LoadRunner Professional

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.