Bringing a new AI system into a production environment involves multiple different stakeholders such as business owners, risk officer, ethics officers approving the AI System for a specific usage. Governance frameworks typically include multiple manual steps, including curating information needed to assess risks and reviewing outcomes to identify appropriate actions and governance strategies. We demo a human-in-the-loop automation system that takes a natural language description of an intended use case for an AI system in order to create semi-structured governance information, recommend the most appropriate model for that use case, prioritise risks to be evaluated, automatically running those evaluations and finally storing these results for auditing, reporting and future recommendations. As a result we increase transparency to stakeholders and provide valuable information to aid in decision making when assessing risks associated with an AI solution.

In the context of cloud computing, enterprises are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to enhance performance, ensure cost efficiency, and avoid vendor lock-in. This trend presents a significant challenge for the migration of AI for IT operations (AIOps) models across different cloud providers due to variations in architecture, performance, and data distribution. Traditional methods of re-training AIOps models for new cloud environments are labor-intensive and delay deployment. To address this issue, we introduce a novel framework called SAM (Subseries Augmentation-based Meta-learning), which facilitates seamless model migration between clouds without the need for re-training from scratch. SAM leverages data augmentation and meta-learning to efficiently adapt AIOps models to new cloud environments. It has proven effective in adapting anomaly detectors across various config-urations over both public and simulated datasets. We believe that SAM can also be adapted to other AI models used for automating IT tasks such as alerting and resource scaling.

We apply the machinery of interventional causal learning with programmable interventions to the domain of applications management. Modern applications are modularized into interdependent components or services (e.g. microservices) for ease of development and management. The communication graph among such components is a function of application code and is not always known to the platform provider. In our solution we learn this unknown communication graph solely using application logs observed during the execution of the application by using fault injections in a staging environment. Specifically, we have developed an active (or interventional) causal learning algorithm that uses the observations obtained during fault injections to learn a model of error propagation in the communication among the components. The “power of intervention” additionally allows us to address the presence of confounders in unobserved user interactions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution in learning the communication graph of well-known microservice application benchmarks. We also show the efficacy of the solution on a downstream task of fault localization in which the learned graph indeed helps to localize faults at runtime in a production environment (in which the location of the fault is unknown). Additionally, we briefly discuss the implementation and deployment status of a fault injection framework which incorporates the developed technology.

In today’s IT environment with a growing number of costly outages, increasing complexity of the systems, and availability of massive operational data, there is a strengthening demand to effectively leverage Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) towards enhanced resiliency. In this paper, we present an automatic fault injection platform to enable and optimize the generation of data needed for building AI/ML models to support modern IT operations. The merits of our platform include the ease of use, the possibility to orchestrate complex fault scenarios and to optimize the data generation for the modeling task at hand. Specifically, we designed a fault injection service that (i) combines fault injection with data collection in a unified framework, (ii) supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and (iii) does not require programming skills for its use. Our current implementation covers the most common fault types both at the application and infrastructure levels. The platform also includes some AI capabilities. In particular, we demonstrate the interventional causal learning capability currently available in our platform. We show how our system is able to learn a model of error propagation in a micro-service application in a cloud environment (when the communication graph among micro-services is unknown and only logs are available) for use in subsequent applications such as fault localization.

In this work we present MTEX-CNN, a novel explainable convolutional neural network architecture which can not only be used for making predictions based on multivariate time series data, but also for explaining these predictions. The network architecture consists of two stages and utilizes particular kernel sizes. This allows us to apply gradient based methods for generating saliency maps for both the time dimension and the features. The first stage of the architecture explains which features are most significant to the predictions, while the second stage explains which time segments are the most significant. We validate our approach on two use cases, namely to predict rare server outages in the wild, as well as the average energy production of photovoltaic power plants based on a benchmark data set. We show that our explanations shed light over what the model has learned. We validate this by retraining the network using the most significant features extracted from the explanations and retaining similar performance to training with the full set of features.