A Usage-based Data Extraction Framework for Cloud-based Application - An Human-Computer Interaction Approach

Abstract

Features or functionalities provided by cloud-based applications are accessed by users through various interfaces such as web browser, mobile app, and command line interface. Yet for monitoring cloud-based applications, software developers and researchers have focused on web browsers. Software updates are provided for such applications based on the data acquired from the cloud monitoring components but usage data of the cloud application features are difficult to extract in a cloud environment as the usage data is spread across the interfaces on the front-end and the back-end. In this paper, we focus on the usage of the cloud application features from the user perspective and how to extract these data in a cloud environment. We define six criteria for the user-level usage data, analyse the existing usage data extraction techniques and propose a usage data extraction framework adhering to the defined criteria.