Log Pattern Mining for Distributed System Maintenance

Due to the complexity of the network structure, log analysis is usually necessary for the maintenance of network-based distributed systems since logs record rich information about the system behaviors. In recent years, numerous works have been proposed for log analysis; however, they ignore temporal relationships between logs. In this paper, we target on the problem of mining informative patterns from temporal log data. We propose an approach to discover sequential patterns from event sequences with temporal regularities. Discovered patterns are useful for engineers to understand the behaviors of a network-based distributed system. To solve the well-known problem of pattern explosion, we resort to the minimum description length (MDL) principle and take a step forward in summarizing the temporal relationships between adjacent events of a pattern. Experiments on real log datasets prove the efficiency and effectiveness of our method.