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."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."
"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."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"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."
"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."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."
"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."
"Keeping up with DevOps, thus the best feature of StormRunner is that we don't have to build and maintain infrastructure anymore."
"The TCO has been optimized along with the total ROI."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is having load generators in countries where we don’t have access to them."
"One of LoadRunner's standout features is its extensive support for various TechStacks and protocols."
"The solution is easy to use."
"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 solution can scale."
"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."
"We could use more detailed information in the request and response sections."
"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."
"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 should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"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."
"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."
"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit."
"We are trying to put it into a complete CI/CD pipeline, but there are still some challenges when you try to run it through different protocols. The challenges are around how you can containerize applications. There are some limitations to some protocols, such as desktop. And when it comes to database testing, there are some things that we can't do through CI/CD."
"Improvements to the reporting would be good."
"We did have some challenges with the initial implementation."
"One area for improvement in LoadRunner Cloud, especially for agile models, is its limited support for functional testing alongside its robust non-functional testing capabilities."
"The product price could be more affordable."
"I'd like to see more ability to dive more deeply into the configuration."
"Scriptless automation is an area that can be improved."
"In terms of new features, they can natively integrate with Chaos engineering tools such as Chaos Monkey and AWS FIS. With LoadRunner, we can generate load, and if Chaos tools are also supported natively, it will help to get everything together."
Apica is ranked 45th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 4 reviews while OpenText LoadRunner Cloud is ranked 6th in Performance Testing Tools with 39 reviews. Apica is rated 8.4, 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 "Enterprise modeling, server maintenance, and competitive pricing". 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.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
