ETCNLog: A System Log Anomaly Detection Method Based on Efficient Channel Attention and Temporal Convolutional Network

Abstract

The scale of the system and network applications is expanding, and higher requirements are being put forward for anomaly detection. The system log can record system states and significant operational events at different critical points. Therefore, using the system log for anomaly detection can help with system maintenance and avoid unnecessary loss. The system log has obvious timing characteristics, and the execution sequence of the system log has a certain dependency relationship. However, sometimes the length of sequence dependence is long. To handle the problem of longer sequence logs in anomaly detection, this paper proposes a system log anomaly detection method based on efficient channel attention and temporal convolutional network (ETCNLog). It builds a model by treating the system log as a natural language sequence. To handle longer sequence logs more effectively, ETCNLog uses the semantic and timing information of logs. It can automatically learn the importance of different log sequences and detect hidden dependencies within sequences to improve the accuracy of anomaly detection. We run extensive experiments on the actual public log dataset BGL. The experimental results show that the Precision and F1-score of ETCNLog reach 98.15% and 98.21%, respectively, both of which are better than the current anomaly detection methods.