Helpdesk Concepts

Incident Management

Definition

Incident management is the process of detecting, logging, and resolving unplanned disruptions to a service as quickly as possible, with the goal of restoring normal operation and minimizing impact on users.

Auch bekannt als: incident responseoutage managementITIL incident management

How it works

When something breaks — an outage, degraded performance, a failed login — an incident is logged, categorized, and prioritized (often by combining impact and urgency in a priority matrix). It's assigned to the right team, worked toward a fix or workaround, and closed once service is restored.

Major incidents follow a heavier path: an incident commander, a status page, stakeholder comms, and a post-incident review (or postmortem) to prevent recurrence. Incident management focuses on restoring service; finding the underlying cause is problem management's job.

Why it matters

A clear incident process is the difference between a chaotic scramble and a coordinated recovery. It reduces mean time to resolution, keeps affected customers informed, and produces the record needed to learn from failures.

In support, incidents also drive ticket spikes: when a system goes down, related tickets flood in. Linking them to the incident — and proactively updating customers — prevents duplicate work and reduces inbound volume.

Häufig gefragt

What is the difference between incident management and problem management?

Incident management restores service fast (fix the symptom); problem management investigates and eliminates the root cause so the incident doesn't happen again.

What is a major incident?

A high-impact disruption — often a full outage or one affecting many users — that triggers escalated coordination, dedicated ownership, and formal communication until service is restored.

Incident Management

How it works

Why it matters

Häufig gefragt

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