Log files are commonly inspected by system administrators and developers to detect suspicious behaviors and diagnose failure causes. Since size of log files grows fast, thus making manual analysis impractical, different automatic techniques have been proposed to analyze log files. Unfortunately, accuracy and effectiveness of these techniques are often limited by the unstructured nature of logged messages and the variety of data that can be logged. This paper presents a technique to automatically analyze log files and retrieve important information to identify failure causes. The technique automatically identifies dependencies between events and values in logs corresponding to legal executions, generates models of legal behaviors and compares log files collected during failing executions with the generated models to detect anomalous event sequences that are presented to users. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the technique in supporting developers and testers to identify failure causes. © 2008 IEEE.

Mariani, L., Pastore, F. (2008). Automated identification of failure causes in system logs. In Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) (pp.117-126). Washington : IEEE Computer Society [10.1109/ISSRE.2008.48].

Automated identification of failure causes in system logs

MARIANI, LEONARDO;PASTORE, FABRIZIO
2008

Abstract

Log files are commonly inspected by system administrators and developers to detect suspicious behaviors and diagnose failure causes. Since size of log files grows fast, thus making manual analysis impractical, different automatic techniques have been proposed to analyze log files. Unfortunately, accuracy and effectiveness of these techniques are often limited by the unstructured nature of logged messages and the variety of data that can be logged. This paper presents a technique to automatically analyze log files and retrieve important information to identify failure causes. The technique automatically identifies dependencies between events and values in logs corresponding to legal executions, generates models of legal behaviors and compares log files collected during failing executions with the generated models to detect anomalous event sequences that are presented to users. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the technique in supporting developers and testers to identify failure causes. © 2008 IEEE.
paper
log file analysis, dynamic analysis, diagnosis, fault localization
English
International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
2008
Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)
978-0-7695-3405-3
2008
117
126
none
Mariani, L., Pastore, F. (2008). Automated identification of failure causes in system logs. In Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) (pp.117-126). Washington : IEEE Computer Society [10.1109/ISSRE.2008.48].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10281/6448
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