In the field monitoring of interactive application

Monitoring techniques can extract accurate dataabout the behavior of software systems. When used in thefield, they can reveal how applications behave in real-worldcontexts and how programs are actually exercised by their users. Nevertheless, since monitoring might need significant storage and computational resources, it may interfere with users activities degrading the quality of the user experience. While the impact of monitoring has been typically studied bymeasuring the overhead that it may introduce in a monitoredapplication, there is little knowledge about how monitoringsolutions may actually impact on the user experience and towhat extent users may recognize their presence. In this paper, we present our investigation on how collectingdata in the field may impact the quality of the user experience. Our initial results show that non-trivial overhead can be toleratedby users, depending on the kind of activity that is performed. This opens interesting opportunities for research in monitoringsolutions, which could be designed to opportunistically collectdata considering the kind of activities performed by the users.