LogGD: Detecting Anomalies from System Logs with Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

Log analysis is one of the main techniques engineers use to troubleshoot faults of large-scale software systems. During the past decades, many log analysis approaches have been proposed to detect system anomalies reflected by logs. They usually take log event counts or sequential log events as inputs and utilize machine learning algorithms including deep learning models to detect system anomalies. These anomalies are often identified as violations of quantitative relational patterns or sequential patterns of log events in log sequences. However, existing methods fail to leverage the spatial structural relationships among log events, resulting in potential false alarms and unstable performance. In this study, we propose a novel graph-based log anomaly detection method, LogGD, to effectively address the issue by transforming log sequences into graphs. We exploit the powerful capability of Graph Transformer Neural Network, which combines graph structure and node semantics for log-based anomaly detection. We evaluate the proposed method on four widely-used public log datasets. Experimental results show that LogGD can outperform state-of-the-art quantitative-based and sequence-based methods and achieve stable performance under different window size settings. The results confirm that LogGD is effective in log-based anomaly detection.