Incident Vs Problem

What’s an incident?

An incident is an unplanned interruption of a system or malfunction of a portion of a service that has not yet affected operation” Let’s find another instance of an incident: a database crashed causing a business disruption. If a database is only used during office hours and the crash occurred after office hours otherwise, as described in ITIL, it is not an accident as no service was affected. It would be an incident only if it extends to hours of use.

On the other hand, if the disruption is planned, for example, a scheduled maintenance, it would not be an incident.

What’s a problem?

A problem is a state of a number of incidents involving or having common problems. It means it is more serious than an accident and needs specific, deeper-level follow-up to avoid future accidents.

Problems aren’t incidents. An incident may pose a problem in cases where there is a high likelihood of the incident happening again.

Problem management role is charged with determining the underlying causal variable that may involve multiple incidents. It may take several incidents before problem management has enough data to understand the root cause. Once problem management identifies the factor and develops a work-around, the problem becomes a “known error.” Incident vs problem management involves fixing the system and restoring service as soon as possible. While managing a problem, finding the underlying root causes does not reoccur.
An incident must be fixed within a specified timeline. Problems can continue indefinitely until an incident occurs.

The Incident Management Lifecycle’s goal is to restore service as quickly as possible to meet service-level agreements. The process is primarily user-focused. Example: Healthcare incident management is curated to investigate each incident with a detailed Root Cause Analysis using various tools like Ishikawa and 5 Why.

Hospital incident management is beneficial for hospital to perform infection control and prevent an issue from snowballing or happening again for efficient incident management.

Problem management deals with solving one or more accidents. The emphasis on problem management to solve the root cause of errors and finding permanent solutions. This process deals with enterprise-level.