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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has demonstrated superhuman capabilities in solving a significant number of tasks, leading to widespread industrial adoption. For in-field network-management application, AI-based solutions, however, have often risen skepticism among practitioners as their internal reasoning is not exposed and their decisions cannot be easily explained, preventing humans from trusting and even understanding them. To address this shortcoming, a new area in AI, called Explainable AI (XAI), is attracting the attention of both academic and industrial researchers. XAI is concerned with explaining and interpreting the internal reasoning and the outcome of AI-based models to achieve more trustable and practical deployment. In this work, we investigate the application of XAI for network management, focusing on the problem of automated failure-cause identification in microwave networks. We first introduce the …