WASL ‘08 Call for Papers

Posted on May 15th, 2008 | by Andrew Hay |

This is really cool news! The First USENIX Workshop on the Analysis of System Logs (WASL ‘08) is happening on December 7th, 2008 in San Diego, CA. About the event:

System logs contain a wide variety of information about system status and health, including events from various applications, daemons, and drivers, as well as sampled information such as resource utilization statistics. As such, these logs represent a rich source of information for the analysis and diagnosis of system problems and prediction of future system events. However, their lack of organization and the general lack of semantic consistency among the information from various software and hardware vendors means that most of this information content is wasted. Today’s most popular log analysis technique is to use regular expressions either to detect events of interest or to filter the log so that a human operator can examine it manually. Clearly, this captures only a fraction of the information available in these logs and does not scale to the large systems common in business and supercomputing environments.

The call for papers is now open and can be accessed here: http://www.usenix.org/events/wasl08/cfp/cfp.html

Topics
This workshop will focus on novel techniques for extracting operationally useful information from existing logs and on methods to improve the information content of future logs. Topics include but are not limited to:

  • Reports on publicly available sources of sample log data
  • Log anonymization
  • Log feature detection and extraction
  • Prediction of malfunction or misuse based on log data
  • Statistical techniques to characterize log data
  • Applications of Natural-Language Processing (NLP) to logs
  • Scalable log compression
  • Log comparison techniques
  • Methods to enhance and standardize log semantics
  • System diagnostic techniques
  • Log visualization
  • Analysis of services (problem ticket) logs

Deadline and Submission Instructions
Submitted papers must be no longer than 8 single-spaced 8.5″ x 11″ pages, including figures, tables, and references; two-column format, using 10-point type on 12-point (single-spaced) leading; and a text block 6.5″ wide x 9″ deep. Author names and affiliations should appear on the title page.

Papers must be in PDF and must be submitted via the Web submission form, which will be available here soon.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by September 26, 2008. Authors of accepted papers will produce a final PDF and the equivalent HTML by October 28, 2008. All papers will be available online to attendees prior to the workshop and will be available online to everyone starting on December 7, 2008.