CrashEventLLM: Predicting System Crashes with Large Language Models

Abstract: As the dependence on computer systems expands across various domains, focusing on personal, industrial, and large-scale applications, there arises a compelling need to enhance their reliability to sustain business operations seamlessly and ensure optimal user satisfaction. System logs generated by these devices serve as valuable repositories of historical trends and past failures. The use of machine learning techniques for failure prediction has become commonplace, enabling the extraction of insights from past data to anticipate future behavior patterns. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks including summarization, reasoning, and event prediction. Therefore, in this paper, we endeavor to investigate the potential of LLMs in predicting system failures, leveraging insights learned from past failure behavior to inform reasoning and decision-making processes effectively. Our approach involves leveraging data from the Intel Computing Improvement Program (ICIP) system crash logs to identify significant events and develop CrashEventLLM. This model, built upon a LLM framework, serves as our foundation for crash event prediction. Specifically, our model utilizes historical data to forecast future crash events, informed by expert annotations. Additionally, it goes beyond mere prediction, offering insights into potential causes for each crash event. This work provides the preliminary insights into prompt-based LLMs for the log-based event prediction task.