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

Abstract

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.

Usage Analytics: A Process to Extract and Analyse Usage Data to Understand User Behaviour in Cloud

“…These information can be also used to classify the user based on the correlation and demographic similarities among them. In order to understand the patterns from user behavior, we propose to exploit all of the usage data from multiple layers of the cloud environment, usage data of a cloud-based application is spread across front-end interfaces (web-browser, smart phone app/client and command-line interface) and the back-end (server instance and database instance) in a cloud environment [9] and formulate as the transition states of a graph. This type of graph can be used to mine execution patterns and to model relationships among different user behavior patterns.…”

“…Hence, usage data has to be classified according to categories. Table 1 provides a information on how usage data could be classified (refer [9] for a deeper discussion of classification). Usage data in a cloud environment can be mainly divided into three categories: 1.…”

“…In our previous work, the criteria for the usage data are defined and analyse the existing usage data extraction techniques according to the defined criteria and propose a usage data extraction framework [9]. We proposed Usage Analytics, a set of potential novel solutions that could help tackle various challenges in the cloud domain.…”