LogPTR: Variable-Aware Log Parsing with Pointer Network

Due to the sheer size of software logs, developers rely on automated loganalysis. Log parsing, which parses semi-structured logs into a structuredformat, is a prerequisite of automated log analysis. However, existing logparsers are unsatisfactory when applied in practice because: 1) they ignorecategories of variables, and 2) have poor generalization ability. To addressthe limitations of existing approaches, we propose LogPTR, the first end-to-endvariable-aware log parser that can extract the static and dynamic parts inlogs, and further identify the categories of variables. The key of LogPTR isusing pointer network to copy words from the log message. We have performedextensive experiments on 16 public log datasets and the results show thatLogPTR outperforms state-of-the-art log parsers both on general log parsingthat extracts the log template and variable-aware log parsing that furtheridentifies the category of variables.