Network Event Extraction from Log Data with Nonnegative Tensor Factorization

Tatsuaki KIMURA
Keisuke ISHIBASHI
Tatsuya MORI
Hiroshi SAWADA
Tsuyoshi TOYONO
Ken NISHIMATSU
Akio WATANABE
Akihiro SHIMODA
Kohei SHIOMOTO

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E100-B    No.10    pp.1865-1878
Publication Date: 2017/10/01
Publicized: 2017/03/13
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.2016EBP3430
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Network Management/Operation
Keyword: 
network management,  syslog,  nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF),  

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Summary: 
Network equipment, such as routers, switches, and RADIUS servers, generate various log messages induced by network events such as hardware failures and protocol flaps. In large production networks, analyzing the log messages is crucial for diagnosing network anomalies; however, it has become challenging due to the following two reasons. First, the log messages are composed of unstructured text messages generated in accordance with vendor-specific rules. Second, network events that induce the log messages span several geographical locations, network layers, protocols, and services. We developed a method to tackle these obstacles consisting of two techniques: statistical template extraction (STE) and log tensor factorization (LTF). The former leverages a statistical clustering technique to automatically extract primary templates from unstructured log messages. The latter builds a statistical model that collects spatial-temporal patterns of log messages. Such spatial-temporal patterns provide useful insights into understanding the impact and patterns of hidden network events. We evaluate our techniques using a massive amount of network log messages collected from a large operating network and confirm that our model fits the data well. We also investigate several case studies that validate the usefulness of our method.