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Bayesian Tail 63

Posted by timothy from the seek-novelty dept.
A user writes "We all know anti-spam-software using Bayesian filtering. The results with these are amazingly good. So that made me thinking: why not create a tool which monitors logfiles and determines using a Bayesian filter what events to display and what not? That's why I created btail. Btail is just that: it monitors a logfile and filters it with a Bayesian filter. The results are above my own expectations!"
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Bayesian Tail

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  • This is a cool idea but I wouldn't want to use it on to filter logs on important systems... every line may be crucial.

    Anyhow credits on a decent idea

    • Re:Cool idea but may be dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @01:08PM (#11210846) Homepage
      This is a cool idea but I wouldn't want to use it on to filter logs on important systems... every line may be crucial.
      Perhaps, but doesn't the same apply to your email? Every email may be crucial as well -- but if you miss a crucial email because it was buried in spam, isn't the effect the same as if it was caught by an overzealous spam filter?

      • Re:Cool idea but may be dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cpuffer_hammer ( 31542 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @01:18PM (#11210969) Homepage
        Why not use it to colorize, Or to rebuild the logs in HTML.
      • The far more important difference is that we cannot control the generation of incoming email, which is why we are reduced to filtering as intelligently as possible.

        Server logs are not the same at all. The administrator has some control over the logs that get generated, and the programmer has full control. There isn't supposed to be the equivalent of email spam at all, because useless messages should just be filtered or redirected at the source. Leaving everything at "verbose" and relying on filtering just

    • I guess it depends on the kind of log file and what you are looking for. If you are talking about a database log file for instance, all errors lines may start with ERR or something and the log file may contain entries for every login and logout that you really don't care about. If you are only interested in certain types of entries it certainly seems useful.
      • You mean like, errr, 'grep'? I think the whole point of this tool is for situations where 'grep' can't easily filter out the rest. In my ideal world developers always tag log entries in such a way that getting the entries you want out is as easy as grepping the file ;-)

  • examples (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rogueuk ( 245470 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @12:52PM (#11210678) Homepage
    Do you have any examples of what type of stuff it learns to filter and what it learns to show? The btail site is kind of lacking of what it outputs versus what it filters

  • Site getting sluggish already (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kiaser Zohsay ( 20134 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @12:56PM (#11210722)
    Blockquote from the readme.txt:


    Step 1. compile & install

    make install

    Step 2. configure btail

    Default configuration file:
    db_bad = .btail_db_bad
    db_good = .btail_db_good
    db_conf = .btail_db_conf
    logfile = /var/adm/messages

    db_... are the database files which are filled by blearn. They are
    used as reference when btail calculates if an event is bad or good.
    logfile is the logfile which you want to monitor. As you see, one
    needs a seperate configurationfile AND databases(!) for each file
    to monitor.

    Step 3. learn logging

    blearn -g good_logging
    blearn -b bad_logging

    good_logging should contain events which are considered ok.
    bad_logging should contain logging of events you want to see, e.g.
    disk errors, invalid loggings, etc.

    Step 3. use btail

    btail

    This will read the logfile defined in btail.conf and emit events
    which are considered not-ok by the bayesian filter.

    --- folkert@vanheusden.com


    Still very preliminary at this point, but shows promise. Now, to build and try it out!
  • Did that story end a bit quick ?
    Heck, I wanna know what the results are goddamnit. What made the thing so great.

    • Re:Well, whereæs the story ? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The missing bit was that his expectations had been that the code would burst into violet flame, emitting strange new quantum rays that would turn his bones into mercury.

      When it merely turned a couple of dogs inside out, he knew the time had come to offer it as a Slashdot story.
  • Go Folkert, go! ;-]
    • Go Folkert! Your site is still standing, so lets wait and see what happens when your story hits the frontpage ;-)

  • What I would like to see (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bhima ( 46039 )
    The environment I work in is highly E-mail centric and I work on many projects. I would like to see some sort of Bayesian filtering employed to sort all of the e-mails I get into folders based on projects.

    • Re:What I would like to see (Score:4, Informative)

      by tonkdude ( 806199 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @01:41PM (#11211260)
      I currently use CRM114 and on the mailing list, some one (Evan Prodromou) has created a program that does just this using the CRM114 language. It is called "Monkeyplexer" based on the idea that you could train a monkey to sort your mail box into folders.

      If you pop over to the CRM114 site [sourceforge.net] and search the general list archives [sourceforge.net] for monkeyplexer to find the discussions about it.

      Here is the last version announcement that I could find in my mailbox:

      monkeyplexer is a tool for automatically sorting incoming email messages into appropriate folders. A new version of monkeyplexer, 0.7, is now available. http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/monkeyplexer/monkeyplexer -0.7.tar.gz [bad.dynu.ca]

      This version includes the following changes:
      You can specify which mailboxes to use, instead of which mailboxes to exclude. This can save some typing and some time at runtime, at the expense of dynamically updating the list. You can tell the monkeytrainer to only train messages that were received in the last few weeks, days, hours, minutes -- whatever. The monkeyplexer remembers which messages have been trained for which folders. If you train a message for a different folder, the monkeyplexer will automatically forget the first folder before training for the new one. Thanks to everyone who has installed monkeyplexer already. I hope this new version helps some people out. I find it easier and more accurate.

      ~ESP
    • POPFile [sf.net] is exactly what you're looking for.

  • If this were Trek... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @01:24PM (#11211052) Homepage
    01:37 Overheat in plasma injector #1.
    01:56 Plasma injector #1 offline, switching to #2 backup.
    02:23 Overheat in plasma injector #2.
    02:44 Failure to shutdown plasma injector #2.
    02:58 Overheat in reactor core.
    03:20 Containment weakening.
    03:25 Containment weakening.
    03:30 Containment weakening.
    03:35 Five minutes to containment failure.
    03:40 FIVE SECONDS TO WARP CORE BREACH!!!

    Better be careful to train the filter about those warnings that don't happen very often, but when they do, you really want to know about them.

    • True. But if the Star Trek error log resembled real life then it might look more like:
      01:37 [error] Overheat in plasma injector #1.
      01:37 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
      01:38 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
      01:38 [warning] Oxegen sensor on deck 2 not responding.
      01:39 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
      01:40 [warning] Cargo bay door 2 is open.
      01:41 [warning] Oxegen sensor on deck 2 not responding.
      01:56 [error] Plasma injector #1 offline, switching to #2 backup.

      In other words real interesting errors i
      • If I were you I'd just write a special script to do that, probably far less hassle and more accurate.
      • tail -f /foo/bar/mysite.com-error.log | grep -i php

        ... will show only the php errors. :-)

      • As others have said, it would be much easier to pipe that through grep or a perl script first instead.
      • Oh sure, I can definitely see where it would be useful for highlighting the important stuff in a sea of logs, and easier for crafting a general solution rather than a pile of rules and regexs.

        For my firewall sound effects program, I basically tail the ZoneAlarm logs, and play a selectable sound effect depending on the port/type. It's cute and even useful for detecting patterns (if you don't mind the noise), but I'm thinking about if Bayesian filtering could be applied to a real security report. It might be

      • As has been said: it's easiest just to write ad hoc filters for this sort of thing. This is what I've been using since my wmail stopped working properly:

        tail -F /var/log/messages | awk '/from=/,"\033[1;32m&\033[0m",$7); system("aplay sounds/newmail.wav&")}; {sub(/.*/,"\033[37m&",$1); sub(/.*/,"\033[33m&\033[0m",$3); print}'

        I use similar rules for alerts about SSH break-in attempts, mail relay probes and machine check exceptions. I know there are all sorts of sophisticated log analyzer and
        • Sorry - that didn't come out right because of the angle brackets in it:
          tail -F /var/log/messages | awk '/from=</ {sub(/<.*>/,"\033[1;32m&\033[0m",$7); system("aplay sounds/newmail.wav&")}; {sub(/.*/,"\033[37m&",$1); sub(/.*/,"\033[33m&\033[0m",$3); print}'

      • I do this kind of thing all the time, allow me to share...

        tail -f foo.log | grep "PHP Fatal error"
    • My guess is that you are probably exactly interested in the uncommon log messages.

      That said, I don't buy logfile filtering until I see it works. Sometimes you are interested in messages of one kind, sometimes in messages of another kind. I still think that fixed pattern matching can do the job better. Of course, that's what many people feel about spam filtering.
      • That said, I don't buy logfile filtering until I see it works. Sometimes you are interested in messages of one kind, sometimes in messages of another kind. I still think that fixed pattern matching can do the job better. Of course, that's what many people feel about spam filtering.

        I think you're misinterpreting what the tool is meant for. Often, when you are looking at the logs, you are looking for something in particular. In those cases, as you suggest, grep is probably the best tool for the job. But, as

  • Bayesian is good for almost everything (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ki Master George ( 768244 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @01:59PM (#11211419)
    Bayesian filtering could be used for lots of things outside of spam. One example could possibly be Wikis, determining spam from ham modifications (well, yes, it is spam here). I've had some other ideas that involve Bayesian, but they've escaped me for the moment.

    • Bayesian is good for almost everything-Dessert. (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "I've had some other ideas that involve Bayesian, but they've escaped me for the moment."

      Recovering the Slashdot lost since 2000, by eliminating most (-1) material e.g.GNAA,FP,etc. Eliminating the human biasis in the moderation system (Since client-side moderation is out). Tagging interesting material (A Baysian agent).

    • Bayesian filtering could be used for lots of things outside of spam. One example could possibly be Wikis, determining spam from ham modifications (well, yes, it is spam here). I've had some other ideas that involve Bayesian, but they've escaped me for the moment.

      • Email sorting filters: imagine a baynesian setup that can decide if a new mail should be sorted into "work", "friends", "ebay", "amazon", "project", etc.
      • Interest filters: Run slashdot stories and comments through your own trained baynesian so
    • I always thought a bayesian (adult) web-site content filter would be a good idea, a la netnanny but without a canned list of "bad" url's.

      In fact, I may just go and make a ff extension that does just that, hmmm, mebbe call it "NNSFW"?

  • Reinvent the Wheel Much? (Score:5, Informative)

    by runswithd6s ( 65165 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @04:28PM (#11213130) Homepage
    (Stage Left) Enters the Controllable Regex Mutilator [sourceforge.net], crm114, with a noticable strut. He's been there, done that.
    CRM114 is a system to examine incoming e-mail, system log streams, data files or other data streams, and to sort, filter, or alter the incoming files or data streams according to the user's wildest desires. Criteria for categorization of data can be by satisfaction of regexes, by sparse binary polynomial matching with a Bayesian Chain Rule evaluator, a Hidden Markov Model, or by other means. Accuracy of the SBPH/BCR classifier has been seen in excess of 99 per cent, for 1/4 megabyte of learning text. In other words, CRM114 learns, and it learns fast .

  • Why learning with supervision? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MoobY ( 207480 ) <`anthony' `at' `liekens.net'> on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @05:39PM (#11213781) Homepage
    I thought this app was learning everything was in the log, and then only showed the new out-of-the-ordinary log entries that didn't quite fit in with the rest. This would allow to filter out freak events from the log and show them to the user. How different would such an app be from the proposed btail? And how confident would you be about such an unsupervised log analyzer?
  • do I get a discount if I already have a subscription to Black Tail?

  • Here's how to make this a lot more useful (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Julian Morrison ( 5575 ) on Thursday December 30, 2004 @01:21AM (#11216683)
    Step 1: Allow the option to automatically discover and load canned training packages, eg: a directory under /etc. Make it automatically pick the right training file to use when called with a logfile (so eg: btail httpd.conf knows to look for the training for httpd.conf files).

    Step 2: Include btail with major distros

    Step 3: Any package for an app that generates logs can come with a ready-made canned training package, which gets dropped into the /etc directory.

    That way, you could apt-get a package, start btail-ing its logfiles immediately without the need to tediously train the filter first. Training would still be possible, to personalise the filter.

  • Nor for Me (Score:1, Insightful)

    by schestowitz ( 843559 )
    People who monitor log files know best where to look and what to ignore. It is better to incorporate filtering into the application that generates the logs.
    • I'm don't understand how your suggestion fits in with your initial statement, or as a comment on the usefulness of a bayesian log filter. It's true that people know best. But after scrolling through the same "Operation completed with errors" line time and time again, the minute effort required adds up. even a simple automated filter can assist, which this person has implemented. It is better to incorporate filtering into the application that generates the logs.

      That's akin to only filling a dictionary with

      • Yes, I contradicted myself somehow. You need to look at the two parts of my reply separately. About Firefox, try what I do and use kedit or the like to run a spellcheker (ALT+T+S). It takes 2 seconds to copy and paste text and I invoke kedit using CTRL+ALT+E (xbindkeys).

  • Bayesian (Score:2, Interesting)

    by inertia187 ( 156602 )
    Bayesian tail might be neat. I like the idea of broadening the use, but I'd much rather see bayesian filters used on my in-box for more than just spam. I envision a filter that would sort out e-mails based on subject matter. This would have the net effect of improving the filter technology because it's trying to sort e-mails you actually want to look at.

    We all know that if the filter makes a mistake and hides a message in the Spam box, and chances are you'll might miss many of them, another the chance t

  • Bayesian AIM bot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by duncangough ( 530657 ) on Friday December 31, 2004 @04:31AM (#11226434) Homepage

    I love Bayes stuff - and there's a very nice Python module written by divmod [divmod.org].

    I was playing around with AIML to cobble together a basic chat bot when I realised that I could use a Bayesian parser to radically cut down the amount of AIML that I needed to write. AIML is an XML style of chat bot repsonses, it's clever in that it's highly recursive but the downside is that you need to create a rule for every eventuality.

    By adding in a bit of Bayesian guessing before the AIML parser got it hands on the conversation, I'm able to keep the AIML files very focused and give the chat bot a bit more sparkle - you don't have to train him about everything. After a while he realised that 'yo', 'hi' and 'hello' are all the same thing, so he just guesses that you're saying hello and pulls out the correct response from the AIML file (rather than creating an AIML rule to deal with all the variations on 'hello').

    If you're interested I'd strongly recommend installing GrokitBot. You can get the source and a bit more explanation at my site, Suttree.com [suttree.com]

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