LogPTR: Variable-Aware Log Parsing with Pointer Network

Due to the sheer size of software logs, developers rely on automated log analysis. Log parsing, which parses semi-structured logs into a structured format, is a prerequisite of automated log analysis. However, existing log parsers are unsatisfactory when applied in practice because they 1) ignore categories of variables, and 2) need labor-intensive model tuning. To address these limitations, we propose LogPTR, a variable-aware log parser that can extract the static and dynamic parts in logs, and further identify categories of variables. The key of LogPTR is formulating log parsing as a text summarization problem and using a pointer mechanism to copy words from the log message and label tokens indicating categories of variables. The experimental results on widely-used benchmark datasets show that LogPTR outperforms state-of-the-art log parsers on both general log parsing that extracts log templates and variable-aware log parsing that further identifies categories of variables.