PILAR: Studying and Mitigating the Influence of Configurations on Log Parsing
The significance of logs has been widely acknowledged with the adoption of various log analysis techniques that assist in software engineering tasks. Many log analysis techniques require structured logs as input while raw logs are typically unstructured. Automated log parsing is proposed to convert unstructured raw logs into structured log templates. Some log parsers achieve promising accuracy, yet they rely on significant efforts from the users to tune the parameters to achieve optimal results. In this paper, we first conduct an empirical study to understand the influence of the configurable parameters of six state-of-the-art log parsers on their parsing results on three aspects: 1) varying the parameters while using the same dataset, 2) keeping the same parameters while using different datasets, and 3) using different samples from the same dataset. Our results show that all these parsers are sensitive to the parameters, posing challenges to their adoption in practice. To mitigate such challenges, we propose PILAR (Parameter Insensitive Log Parser), an entropy-based log parsing approach. We compare PILAR with the existing log parsers on the same three aspects and find that PILAR is the most parameter-insensitive one. In addition, PILAR achieves the second highest parsing accuracy and efficiency among all the state-of-the-art log parsers. This paper paves the road for easing the adoption of log analysis in software engineer practices.
Wed 17 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
15:45 - 17:15 | Software loggingTechnical Track at Meeting Room 101 Chair(s): Hongyu Zhang The University of Newcastle | ||
15:45 15mTalk | PILAR: Studying and Mitigating the Influence of Configurations on Log Parsing Technical Track Hetong Dai Concordia University, Yiming Tang Concordia University, Heng Li Polytechnique Montréal, Weiyi Shang University of Waterloo | ||
16:00 15mTalk | Did We Miss Something Important? Studying and Exploring Variable-Aware Log Abstraction Technical Track Zhenhao Li Concordia University, Chuan Luo Beihang University, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen Concordia University, Weiyi Shang University of Waterloo, Shilin He Microsoft Research, Qingwei Lin Microsoft Research, Dongmei Zhang Microsoft Research | ||
16:15 15mTalk | On the Temporal Relations between Logging and Code Technical Track Zishuo Ding Concordia University, Yiming Tang Concordia University, Yang Li Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Heng Li Polytechnique Montréal, Weiyi Shang University of Waterloo Pre-print | ||
16:30 15mTalk | How Do Developers' Profiles and Experiences Influence their Logging Practices? An Empirical Study of Industrial Practitioners Technical Track Guoping Rong Nanjing University, shenghui gu Nanjing University, Haifeng Shen Australian Catholic University, He Zhang Nanjing University, Hongyu Kuang Nanjing University | ||
16:45 15mTalk | When to Say What: Learning to Find Condition-Message Inconsistencies Technical Track Pre-print | ||
17:00 15mTalk | A Semantic-aware Parsing Approach for Log Analytics Technical Track Yintong Huo The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yuxin Su Sun Yat-sen University, Cheryl Lee The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Michael Lyu The Chinese University of Hong Kong Pre-print |