LogRCA: Log-based Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Services

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wittkopp, Thorsten, Wiesner, Philipp, Kao, Odej
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wittkopp, Thorsten
Wiesner, Philipp
Kao, Odej
author_facet Wittkopp, Thorsten
Wiesner, Philipp
Kao, Odej
contents To assist IT service developers and operators in managing their increasingly complex service landscapes, there is a growing effort to leverage artificial intelligence in operations. To speed up troubleshooting, log anomaly detection has received much attention in particular, dealing with the identification of log events that indicate the reasons for a system failure. However, faults often propagate extensively within systems, which can result in a large number of anomalies being detected by existing approaches. In this case, it can remain very challenging for users to quickly identify the actual root cause of a failure. We propose LogRCA, a novel method for identifying a minimal set of log lines that together describe a root cause. LogRCA uses a semi-supervised learning approach to deal with rare and unknown errors and is designed to handle noisy data. We evaluated our approach on a large-scale production log data set of 44.3 million log lines, which contains 80 failures, whose root causes were labeled by experts. LogRCA consistently outperforms baselines based on deep learning and statistical analysis in terms of precision and recall to detect candidate root causes. In addition, we investigated the impact of our deployed data balancing approach, demonstrating that it considerably improves performance on rare failures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_13599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LogRCA: Log-based Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Services
Wittkopp, Thorsten
Wiesner, Philipp
Kao, Odej
Machine Learning
To assist IT service developers and operators in managing their increasingly complex service landscapes, there is a growing effort to leverage artificial intelligence in operations. To speed up troubleshooting, log anomaly detection has received much attention in particular, dealing with the identification of log events that indicate the reasons for a system failure. However, faults often propagate extensively within systems, which can result in a large number of anomalies being detected by existing approaches. In this case, it can remain very challenging for users to quickly identify the actual root cause of a failure. We propose LogRCA, a novel method for identifying a minimal set of log lines that together describe a root cause. LogRCA uses a semi-supervised learning approach to deal with rare and unknown errors and is designed to handle noisy data. We evaluated our approach on a large-scale production log data set of 44.3 million log lines, which contains 80 failures, whose root causes were labeled by experts. LogRCA consistently outperforms baselines based on deep learning and statistical analysis in terms of precision and recall to detect candidate root causes. In addition, we investigated the impact of our deployed data balancing approach, demonstrating that it considerably improves performance on rare failures.
title LogRCA: Log-based Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Services
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13599