Creating Operational Profiles of Software Systems by Transforming their Log Files to Directed Cyclic Graphs
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Abstract -
Most log files are of one format - a flat file with the events
of execution recorded one after the other. Each line in the
file contains at least a timestamp, a combination of one or
more event identifiers, and the actual log message with information
of which event was executed and what the values
for the dynamic parameters of that event are. Since log files
have this trace information, we can use it for many purposes, such as operational profiling and anomalous execution path
detection. However the current flat file format of a log file
is very unintuitive to detect the existence of a repeating
pattern. In this paper we propose a transformation of the
current serial order format of a log file to a directed cyclic
graph (such as a non-finite state machine) format and how
the operational profile of a system can be built from this
representation of the log file. We built a tool (in C++), that transforms a log file with a set of log events in a serial
order to an adjacency matrix for the resulting graphical representation.
We can then easily apply existing graph theory
based algorithms on the adjacency matrix to analyze the log
file of the system. The directed cyclic graph and the analysis
of it can be visualized by rendering the adjacen
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@article{Nagappan2011_5
author = {Meiyappan, Nagappan and Brian, Robinson,
keyword = {Debugging, Log File Analysis},
title = {Creating Operational Profiles of Software Systems by Transforming their Log Files to Directed Cyclic Graphs},
type = {workshop}
}