Title
Robust log-based anomaly detection on unstable log data.
Abstract
Logs are widely used by large and complex software-intensive systems for troubleshooting. There have been a lot of studies on log-based anomaly detection. To detect the anomalies, the existing methods mainly construct a detection model using log event data extracted from historical logs. However, we find that the existing methods do not work well in practice. These methods have the close-world assumption, which assumes that the log data is stable over time and the set of distinct log events is known. However, our empirical study shows that in practice, log data often contains previously unseen log events or log sequences. The instability of log data comes from two sources: 1) the evolution of logging statements, and 2) the processing noise in log data. In this paper, we propose a new log-based anomaly detection approach, called LogRobust. LogRobust extracts semantic information of log events and represents them as semantic vectors. It then detects anomalies by utilizing an attention-based Bi-LSTM model, which has the ability to capture the contextual information in the log sequences and automatically learn the importance of different log events. In this way, LogRobust is able to identify and handle unstable log events and sequences. We have evaluated LogRobust using logs collected from the Hadoop system and an actual online service system of Microsoft. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can well address the problem of log instability and achieve accurate and robust results on real-world, ever-changing log data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3338906.3338931
ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Anomaly Detection,Log Analysis,Deep Learning,Log Instability,Data Quality
Conference
978-1-4503-5572-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
20
0.73
0
Authors
17
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xu Zhang1252.85
Yong Xu2413.21
Qingwei Lin328527.76
Bo Qiao4339.09
Hongyu Zhang586450.03
Yingnong Dang653726.92
Chunyu Xie7535.27
Xinsheng Yang8211.43
Qian Cheng9201.07
Ze Li1018420.82
Junjie Chen118314.71
Xiaoting He12362.32
Randolph Yao13200.73
Jian-Guang Lou1489756.16
Murali Chintalapati15333.40
Shen Furao1651543.27
Dongmei Zhang171439132.94