Usage analytics: research directions to discover insights from cloud-based applications

Usage in the software field deals with knowledge about how end-users use the application and how the application reacts to the users’ actions. In a complex and heterogeneous cloud computing environment, the process of extracting and analysing usage data is difficult since the usage data is spread across various front-end interfaces and back-end underlying infrastructural components of the cloud that host the application. In this paper we propose Usage Analytics, a set of potential research directions that could help tackle various challenges in the cloud domain. We provide an overview of usage analytics in the cloud environment and propose how to discover insights using these analytics solutions. We give some discussions about challenges in discovering insights from the usage data as well as provide vision of how usage data will bring benefits to the cloud environment