1. A method of tracking an application that is deployed as a set of application instances, where the application is instrumented with a usage monitoring application programming interface (API) that generates a log file when the application is executed, the log file comprising data associated with a set of application feature executions, failures or faults, comprising: operating, at a service provider domain, an Internet-accessible infrastructure, the Internet-accessible infrastructure comprising a web server, an application server, and a database; receiving, by the web server, log files generated by the instrumented applications, wherein information in at least one log file is encoded in a compact data structure; processing, by the application server, data aggregated from the received log files; and storing, in the database, aggregated log data; exporting, from the database and to a permitted entity, aggregated log data; where the application is one of: a server-based application, a web-based application, and a rich Internet application.