Error log processing for accurate failure prediction

  • Authors:
  • Felix Salfner;Steffen Tschirpke

  • Affiliations:
  • International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley;Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  • Venue:
  • WASL'08 Proceedings of the First USENIX conference on Analysis of system logs
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Error logs are a fruitful source of information both for diagnosis as well as for proactive fault handling - however elaborate data preparation is necessary to filter out valuable pieces of information. In addition to the usage of well-known techniques, we propose three algorithms: (a) assignment of error IDs to error messages based on Levenshtein's edit distance, (b) a clustering approach to group similar error sequences, and (c) a statistical noise filtering algorithm. By experiments using data of a commercial telecommunication system we show that data preparation is an important step to achieve accurate error-based online failure prediction.