blackfire.io vs. BlazeMeter vs. Micro Focus Diagnostics (discontinued)

Blackfire.io is super helpful in allowing proactive testing of applications before releasing on the production environment. Blackfire.io provides actionable insights to improve code proactively by integration with the development software. Also tracks the live production environment and is able to highlight any loading issues or unusual bounce rates. Blackfire.io also monitors HTTP requests and SQL queries which again help improve efficiency for developers and reduce development time.

Incentivized

It is well suited for applications that are mission-critical or applications that can receive high traffic/transactions at unscheduled time periods. Using the load testing feature of BlazeMeter, we can test and ascertain the capacity of the application without the drawbacks of the usual Apache JMeter load testing which depends heavily on the host system from where the load testing is performed.

Incentivized

I would say on 90% of our agent installs everything works without any modification. If the application however makes a large use of memory based cache and analysis that classes will need to be excluded from instrumentation or it will impact performance.

Incentivized

• Provide details on processes eating up valuable server resources
• Alert against bottlenecks and find bottlenecks
• Performs load tests in code before moving to production environments

Incentivized

• BlazeMeter takes the .jmx script that teams had written for JMeter. The transition from JMeter to BlazeMeter was seamless.
• BlazeMeter offers its own cloud and hence we did not have to set it up on-premise.
• BlazeMeter hits our application from various geographic locations that simulates real life users.

Incentivized

• Agent level customization - For highly performant applications we can easily exclude instrumentation, yet still receive the benefit of historical tracking on common data points like CPU, Heap and GC cycles.
• Support - In the 5+ years working with the product any HP solution engagements have been quick to provide a needed configuration solution.
• Agent Diversity - Have used the product across 6+ differing middleware technologies comprising dozens of version (both middleware and java) combinations.
• Agent installation - With its ability to support a silent type install, automating was a simple task.

Incentivized

• They count same API endpoint AND same method (e.g. POST, OPTIONS, GET etc) as different profiles
• Customer service needs a lot of improvement
• The documentation can be a bit more detailed to remove any scope of doubts

Incentivized

• Blazemeter reporting is very basic and shallow. There is no way to drill down or correlate. I can get better reports by using JMeter for free.
• Blazemeter is very costly. Testing with volumes of more than 1K cu is expensive, and can be done for much cheaper if a company/team is willing to invest a bit of time to figure out how to use cloud instances and jmeter slaves, and to write a basic script to collect resulting xml output.

Incentivized

• The product does offer a lot of functionality - This can lead to a cluttered user interface and does take some time to become comfortable and proficient in its use.
• Data Volume - We have had some issues in balancing the desire to keep all data and consuming infrastructure storage.

Incentivized

Easy to setup to do API Performance Testing. Dashboard to showcase results Capability to showcase runtime results

Incentivized

blackfire.io definitely provides an edge over competing products such as Datadog due to the level of monitoring and analysis it provides. Datadog is a great tool however when evaluating and catching inefficiencies in lower non production environments, blackfire.io provides a level of reporting that were did not find any competing products.

Incentivized

In comparison with Blazemeter the closes competitor is JMeter but it has disadvantages like it is not a tool that can be use as a collaborative tool and works locally in a computer, Blazemeter is in the web so different people can access and run tests or collaborate do add, edit or delete the existent scripts.

Incentivized

While it has been several years since using BMC Patrol I like that HP doesn't require me to have a custom module added for every different type of product I would like to instrument.

Incentivized

• Reduce in bugs by 50%, more happy customers
• 2x decrease in load time for the website
• 100% performance validation before production release

Incentivized

• It helped positively by helping to identify the maximum capacity needed for high traffic periods
• Saved revenue by eliminating unwanted duplication of systems

Incentivized

• Performance Tuning - Product is fully integrated to provide baseline and drift across releases.

Incentivized