An Assessment of ChatGPT on Log Data

Abstract

Recent development of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT has been widely applied to a wide range of software engineering tasks. Many papers have reported their analysis on the potential advantages and limitations of ChatGPT for writing code, summarization, text generation, etc. However, the analysis of the current state of ChatGPT for log processing has received little attention. Logs generated by large-scale software systems are complex and hard to understand. Despite their complexity, they provide crucial information for subject matter experts to understand the system status and diagnose problems of the systems. In this paper, we investigate the current capabilities of ChatGPT to perform several interesting tasks on log data, while also trying to identify its main shortcomings. Our findings show that the performance of the current version of ChatGPT for log processing is limited, with a lack of consistency in responses and scalability issues. We also outline our views on how we perceive the role of LLMs in the log processing discipline and possible next steps to improve the current capabilities of ChatGPT and the future LLMs in this area. We believe our work can contribute to future academic research to address the identified issues.