Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Difference between Incident and a problem

Here is an example:

A user's Router hangs and he raises an incident at the help desk. Help desk tells him to reboot and the incident is fixed

A few days later, his Router hangs again and help desk notice that it happened a few days before as well

Service desk raises a problem record, because rebooting the Router only solves the incident temporarily and it does to fix the root cause of whatever is causing the Router to Hang.

The problem record gets assigned to 2nd line support to do root cause analysis on what is causing the Router to hang.

They find that, the problem becomes a known error.

A change request gets raised to install a patch from the vendor of the Router.

If the patch is installed successfully, the problem and all related incidents are resolved.

When the Request reports about an outage or a drop in the Quality of Service, the Request is classified as an Incident. When the request requires a New Service to be setup, it is classified as a New Service Request.

Multiple incidents can also be associated with a single problem.

So all the problems will come to CAB for final analysis and in some cases when an incident is not associated with a problem, CAB has to analyze it & workaround for solution, before it become a problem. This should be CAB’s proactive approach/role.

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