Item: OpenText LoadRunner Professional
Rating: 8
Author: Mayank Thirani

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HP Load Runner is a great industry standard load testing tool. We are using it across the whole organization as well as outside the organization to serve all our multiple regional clients from the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific region and others.

HP Load Runner addresses the application performance management issues by spoofing the hits of each user to the web server and it helps to identify the bottleneck of the web application. All the metrics captured or generated by this tool are highly trusted by software engineers worldwide which make this tool more popular and supported.

Pros and Cons

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.

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

The biggest point of using HP LoadRunner is the response time numbers captured after executing the tests were more accurate when we generated the same by using tools like JMeter or NeoLoad though it involves a certain licensing cost but what [we] needed was trust and accuracy where it makes a high mark.
Secondly, the support we get from HP is awesome and the online forums help us to resolve lots of issues in tight project situations while JMeter or NeoLoad has fewer forums or they don't have good documentation compared to HP LoadRunner.
Thirdly, the analysis feature provided by HP LoadRunner is easier to manage and can see more detailed correlated metric. This will help the developers to identify the actual bottlenecks in the application (like tuning some configuration or SQL queries etc.).

Other Software Used

JMeter, NeoLoad, WebLOAD

Likelihood to Recommend

Below are certain scenarios where HP LoadRunner is well suited:

Whenever it is required to simulate the behavior of a real user on a web application or mobile users then it plays a vital role.
A deep dive analysis report for each configured metric in the server is observed in the analysis tool and we can put the same in the HTML report if we want that.
When you are a beginner with no knowledge of a performance testing scenario, HP LoadRunner is a good choice as it provides great support from HP and excellent documentation as well as online forums for helping out.

Below are some of the scenario where it is less appropriate:

If you have a low budget for performance testing for your project and if you know the methodologies of performance testing, you can switch it to some open source tools rather than HP LoadRunner as it is costly for supporting multiple users.
If you want to run a test of multiple applications at same time, you cannot use controller to do that as controller is used for performing a test of one application at a time.

I Love HP LoadRunner

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Micro Focus LoadRunner (formerly HP LoadRunner)