Flux Research Group / School of Computing

DeepLog: Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis from System Logs through Deep Learning

Min Du, Feifei Li, Guineng Zheng, and Vivek Srikumar

ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2017.

areas
Security, Cloud

abstract

DeepLog: Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis from System Logs through Deep Learning

Anomaly detection is a critical step towards building a secure and trustworthy system. e primary purpose of a system log is to record system states and signi cant events at various critical points to help debug system failures and perform root cause analysis. Such log data is universally available in nearly all computer systems. Log data is an important and valuable resource for understanding system status and performance issues; therefore, the various system logs are naturally excellent source of information for online monitoring and anomaly detection. We propose DeepLog, a deep neural network model utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), to model a system log as a natural language sequence. is allows DeepLog to automatically learn log pa erns from normal execution, and detect anomalies when log pa erns deviate from the model trained from log data under normal execution. In addition, we demonstrate how to incrementally update the DeepLog model in an online fashion so that it can adapt to new log pa erns over time. Furthermore, DeepLog constructs work ows from the underlying system log so that once an anomaly is detected, users can diagnose the detected anomaly and perform root cause analysis e ectively. Extensive experimental evaluations over large log data have shown that DeepLog has outperformed other existing log-based anomaly detection methods based on traditional data mining methodologies.