Mining Patterns in Mobile Network Logs

Alarm logs are a valuable source of information and play a crucial role in network management. Network devices such as backbone routers or 3G/4G base stations generate verbose and detailed logs that network managers process to detect problems and identify their root causes. Manual analysis of such logs is extremely time-consuming because of the extensive amount of data. Therefore, finding suitable automatic methods to process logs is an important problem in the network analysis area.In this paper, we target the automatic extraction of situations, i.e., sequences of events occurring close in time and space which identify common and recurring patterns. We adopt an unsupervised machine learning approach to automatically mine logs and provide information and correlations in network failures. We face a real use case processing more than 2 million alarms generated by 2 months of TIM Network Operations Center in Northern Italy. Most of the features are categorical and call for specific methodologies to process them. We choose rule mining of frequent items. We focus on event logs and apply rule mining methods to extract temporal-spatial correlations and co-occurrences, i.e., situations. To ease the analyst work, we highlight the most important rules and offer visualization techniques in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Results have been verified to be helpful to recognize common situations and identify possible future anomalies.