So, why are Incident Management and Problem Management different processes? Are all service requests incidents? Is a planned downtime within the scope of Incident Management? We shall answer these questions before proceeding.
An incident is defined as any unplanned interruption to an IT Service or reduction in the quality of an IT Service. Failure of a configuration item that has not yet impacted service is also an incident. Hence, any planned downtime will not be qualified as an incident, but failure of a disk from a mirror set, which might not have impacted service yet, will be an incident. Incident Management, therefore, is the process for dealing with all incidents.
The primary goal of the Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation (as defined to be within SLA limits) as quickly as possible and to minimize the adverse impact on business operations...