How to accurately identify the format of log messages

What is it about?

This paper presents a method to automatically identify the different templates used in log messages. We formulate this problem as a multi-objective optimization one, where the goal is to generate log message templates that match as many log entries as possible and are highly specific for each log event.

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Why is it important?

Logging is a programming practice that is used for gathering run- time information of a software system; it is a pervasive activity that finds many applications, ranging from anomaly detection to performance diagnosis. All these applications carry out some sort of log analysis, which requires to parse the log messages. To parse log messages, it is necessary to know their templates (i.e., their format).