SOSP Workshop on the Analysis of System Logs (WASL) 2009

October 14, 2009

Big Sky Resort
Big Sky, MT

ACM SIGOPS In Cooperation with USENIX
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SOSP WASL 2009

Call for Papers Workshop Website Important Dates

System logs contain a wide variety of information about system status and health, including events from various applications, daemons and drivers, as well as sampled information such as resource utilization statistics. As such, these logs represent a rich source of information for the analysis and diagnosis of system problems and prediction of future system events. However, their lack of organization and the general lack of semantic consistency between information from various software and hardware vendors means that most of this information content is wasted. Indeed, today's most popular log analysis technique is to use regular expressions to either detect events of interest or to filter the log so that a human operator can examine it manually. Clearly, this captures only a fraction of the information available in these logs and does not scale to the large systems common in business and supercomputing environments.

This workshop will focus on novel techniques for extracting operationally useful information from existing logs and methods to improve the information content of future logs. Topics include but are not limited to:

Papers limited to 6 2-column pages using >= 10pt font.

Workshop Chair Program Committee

WASL 2009 Technical Program

Wednesday, October 14
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM Session 1: Log Analysis Tools
3:00 PM - 3:30 PM Break
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM Session 2a: Analyzing System Logs
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Session 2b: Group Discussion on Current State of the Art
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM Dinner
8:00 PM - 9:30 PM Session 3: Panel on Future Research Agenda


Session 1: Log Analysis Tools

Extracting Message Types from BlueGene/L's Logs
A. Makanju, A. Zincir-Heywood, and E. Milios
Incremental Learning of System Log Formats
K. Zhu, K. Fisher, and D. Walker
Visual and Algorithmic Tooling for System Trace Analysis: A Case Study
W. De Pauw and S. Heisig

Session 2a: Analyzing System Logs

Mining Dependency in Distributed Systems through Unstructured Logs Analysis
J. Lou, Q. Fu, Y. Wang, and J. Li
A Bayesian Network Approach to Modeling IT Service Availability using System Logs
R. Zhang, E. Cope, L. Huesler, and F. Cheng
Endpoint Identification Using System Logs
S. Melvin

Session 2b: Group Discussion on Current State of the Art

  1. Tips and tricks in current use
  2. Gaps and challenges in current techniques
  3. Vision and steps for the future

Session 3: Panel on Future Research Agenda

  1. What are the most difficult problems with logging, in the real world?
  2. How to make academia-industry interactions more productive?
  3. How to extract meaningful information from logs?
  4. How to improve system management