Discovering interactions between applications with log analysis.

Application logs record the behavior of a system during its runtime and their analysis can provide useful information. In this article, we propose a method of automated log analysis to discover interactions taking place between applications in an enterprise. We believe that such an automated approach can greatly support enterprise architects in building an up-to-date view of a governed system in a modern, fast-paced development environment. Our contribution is the following: we propose a new method for log template generation called SLT (Simple Log Template), we propose a method of extracting knowledge about application interactions from logs, and we validate the proposed methods on a real system running at Nordea Bank. Additionally, we collect statistical information about application logs from the real-life system, based on which we formulate some observations that support our method.