一句话：通过问卷与访谈揭示微软工业日志分析实践、痛点及其与学术研究的差距。
日志对软件系统管理维护至关重要，但一线实践者的真实声音较少被研究。本文在微软开展综合调研：以13题问卷收集105名员工反馈，并访谈12名员工，系统总结日志分析的格式、场景、方法、工具与痛点。作者将工业实践与学术研究对比，讨论产学差距与未来机会，并给出四项发现。特别地，日志异常检测研究与故障告警实践在目标、技术和效率上存在巨大鸿沟；近期广泛研究的数据驱动日志解析，也可通过在软件开发期间记录模板ID来替代实现。
Logs are crucial to the management and maintenance of software systems. In recent years, log analysis research has achieved notable progress on various topics such as log parsing and log-based anomaly detection. However, the real voices from front-line practitioners are seldom heard. For example, what are the pain points of log analysis in practice? In this work, we conduct a comprehensive survey study on log analysis at Microsoft. We collected feedback from 105 employees through a questionnaire of 13 questions and individual interviews with 12 employees. We summarize the format, scenario, method, tool, and pain points of log analysis. Additionally, by comparing the industrial practices with academic research, we discuss the gaps between academia and industry, and future opportunities on log analysis with four inspiring findings. Particularly, we observe a huge gap exists between log anomaly detection research and failure alerting practices regarding the goal, technique, efficiency, etc. Moreover, data-driven log parsing, which has been widely studied in recent research, can be alternatively achieved by simply logging template IDs during software development. We hope this paper could uncover the real needs of industrial practitioners and the unnoticed yet significant gap between industry and academia, and inspire interesting future directions that converge efforts from both sides.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot6970,
title = {An empirical study of log analysis at Microsoft},
author = {Shilin He and Xu Zhang and Pinjia He and Yong Xu and Liqun Li and Yu Kang and Minghua Ma and Yining Wei and Yingnong Dang and Saravanakumar Rajmohan and Qingwei Lin},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1145/3540250.3558963}
}