OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs. Spirent TestCenter

Micro Focus LoadRunner and its suite of tools, specifically VuGen works wonderfully for us for all web, http/https and web service calls. We've been able to build tests for near any scenario we need with relative ease. As long as we have crafted up requirements for our scenarios / scripts to managed scope, we've had high success working with scripting and data driving. Our main tests are web service calls - typically chained together to form a full scenario with transactions measuring the journey or a similar (measure along the way) journey through a browser. For web services we will use VuGen and browser we've shifted to Tru Client I have had little-to-no experience scripting against a thick client where a ui-driven test would be required. I know its possible but quite costly due to the need to run the actual desktop client to drive tests. We've been fortunate enough to leverage http calls to represent client traffic.

Incentivized

Spirent solution is well suited to qualify a Lan infrastructure bandwidth capacity or a device itself capacity such as a router or a firewall for example. But this solution in our case is also well suited to test a complex and numbered mpls environment. I would not recommend it to a small business as the solution is very expensive: châssis and card cost are expensive and the solution requires to be an advanced user in system, not only on network devices

Incentivized

• It can simulate multiple users at the same time and help understand the performance.
• It can generate excellent reports and give insights into application performance.
• It is a fast tool and does not take time to perform its functions.

Incentivized

• Bandwidth test
• QoS and traffic type generation
• Software platform availability
• Technical Support

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• QA
• Various bugs to fix on software installation
• Technical documentation
• No Spirent classes available
• Lack to fix major issues such as ntp for latency calculation

Incentivized

7 because they lack to improve some major bugs we have exchanged about with them

Incentivized

Customer service is not that great. It's difficult to get hold of someone if an issue is supposed to be addressed on an urgent basis. No online chat service readily available.

Incentivized

HP performance center stacks up very well for front end applications. Need more improvements for API performance testing.

Incentivized

I wasn't able to specifically test other big products but I did use other free products in the past such as iperf, but free softwares don't allow the same level of support ans ease to use than Spirent

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Allows to qualify a link or a project to validate end of this one
• Allowed to detect various configuration issues that were fixed right after
• Allow to use virtual machines for easy remote deploykents
• Neharive: upgrade can depreciate products and newer products have sometimes better bandwidth capacity but less features

Incentivized