What is incident management?
Also called: IT incident management, incident response
Last updated
Incident management is the process of responding to an unplanned interruption or loss of quality in a service, so that normal service is restored as quickly as possible and the impact is kept small. It covers detecting and logging the incident, assessing its priority, resolving or escalating it, communicating with users and closing it.
In more detail
In ITIL terms, an incident is the disruption itself, while a problem is its underlying cause. Incident management aims for a fast fix, even a workaround; finding and removing the cause is problem management’s job. Keeping the two apart stops the urge to investigate getting in the way of restoring service.
Priority usually comes from impact and urgency, and sets the response and resolution targets. Major incidents get their own procedure: a named incident lead, regular updates to stakeholders and a review afterwards.
Example
Users report the finance system is slow. The service desk logs it as priority 2, the on-call engineer finds a full disk on the database server, clears old logs as a workaround, confirms the system is back to normal and closes the incident, raising a problem record to find out why the logs grew.
Incidents in CheckFlow
In CheckFlow an incident response can run as a checklist started by hand, through the API or from Zapier: the priority chosen in a drop-down shows the steps for that level, halts stop closure until service is confirmed, and a Linked Checklist field can open the problem record.
Related terms
Templates with a live demo
Each one opens as a live checklist you can try without signing up.
Run your next process as a checklist.
Build it once as a template, then run it with owners, due dates and a record of every step.
14-day free trial, no credit cardFull refund in your first 30 daysUS hosting, EU on request