What is Incident Management?

Incident management is the IT service management process for restoring normal service as quickly as possible after an unplanned disruption, called an incident, such as an outage, a broken laptop, or an application error. The priority is speed of recovery and limiting business impact, even if that means a temporary workaround rather than a permanent fix.

The typical flow is log, categorise, prioritise, assign, resolve, and close, with SLA timers and escalation keeping urgent issues moving. It is distinct from problem management, which investigates the underlying root cause so the same incidents stop recurring; incident management asks how do we get working again now, while problem management asks why did this happen. A helpdesk supports this with prioritised tickets, SLAs, escalations, and a knowledge base of known fixes.