There’s strong interest in applying AIOps, which stands for Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, as the forces of digital business transformation weigh in on large corporations. Today, many IT professionals believe that AIOps will lead to several strategic benefits. These include increased efficiency, faster remediation, reduced operational complexity, and importantly, improved user experience.

Machine learning is powerful, and the results we see from deep-learning papers are typically impressive. But can we be confident enough in them to make business decisions that have real, monetary outcomes? For any type of isolated tasks, such as learning to detect a face in an image, or classify a credit card transaction as fraudulent or not, or classify a frequently rebooting device as defective, we can usually construct the relevant low-level features (e.g., pixels, filters, zip codes, vendors, reboots, URLs) and solve the problem using conventional machine learning techniques.