What is the role of surrounding environment in registration of dust around planets?

Dust in the interplanetary space and around planets can be observed by specialized detectors that allow determination of many parameters like velocity, mass or even mass composition of the registered dust grains but the principal disadvantage of such detectors is their small geometrical factor. On the other hand, the dust grains are impacting the whole spacecraft body and these impacts can influence the spacecraft potential by various mechanisms and thus can be used for detection of dust impacts by electric antennas. The electric field instruments register dust impacts as short pulses resulting from the interplay between plasma cloud generated by the dust impact and surrounding plasma environment. This method has been used by many investigators in the interplanetary space as well as in vicinity of several planes like Earth, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn. We critically survey these investigations with an emphasis on the influence of the surrounding environment on a (mis)interpretation of the electric field measurements.