Experience Report: System Log Analysis for Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection plays an important role in management of modern large-scale distributed systems. Logs, which record system runtime information, are widely used for anomaly detection. Traditionally, developers (or operators) often inspect the logs manually with keyword search and rule matching. The increasing scale and complexity of modern systems, however, make the volume of logs explode, which renders the infeasibility of manual inspection. To reduce manual effort, many anomaly detection methods based on automated log analysis are proposed. However, developers may still have no idea which anomaly detection methods they should adopt, because there is a lack of a review and comparison among these anomaly…