Log anomaly detection has become a common practice for software engineers to analyze software system behavior. Despite significant research efforts in log anomaly detection over the past decade, it remains unclear what are practitioners’ expectations on log anomaly detection and whether current research meets their needs. To fill this gap, we conduct an empirical study, surveying 312 practitioners from 36 countries about their expectations on log anomaly detection. In particular, we investigate various factors influencing practitioners’ willingness to adopt log anomaly detection tools. We then perform a literature review on log anomaly detection, focusing on publications in premier venues from 2015 to 2025, to compare practitioners’ needs with the current state of research. Based on this comparison, we highlight the directions for researchers to focus on to develop log anomaly detection techniques that better meet practitioners’ expectations.

Numerous Deep Learning (DL)-based approaches have gained attention in software Log Anomaly Detection (LAD), yet class imbalance in training data remains a challenge, with anomalies often comprising less than 1% of datasets like Thunderbird. Existing DLLAD methods may underperform in severely imbalanced datasets. Although data resampling has proven effective in other software engineering tasks, it has not been explored in LAD. This study aims to fill this gap by providing an in-depth analysis of the impact of diverse data resampling methods on existing DLLAD approaches from two distinct perspectives. Firstly, we assess the performance of these DLLAD approaches across four datasets with different levels of class imbalance, and we explore the impact of resampling ratios of normal to abnormal data on DLLAD approaches. Secondly, we evaluate the effectiveness of the data resampling methods when utilizing optimal resampling ratios of normal to abnormal data. Our findings indicate that oversampling methods generally outperform undersampling and hybrid sampling methods. Data resampling on raw data yields superior results compared to data resampling in the feature space. These improvements are attributed to the increased attention given to important tokens. By exploring the resampling ratio of normal to abnormal data, we suggest generating more data for minority classes through oversampling while removing less data from majority classes through undersampling. In conclusion, our study provides valuable insights into the intricate relationship between data resampling methods and DLLAD. By addressing the challenge of class imbalance, researchers and practitioners can enhance DLLAD performance.

Concise and precise bug report titles help software developers to capture the highlights of the bug report quickly. Unfortunately, it is common that bug reporters do not create high-quality bug report titles. Recent long short-term memory (LSTM)-based sequence-to-sequence models such as iTAPE were proposed to generate bug report titles automatically, but the text representation method and LSTM employed in such model are difficult to capture the accurate semantic information and draw the global dependencies among tokens effectively. This article proposes a deep attention-based summarization model (i.e.,AttSum) to generate high-quality bug report titles. Specifically, theAttSummodel employs the encoder.decoder framework, which utilizes the robustly optimized bidirectional-encoder-representations-from-transformers approach to encode the bug report bodies to capture contextual semantic information better, the stacked transformer decoder to automatically generate titles, and the copy mechanism to handle the rare token problem. To validate the effectiveness ofAttSum, we conduct automatic and manual evaluations on 333563 “$< body, title>$” pairs of bug reports and perform a practical analysis of its ability to improve low-quality titles. The result shows thatAttSumis superior to the state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin both on automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., by 3.4%–58.8% and 7.7%–42.3% in terms of recall-oriented understudy for gisting evaluation in F1 and bilingual evaluation understudy, separately) and three human-set modalities (e.g., by 1.9%–57.5%). Moreover, we analyze the impact of the training data size onAttSumand the results imply that our approach is robust enough to generate much better titles.