We performed a comparison between Apica and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability."With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."
"From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day."
"One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally."
"It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."
"It is easy to set up and configure."
"We see the benefit almost every day. It allows us to be alerted whenever there is a store that is not responding properly around the world. We do have a network operation center (NOC) who receives these alerts, immediately checking if everything is okay."
"The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integrate with other tools with a separate execution environment. The tool is also easy to use."
"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to configure browser settings for different operating systems and on different versions without the need to install every single version on each machine and to manage them."
"The TruClient feature is the most valuable for us. An application with testing can only be scripted using TruClient, so it's part web-based, but it also has its own protocol combined with HTTP and HTML. So many other tools do not recognize this specific proprietary protocol. Using TruClient, we can still create scripts that cover everything that we need to cover."
"It's a fast product, so you don't have much trouble in terms of maintenance overhead. You don't want to just look into configuring load generators, look for upgrades, and end up having that take up a lot of your time. With this solution, you just log in and you start using it. This means that there is a huge benefit in terms of the overhead of maintaining the infrastructure and the maintenance effort."
"The record and playback feature is the most valuable feature. It's all driven by the script, so it's a script-based tool where the background tracing starts. Java's background process does a lot of tracing. The process starts in the background. It sees what peaks of volumes that the process can handle. It's easy to use because it's script based, record, and playback. I"
"One of LoadRunner's standout features is its extensive support for various TechStacks and protocols."
"The fact that the solution supports multiple protocols such as open source, VuGen, TruWeb, TruClient, and SAP is very important because these protocols help us to concentrate on what is really needed to produce performance tests. If something is not supported, you have to use other tools or find other ways of assimilating loads."
"It is feature-rich. It supports most protocols, which is important because I am in charge of a team at the bank, and we do performance testing for all kinds of different applications. We have tons of them. We even do video streams."
"This solution is SaaS based so we can utilize cloud technology, which is less time consuming and saves a lot of of money."
"The having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome. It would be nice to see that become a web-based application. Having the documentation a little more accessible, and easier to digest by people who are just learning how to use the framework, especially when it comes to more complex or more edge-based cases would be really helpful to have."
"Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement."
"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"There are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time."
"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."
"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents."
"There are three modules in the system that are different products packaged into one, and they can sometimes be difficult to figure out, so they should be better integrated with each other."
"CI/CD integration could be a little bit better. When there's a test and if you see that there are high response times in the test itself, it would be great to be able to send an alert. It would give a heads-up to the architect community or ops community."
"Reporting and analysis need improvement. Compared to the old school LoadRunner Windows application, the reporting and analysis are mediocre in LoadRunner Cloud."
"Their documentation is not technical enough for us. We would like to have much deeper technical documentation so that we can self-serve without constantly having to go back to them and ask."
"We did have some challenges with the initial implementation."
"An area for improvement is analytics on why response times are slow from certain countries."
"The product price could be more affordable."
"It doesn't provide custom reports. You can only use the default reports which contain irrelevant data or is missing data that we need."
Apica is ranked 45th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 6 reviews while OpenText LoadRunner Cloud is ranked 6th in Performance Testing Tools with 39 reviews. Apica is rated 8.2, while OpenText LoadRunner Cloud is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Offers transcript download feature and easy to set up and configure tests but not very user friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText LoadRunner Cloud writes "Supports multiple protocols and helps to ensure that our applications are stable at any given point". Apica is most compared with Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics and Apache JMeter, whereas OpenText LoadRunner Cloud is most compared with OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise, Tricentis NeoLoad, OpenText LoadRunner Professional, BlazeMeter and IBM Rational Performance Tester.
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