LoadRunner 2020 and BeyondThe LoadRunner family continues to be the standard in performance engineering with unmatched, innovative features and enhancements to meet the needs of modern software development. [Republished with permission from Scott Moore Consulting]

Article Reprintwww.microfocus.com

Application Delivery Management

Article ReprintLoadRunner 2020 and Beyond

2

Over the last 20 years, the software testing industry has seen a lot of changes in the LoadRunner portfolio as the IT landscape has trans-formed around it. Before covering the LoadRunner 2020 portfolio spe-cifics, it’s worth quickly noting the history and milestones in the testing industry to show how LoadRunner has continually evolved to stay one step ahead.

The Early Days of Software TestingIn the beginning, most testing was still client/server. The industry watched the “dot com” turn into the “dot bomb,” as well as the rise of Agile and DevOps practices, plus the emerging roles for the Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) and the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). Several companies have come along touting they were the next great load testing product and subsequently listing all the reasons why LoadRunner was a dinosaur that should be put out to pasture. Those companies aren’t around today. LoadRunner still continues to be the standard in performance testing for the Enterprise. Why? It provides amazing value to any company serious about application quality. The latest version of LoadRunner continues to add features and enhance-ments to meet the need of modern software development.

From Centers to FamiliesIn the early 2000’s, Waterfall methodology was still the standard for most major application development. The Center of Excellence (CoE) was a great way to centralize resources, organize skillsets, and imple-ment standardized processes. During this period, Mercury (acquired by HPE who was then acquired by Micro Focus) products were arranged in “Centers” (Quality Center, Performance Center, etc.). As more and more organizations migrated to the Agile methodology, it required a funda-mental shift from centralized control and formality to decentralized and autonomous actions. In short, the CoE limited agility.

LoadRunner 2020 was released at the beginning of the year and there is a fundamental shift from a Center to a Family of products that share the most recognized name in the industry:

■ LoadRunner Enterprise (formerly known as Performance Center)

■ LoadRunner Professional—the original LoadRunner

■ LoadRunner Cloud (formally known as StormRunner Load)

■ LoadRunner Developer (new for Developers and shift-left practices)

A formal press release announced the new Family.

2020 and SP1 Feature HighlightsLoadRunner 2020 was officially released in late December of 2019, with Service Pack 1 following shortly thereafter in the Spring of 2020. There is an overview of the new family on the official Micro Focus LoadRunner family site and blog articles in the Community pages covering individual product enhancements:

■ LoadRunner Enterprise 2020 SP1

■ LoadRunner Professional 2020 SP1

■ LoadRunner Cloud 2020.05

The following content covers some of the more significant differences and new features from the point of view of an avid user.

New Modern User InterfaceThe first thing to notice is that some of the look and feel has changed, in-cluding the top row of function icons and the Summary Page in Analysis.

and with the recording bar:

and the Real-Time Graphs in the Controller:

Figure 1. New look and feel

3www.microfocus.com

DevWebFormerly called “TruWeb” in the Technical Preview from a previous edi-tion, DevWeb is a new JavaScript SDK engine that supports the auto-mation of HTTP (http/https/http2) and WebSockets across Windows, Linux and MacOS. Don’t be confused with name change, it’s actually a good thing. It’s not associated with TruClient so the renaming helps to clear that up. DevWeb is being announced as a “protocol”, but it is actually much more than that. It’s an engine. But at a basic level it means that instead of only having a C library of API’s to use for web protocols, users will also have a JavaScript SDK. This can reduce the number of lines of code to accomplish the same automation in many instances.

LoadRunner DeveloperLoadRunner Developer is a way to utilize the DevWeb engine and ex-ecute most of LoadRunner functionality without having to use VuGen or the Controller. You can create DevWeb scripts in any IDE (like Visual Studio Code) and the LoadRunner Developer packaging allows the us-ers to execute them.

Enterprise DevOps is forcing a new paradigm in IT culture. The role of an independent performance tester or engineer is being replaced by a DevOps engineer who is expected to know performance in addition to everything else. Developers still need to do performance testing early and build this into a continuous integration and deployment model. Whoever “owns” quality and performance in the organization should have someone who provides developers with this capability while still having someone addressing performance of the integrated ap-plication as it would reside in production. The lines are being blurred more and more each day. For this reason, there is definitely a need for LoadRunner Developer.

KEY REASONS TO USE DEVWEB AND LOADRUNNER DEVELOPER ■ Script size: ANSI-C based scripts require a lot more code to

accomplish the same thing as JavaScript. However, the run-time resource consumption will be higher because JavaScript is a higher level language.

■ Script maintenance: there should be a reduction in the time to make changes to scripts as the application changes.

■ SDK in JavaScript: most people working with web technologies already understand JavaScript. Many newer developers have never studied the C language.

■ JavaScript 3rd party library reuse.

■ Recording: a script can be recorded without the use of a plug-in, using tools native to the browser.

■ InfluxDB and Grafana: integrates with InfluxDB and Grafana where some organizations already have data from Prometheus and other monitoring providers that export to that format.

Figure 3. DevWeb scriptsFigure 2. These changes are mostly cosmetic, yet the “cleaner” UI is more intuitive.

“The LoadRunner 2020 release is hands-down the best end-to-end performance engineering solution on the market. The addition of LoadRunner Developer completes the shift-left performant testing need while integrations with APM partners completes the shift-right need.”

SCOTT MOORE

Founder and CEOScott Moore Consulting

Article ReprintLoadRunner 2020 and Beyond

4

LoadRunner Developer integrates with and is part of the LoadRunner family, and all the assets created using LoadRunner Developer can be leveraged in LoadRunner Professional, LoadRunner Enterprise and LoadRunner Cloud, enabling collaboration between the teams and le-veraging the other benefits provided by the Micro Focus performance engineering solutions such as advanced scheduling, simulation of real world scenarios, superior execution, network emulation from different geographic locations, and, smarter, more detailed analytics that will help to isolate and identify performance issues before release.

With LoadRunner Cloud 2020.05, a new integration between Load-Runner Developer and LoadRunner Cloud allows developers to scale up their load testing without leaving the IDE.

Download LoadRunner Developer now from the Micro Focus App Deliv-ery Marketplace.

LoadRunner Enterprise Stand-AloneProbably the most significant change for LoadRunner Enterprise is decoupling the main server from ALM/Quality Center (QC) for admin-istration and internal management so that it can run as a stand-alone server. This makes it easier to implement in organizations that are not using ALM/QC but still require the shared licensing and infrastructure for multiple teams in a single organization. Here is a basic configuration:

The LoadRunner Enterprise servers handle any of the items the Performance Center servers previously handled, as well as any depen-dencies from ALM/QC that were needed.

There is also a Dockerized version that can be implemented, and you can find out more about that here.

VuGen has the new connection listed under the Integrations options:

s

Don’t confuse this with the ALM connection in the LoadRunner Pro fes-sional Controller:

Figure 4. LoadRunner Enterprise

Figure 5. VuGen new connection

Figure 6. ALM Connection

5www.microfocus.com

Many companies still use ALM/QC for script and scenario storage and versioning, so this makes sense to keep that the same. Note that while LoadRunner Professional connects to traditional ALM, LoadRunner Enterprise does NOT (thus, the decoupling). It does integrate with ALM OCTANE if this is needed as part of the implementation.

Anomaly DetectionReal-time and offline anomaly detection in results graphs is a feature that is currently only available in LoadRunner Enterprise. The anomaly detection engine looks for deviations over time and continuously cal-culates the mean and standard deviation. It determines values that are considered abnormal when a measurement deviates from the sleeve for a significant period of time. This way, all deviations aren’t automatically marked as anomalies.

Over the next few years, it’s suspected that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be used more frequently to assist in detec-tion of performance issues in both testing and application performance monitoring (APM). This falls under the industry definition of AIOps and it’s good to see LoadRunner is beginning to bring some of this into its feature set. Find out more here.

Idea ExchangesFor registered members of the Micro Focus Application Deliver Man-agement (ADM) Community Forums, there is a new section for member feedback called Idea Exchanges (see Figure 8) which provides a new way of directly conversing with the LoadRunner product managers. Once signed up in the Community, members can post ideas for new features, enhancements, and any other useful ideas. These are voted on and run through a series of statuses. Those that are accepted will make their way into the product, which further strengthens the LoadRunner team’s commitment to create innovation based on customer feedback.

The ADM Idea Exchange contains multiple exchanges for perfor-mance—a separate one for LoadRunner Professional, LoadRunner Enterprise, and LoadRunner Cloud. When a community member has an idea and wants to get it to the right person to review it, this is an easy way to do it.

Still the OneCompetitors in the testing industry have tried to create reasons to avoid LoadRunner. Open source advocates with an obvious theological slant are critical of any commercial software. Most performance engineer-ing experts agree many of these objections do not hold water. Some people just want to use the latest shiny thing. Some use open source, even when it costs more than LoadRunner in the way of time and man-power to setup and maintain. Often times, people who were determined to switch from LoadRunner to something else were confronted on the value it provides versus their proposed solution, and they were asked what they might be gaining that LoadRunner does not provide. Time and time again, their arguments fell apart quickly. To those who really think open source should always be preferred because it is “free”, they haven’t seen the bigger picture. Costs have to include a lot more than commercial software licensing. Making these kinds of decisions require consideration of a lot of factors about the particular organization and their maturity in software development.

Figure 7. Anomaly detection engine

Figure 8. ADM Community

Article ReprintLoadRunner 2020 and Beyond

6

LoadRunner is not just about load testing. It is about performance engineering. It continues to evolve to meet the needs of Agile/Lean development and DevOps by integrating with CI/CD pipeline engines, APM, and Service Virtualization. It has ALWAYS been a performance engineering tool. The goal has always been to break the silos and the “wall of confusion” between developers and the operations team (pro-duction support).

Learn more at

■ LoadRunner family

■ LoadRunner Enterprise

■ LoadRunner Professional

■ LoadRunner Cloud

■ LoadRunner Developer

■ Micro Focus Application Deliver Management (ADM) Community Forums

■ ADM Blog

■ AMD Help Centers

■ Micro Focus AppDelivery Marketplace

172-000016-001  |  M  |  07/20  |  © 2020 Micro Focus or one of its affiliates. Micro Focus and the Micro Focus logo, among others, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Micro Focus or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies in the United Kingdom, United States and other countries. All other  marks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact us at:www.microfocus.com

Like what you read? Share it.