Failure Prediction using the Cox Proportional Hazard Model

Crashes of software systems may have disruptive, and sometimes tragic effects on users. Being able to forecast such failures is extremely important, even when the failures are inevitable – at least recovery or rescue actions can be taken. In this paper we present a technique to predict the failure of running software systems. We propose to use log messages to predict failures running devices that read log files of running application and warns about the likely failure of the system; the prediction is based on the Cox Proportional Hazards (PH) model that has been applied successfully in various fields of research. We perform an initial validation of the proposed approach on real-world data.