

Parasoft SOAtest, JMeter, HP UFT, Selenium, HP Quality Center, Visual Studio Test Professional, JIRA Software, Team Foundation Server, Apache Maven, HP Business Process Testing, IBM Rational Functional Tester, IBM ClearQuest, CA Application Test, Snagit

Industry giant LoadRunner

Incentivized
Pradeepan AnthonyView profile
Associate QA Manager/Performance Testing Practice in Quality Assurance at Virtusa (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Multi protocol support. LoadRunner supports many protocols unlike any other tools while web/http being their strong suite.
  • User friendliness is key. Neat interface. I see the tool has evolved over the years and most custom written code now comes with LR commands built in. Also you do not need to use short keys anymore you have the options on the dashboard to to pick and choose like the steps toolbox. Now you do not need to be an expert to correlate a dynamic parameter. The user guided features enabled in the new versions makes everything simple while saving a lot of time
  • Reporting features. The LR Analyzer is the best reporting tool in the market - you have many options to cater client needs. Not every client wants to have the same report.
  • StormRunner is the cloud version of loadrunner which supports web/Ajax/Services etc. This is a great tool as this is less expensive compared to the whole LoadRunner suite. The clients who cannot afford to spend a lot of money on getting the LoadRunner commercial suite could spend a little money in getting HP StromRunner and still do most of the things that LoadRunner can perform.

Cons

  • Diagnostics side is something they could focus on. That is probably the only battle they could possibly lose when it comes to Performance Engineering. Tools like AppDynamics & Dynatrace is far better and most organizations now tend to have at least one of these two tools in their suite in addition to LoadRunner.
  • Protocol Ajax Truclient is a great find but it needs improvements. While this adds value it also has a few drawbacks. This protocol does not always work as intended. The Firefox version has evolved but the Chrome and IE version of Truclient needs improvement
  • Every tool has its own bugs and LoadRunner is not second to that. With every new version they release we have seen more and more bugs get added and also some of the key features get dropped as well. For example the checkbox "Add a comment in the script for correlations that gets created". This checkbox is no longer in the recording options hence by default all correlated values get commented out in the script thereby causing memory issues due to the size of the scripts. This is one thing that we came across and HP is working on getting this feature added back in a future release.

Return on Investment

  • The scripts created with traditional web/http protocol are not robust thus re-scripting is required after most every code drop. Troubleshooting and fixing the issue takes more time therefore in most cases we do re-scripting to keep it simple and save time.
  • In ideal world you would rather spend more time doing testing than scripting in that case mostly you could use an Ajax TruClient protocol. This type of script will only fail when an object in the application is removed or changed completely. This way of scripting will save you more time and helps you maintain the scripts with less re-work effort on a release basis. On the long run you will have a better ROI when you use Ajax TruClient protocol for scripting.

Other Software Used

JMeter, BlazeMeter, HP StormRunner Load, OctoPerf