LTAnomaly: A Transformer Variant for Syslog Anomaly Detection Based on Multi-Scale Representation and Long Sequence Capture

Abstract

Detailed information on system operation is recorded by system logs, from which fast and accurate detection of anomalies is conducive to service management and system maintenance. Log anomaly detection methods often only handle a single type of anomaly, and the utilization of log messages could be higher, which makes it challenging to improve the performance of log anomaly detection models. This article presents the LTAnomaly model to accomplish log anomaly detection using semantic information, sequence relationships, and component values to make a vector representation of logs, and we add Transformer with long short-term memory (LSTM) as our final classification model. When sequences are processed sequentially, the model is also influenced by the information from the global information, thus increasing the dependence on feature information. This improves the utilization of log messages with a flexible, simple, and robust model. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, experiments are performed on the HDFS and BGL datasets, with the F1-measures reaching 0.985 and 0.975, respectively, showing that the proposed method enjoys higher accuracy and a more comprehensive application range than existing models.