Papers › On Automatic Parsing of Log Records

On Automatic Parsing of Log Records

12 Feb 2021arXiv:2102.06320archive 2025-07-28

Jared Rand, Andriy Miranskyy

Software log analysis helps to maintain the health of software solutions and ensure compliance and security. Existing software systems consist of heterogeneous components emitting logs in various formats. A typical solution is to unify the logs using manually built parsers, which is laborious. Instead, we explore the possibility of automating the parsing task by employing machine translation (MT). We create a tool that generates synthetic Apache log records which we used to train recurrent-neural-network-based MT models. Models' evaluation on real-world logs shows that the models can learn Apache log format and parse individual log records. The median relative edit distance between an actual real-world log record and the MT prediction is less than or equal to 28%. Thus, we show that log parsing using an MT approach is promising.

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Code

WulffHunter/log_generator officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

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Tasks

Log ParsingMachine TranslationTranslation

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

Synthetic and Real Apache Log Records

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Machine Translation V_A (trained on T_H) M_C Median Relative Edit Distance 0.28 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation V_B (trained on T_H) M_C Median Relative Edit Distance 0.25 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation V_C (trained on T_H) M_C Median Relative Edit Distance 0.27 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

GRULSTM

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