A literature review and existing challenges on software logging practices

Abstract

Software logging is the practice of recording different events and activities that occur within a software system, which are useful for different activities such as failure prediction and anomaly detection. While previous research focused on improving different aspects of logging practices, the goal of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review and the existing challenges of practitioners in software logging practices. In this paper, we focus on the logging practices that cover the steps from the instrumentation of a software system, the storage of logs, up to the preprocessing steps that prepare log data for further follow-up analysis. Our systematic literature review (SLR) covers 204 research papers and a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 20,766 and 149 questions on StackOverflow (SO). We observe that 53% of the studies focus on improving the techniques that preprocess logs for analysis (e.g., the practices of log parsing, log clustering and log mining), 37% focus on how to create new log statements, and 10% focus on how to improve log file storage. Our analysis of SO topics reveals that five out of seven identified high-level topics are not covered by the literature and are related to dependency configuration of logging libraries, infrastructure related configuration, scattered logging, context-dependant usage of logs and handling log files.