Why Log Incidents

Incident logging is critical for IT Service Management for the following reasons:

1. The first and perhaps most obvious reasons is you want to know if there are pending incidents that need to be resolved. When supporting a service, you want to make sure that everything is working as it should. You would not want to miss resolving an incident that would affect say a major service used by your company.

Incident and Problem: What is the Difference

One nice thing about ITIL is it provides definitions for almost everything in IT service management. First things first. We need to define these two terms.

• An incident is an unplanned disruption or degradation of service.
• A problem is a cause of one or more incidents.

Quite often, these two terms are used interchangeably. This causes a lot of confusion. Sometimes people will add another term, "issue" to mean the same thing.