Brain: Log Parsing With Bidirectional Parallel Tree

Siyu Yu, Pinjia He, Ningjiang Chen, Yifan Wu

Abstract: Automated log analysis can facilitate failure diagnosis for developers and operators using a large volume of logs. Log parsing is a prerequisite step for automated log analysis, which parses semi-structured logs into structured logs. However, existing parsers are difficult to apply to software-intensive systems, due to their unstable parsing accuracy on various software. Although neural network-based approaches are stable, their inefficiency makes it challenging to keep up with the speed of log production. In this work, we found that the longest common pattern among logs is likely to be part of the log template. Inspired by this key insight, we propose a new stable log parsing approach, called Brain, which creates initial groups according to the longest common pattern. Then a bidirectional tree is used to hierarchically complement the constant words to the longest common pattern to form the complete log template efficiently. Experimental results on 16 benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art parsers on two widely-used parsing accuracy metrics, and it only takes around 46 seconds to process one million lines of logs.