Incidents and Problems

One common doubt is usually there in everyone’s mind related to the IT service field as to what is the difference between an incident and a problem. This doubt is usually there in most of our minds but we generally tend to ignore and don’t ask anyone for the fear of being ridiculed or believe it to be the same thing. We generally use it in a very casual manner as all issues are either an incident or a problem.

However this is far from true as ITIL very clearly specifies the difference between an incident and a problem. Now let’s look at their explanations and clear the air around the same.

An incident is actually a failure of a system or an error in the system like a hard disk failure or a server crash or printer jamming etc. They are actually 1 time events and have standard handling and fixing procedures.

Whereas by contrast a problem arises due to multiple related incidentsand is usually more serious than an incident and needs to be followed up at deeper level to avoid future similar incidents.

A classic example of an incident resolution is taking an aspirin when you get a headache-this guarantees that you do not have the headache anymore but doesn’t guarantee the fact that you wouldn’t have the headache again. While popping an aspirin we never bother to think of why we got the headache in the very first place.

So here the aspirin Is the incident resolution while finding out what caused the headache is classic problem identification and resolution.

The main motto of Incident resolution is to resolve the incident as soon as possible while that of problem resolution is ultimate resolution of the problem and ensure that it doesn’t reoccur again.

Ideally there should be fixed and tight deadline for incident resolution, but none for problem resolution as their mottos and aims are totally different, though their functioning and processes might be similar.