What is the difference between incident and problem in ServiceNow?

[Hrishabh Kumar]

I am confused between the individuality of Incident and Problem in ServiceNow. I need to know the following things:

1) Definition of Incident and Problem.

2) Difference in Incident and problem.

3) Relation between Incident and Problem.

4) What do end-user create? Incident or Problem.

5) How are the Incident and Problem created and resolved.

[Saurav11 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Let me explain with the below example:-

Let's suppose you work in an organization, and you are using outlook for connectivity, then you face issue while opening the outlook you are not able to connect to the outlook.

Then you will raise this concern to the related team (who is responsible for outlook).----> Incident

The corresponding team will look into it, and try to fix it. If they don't find any root cause for the incident and if they get multiple incidents for the same underlying cause then the incident will be considered as a problem. They will give you some workaround until the root cause is determined.

If multiple users are facing the same issue with the outlook. ----> Problem

Now let me answer your question one by one:-

1) Definition of Incident and Problem.

An incident is something that affects a service (so a user, system, etc) - something that impacts productivity. Generally it is the effect.
A problem is the underlying cause of one or more incidents.

2) Difference in Incident and problem.

In simple words any issue which is affecting only you as a individual is a Incident however if the same issue is affecting a larger audience is a Problem.

3) Relation between Incident and Problem.

Now let suppose 1 user creates a Incident for outlook issue and then 100 of users create an incident with the same issue. So you create a Problem for all the incidents link all 100 incident to one Problem record and solve the issue using the problem. So when you close the problem it will close  all the incident as well.

4) What do end-user create? Incident or Problem.

An end-user by process should create a Incident and the agents who work on Incident should create the problem if they see a recurring pattern on incident.

5) How are the Incident and Problem created and resolved.

They are created by users from Portal using record producer of ITIL users directly in the platform and once the issue is resolved they are closed by the agents.

Please mark my answer as correct based on Impact.

[Saurav11 · Accepted solution]

5) How are the Incident and Problem created and resolved.

They are created by users from Portal using record producer of ITIL users directly in the platform and once the issue is resolved they are closed by the agents.

Please mark my answer as correct based on Impact.