This change contains a major refactoring of the timestamp
format determination code used by the ML find file structure
endpoint.
Previously timestamp format determination was done separately
for each piece of text supplied to the timestamp format finder.
This had the drawback that it was not possible to distinguish
dd/MM and MM/dd in the case where both numbers were 12 or less.
In order to do this sensibly it is best to look across all the
available timestamps and see if one of the numbers is greater
than 12 in any of them. This necessitates making the timestamp
format finder an instantiable class that can accumulate evidence
over time.
Another problem with the previous approach was that it was only
possible to override the timestamp format to one of a limited
set of timestamp formats. There was no way out if a file to be
analysed had a timestamp that was sane yet not in the supported
set. This is now changed to allow any timestamp format that can
be parsed by a combination of these Java date/time formats:
yy, yyyy, M, MM, MMM, MMMM, d, dd, EEE, EEEE, H, HH, h, mm, ss,
a, XX, XXX, zzz
Additionally S letter groups (fractional seconds) are supported
providing they occur after ss and separated from the ss by a dot,
comma or colon. Spacing and punctuation is also permitted with
the exception of the question mark, newline and carriage return
characters, together with literal text enclosed in single quotes.
The full list of changes/improvements in this refactor is:
- Make TimestampFormatFinder an instantiable class
- Overrides must be specified in Java date/time format - Joda
format is no longer accepted
- Joda timestamp formats in outputs are now derived from the
determined or overridden Java timestamp formats, not stored
separately
- Functionality for determining the "best" timestamp format in
a set of lines has been moved from TextLogFileStructureFinder
to TimestampFormatFinder, taking advantage of the fact that
TimestampFormatFinder is now an instantiable class with state
- The functionality to quickly rule out some possible Grok
patterns when looking for timestamp formats has been changed
from using simple regular expressions to the much faster
approach of using the Shift-And method of sub-string search,
but using an "alphabet" consisting of just 1 (representing any
digit) and 0 (representing non-digits)
- Timestamp format overrides are now much more flexible
- Timestamp format overrides that do not correspond to a built-in
Grok pattern are mapped to a %{CUSTOM_TIMESTAMP} Grok pattern
whose definition is included within the date processor in the
ingest pipeline
- Grok patterns that correspond to multiple Java date/time
patterns are now handled better - the Grok pattern is accepted
as matching broadly, and the required set of Java date/time
patterns is built up considering all observed samples
- As a result of the more flexible acceptance of Grok patterns,
when looking for the "best" timestamp in a set of lines
timestamps are considered different if they are preceded by
a different sequence of punctuation characters (to prevent
timestamps far into some lines being considered similar to
timestamps near the beginning of other lines)
- Out-of-the-box Grok patterns that are considered now include
%{DATE} and %{DATESTAMP}, which have indeterminate day/month
ordering
- The order of day/month in formats with indeterminate day/month
order is determined by considering all observed samples (plus
the server locale if the observed samples still do not suggest
an ordering)
Relates #38086Closes#35137Closes#35132