Outlier detection from ETL execution trace

Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) is an integral part of Data Warehousing (DW) implementation. The commercial tools that are used for this purpose captures lot of execution trace in form of various log files with plethora of information. However there has been hardly any initiative where any proactive analyses have been done on the ETL logs to improve their efficiency. In this paper we utilize outlier detection technique to find the processes varying most from the group in terms of execution trace. As our experiment was carried on actual production processes, any outlier we would consider as a signal rather than a noise. To identify the input parameters for the outlier detection algorithm we employ a survey among developer community with varied mix of experience & expertise. We use simple text parsing to extract these features from the logs, as shortlisted from the survey. Subsequently we applied outlier detection technique (Clustering based) on the logs. By this process we reduced our domain of detailed analysis from 500 logs to 44 logs (8 Percentage). Among the 5 outlier cluster, 2 of them are genuine concern, while the other 3 figure out because of the huge number of rows involved.