Quality Monitoring and Assessment of Deployed Deep Learning Models for Network AIOps

Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently attracted a lot of attention, transitioning from research labs to a wide range of successful deployments in many fields, which is particularly true for deep learning (DL) techniques. Ultimately, DL models, being software artifacts, need to be regularly maintained and updated: AIOps is the logical extension of the DevOps software development practices to AI software applied to network operation and management. In the life cycle of a DL model deployment, it is important to assess the quality of deployed models, to detect “stale” models and prioritize their update. In this article, we cover the issue in the context of network management, proposing simple but effective techniques for quality assessment of individual inference, and for overall model quality tracking over multiple inferences, that we apply to two use cases, representative of the network management and image recognition fields.