A Large-Scale Evaluation for Log Parsing Techniques: How Far Are We?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiang, Zhihan, Liu, Jinyang, Huang, Junjie, Li, Yichen, Huo, Yintong, Gu, Jiazhen, Chen, Zhuangbin, Zhu, Jieming, Lyu, Michael R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Jiang, Zhihan
Liu, Jinyang
Huang, Junjie
Li, Yichen
Huo, Yintong
Gu, Jiazhen
Chen, Zhuangbin
Zhu, Jieming
Lyu, Michael R.
author_facet Jiang, Zhihan
Liu, Jinyang
Huang, Junjie
Li, Yichen
Huo, Yintong
Gu, Jiazhen
Chen, Zhuangbin
Zhu, Jieming
Lyu, Michael R.
contents Log data have facilitated various tasks of software development and maintenance, such as testing, debugging and diagnosing. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, log parsing is typically required to transform log messages into structured data for automated log analysis. Given the abundance of log parsers that employ various techniques, evaluating these tools to comprehend their characteristics and performance becomes imperative. Loghub serves as a commonly used dataset for benchmarking log parsers, but it suffers from limited scale and representativeness, posing significant challenges for studies to comprehensively evaluate existing log parsers or develop new methods. This limitation is particularly pronounced when assessing these log parsers for production use. To address these limitations, we provide a new collection of annotated log datasets, denoted Loghub-2.0, which can better reflect the characteristics of log data in real-world software systems. Loghub-2.0 comprises 14 datasets with an average of 3.6 million log lines in each dataset. Based on Loghub-2.0, we conduct a thorough re-evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art log parsers in a more rigorous and practical setting. Particularly, we introduce a new evaluation metric to mitigate the sensitivity of existing metrics to imbalanced data distributions. We are also the first to investigate the granular performance of log parsers on logs that represent rare system events, offering in-depth details for software diagnosis. Accurately parsing such logs is essential, yet it remains a challenge. We believe this work could shed light on the evaluation and design of log parsers in practical settings, thereby facilitating their deployment in production systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_10828
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Large-Scale Evaluation for Log Parsing Techniques: How Far Are We?
Jiang, Zhihan
Liu, Jinyang
Huang, Junjie
Li, Yichen
Huo, Yintong
Gu, Jiazhen
Chen, Zhuangbin
Zhu, Jieming
Lyu, Michael R.
Software Engineering
Log data have facilitated various tasks of software development and maintenance, such as testing, debugging and diagnosing. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, log parsing is typically required to transform log messages into structured data for automated log analysis. Given the abundance of log parsers that employ various techniques, evaluating these tools to comprehend their characteristics and performance becomes imperative. Loghub serves as a commonly used dataset for benchmarking log parsers, but it suffers from limited scale and representativeness, posing significant challenges for studies to comprehensively evaluate existing log parsers or develop new methods. This limitation is particularly pronounced when assessing these log parsers for production use. To address these limitations, we provide a new collection of annotated log datasets, denoted Loghub-2.0, which can better reflect the characteristics of log data in real-world software systems. Loghub-2.0 comprises 14 datasets with an average of 3.6 million log lines in each dataset. Based on Loghub-2.0, we conduct a thorough re-evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art log parsers in a more rigorous and practical setting. Particularly, we introduce a new evaluation metric to mitigate the sensitivity of existing metrics to imbalanced data distributions. We are also the first to investigate the granular performance of log parsers on logs that represent rare system events, offering in-depth details for software diagnosis. Accurately parsing such logs is essential, yet it remains a challenge. We believe this work could shed light on the evaluation and design of log parsers in practical settings, thereby facilitating their deployment in production systems.
title A Large-Scale Evaluation for Log Parsing Techniques: How Far Are We?
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10828