Mining Telecom System Logs to Facilitate Debugging Tasks

Telecommunication systems are monitored continuously to ensure quality and continuity of service. When an error or an abnormal behaviour occurs, software engineers resort to the analysis of the generated logs for troubleshooting. The problem is that, even for a small system, the log data generated after running the system for a period of time can be considerably large. There is a need to automatically mine important information from this data. There exist studies that aim to do just that, but their focus has been mainly on software applications, paying little attention to network information used by telecom systems. In this paper, we show how data mining techniques, more particularly the ones based on mining frequent itemsets, can be used to extract patterns that characterize the main behaviour of the traced scenarios. We show the effectiveness of our approach through a representative study conducted in an industrial setting.