Read the Incident Management Key Concepts.
Important links
Outcomes
As a result of the successful implementation of the Incident Management Process:
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Following interruptions, IT service is rapidly restored
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IT service availability is sustained at a high level
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Workarounds to resolve similar service interruptions are created
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Potential improvements to services may be identified
'Normal service operation' is defined here as working within agreed service level
targets.
Scope
The management of the lifecycle of incidents (including reception, logging, acknowledgement, classification, response,
tracking and reporting) for all components involved in the provision of IT service.
Includes
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Incidents reported by users or discovered within the IT organization by automation or people
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Handling (automatically or with human assistance) of system events that have been identified as incidents by
the Event Management process
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Creation of workarounds
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Whilst service restoration has the highest priority, consideration has to be made of the risk that a
workaround could exacerbate the original incident. For example, certain virus infections might spread
beyond their initial scope if a simple service restoration is put into effect
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Implementation of workarounds (with Change Management, where required by the change policy)
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Participation within the procedures (typically involving several processes working in conjunction) defined for
handling 'major incidents'
Excludes
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Monitoring (Service Execution, Data Management)
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Responding to business-as-usual perturbations in the running of services (Event Management)
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Service requests (Request Fulfillment)
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IT Resilience – ensuring the continued readiness and integrity of the IT services (Resilience category
processes)
Key performance indicators
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Number of incidents opened, closed, and pending (by severity level)
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The elapsed time and direct costs
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In this process domain
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In each process step and between steps
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Percent of incidents closed with automated responses against manual responses
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Percent of incidents closed using existing documentation (known errors)
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Service and infrastructure availability and unavailability
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Value of service and infrastructure availability and unavailability
Relation to other processes
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An incident can be raised by many processes.
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While responding to an incident, it is possible that a change request might be created, which would be handled by
Change Management. In addition, an incident may be raised during the processing
of a change request.
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When a fault is detected by Event Management, an incident may be raised and submitted to Incident
Management. Once the incident is resolved, the incident record is closed and Event Management is
notified.
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Problem Management looks at groups of related incidents to determine if
there is a root cause to those related incidents. During incident closure problems may be raised where there
is an underlying or ongoing problem needing Root Cause Analysis and problem resolution.
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Request Fulfillment is the user-facing process for the Service Desk. When a
request is recognized as an incident, it is routed to Incident Management.
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Incident Management provides CI information to Configuration Management and vice versa. Incident Incident
Management typically uses information from Configuration Management to identify and resolve incidents.
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The resolution of incidents is important to the management of service levels in Service Level Management.
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The resolution of incidents may involve the implementation of changes using Change Management.
For more information
For more information, see Incident Management in the ITIL® documentation.
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