Problem Management use case

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Problem Management use case

    Problem Management aims to prevent problems and minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be avoided. It enables you to capture and track affected configuration items (CIs) to maintain records of updates, repairs, swaps, or retirements. By managing assets systematically, you can identify their locations, usage, and changes over time. The dependency view helps you understand the relationships between CIs affected by a problem.

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    Key Features

    • Impact Understanding: Assess the impact of problems on services and offerings using the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) within the Common Service Data Model (CSDM).
    • Dynamically Routing Problems: Identify impacted services related to a problem for efficient resolution.
    • Service Subscriptions: Utilize related lists to determine who has access to services and may be affected during an outage, including subscriptions by company, department, group, location, and user.
    • Business and Technology Management Offerings: Leverage offerings to identify business and technical approvers based on criticality and assignment groups.
    • Environment Management: Differentiate between production and non-production environments using the environment attribute for clarity in problem management.

    Key Outcomes

    Implementing Problem Management leads to a structured approach for identifying impacted configuration items and determining root causes. Follow these steps for effective usage:

    • Populate the Configuration Item attribute on the Problem form with the affected CI.
    • (Optional) Utilize Service and Service Offering attributes to refine the CI selection process.
    • (Optional) Use the Affected CI related list to identify potential causes of the problem.

    The Problem Management use case is described in this section.

    Problem Management is used to prevent problems and the occurrence of resulting incidents. It also aims at eliminating recurring incidents and minimizing the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented. With Problem Management, you can capture information on affected configuration items (CIs), with type as asset, in a problem to keep a record of the updated, repaired, swapped, or retired configuration items. By keeping track of the assets, you can identify the location of the assets, their usage and when the assets were changed. Using Problem Management, you to monitor and manage the assets in your company using a systematic approach.

    If a configuration item (CI) has resulted in a problem, use the dependency view to identify other configuration items (CIs) affected by the CI that caused the problem. You can then associate affected configuration items (CIs) with a problem record to find out how the problem affects other CIs with dependent relationships.

    Key features of the Problem Management use case

    The CMDB, when used by the CSDM framework, provides value to Problem Management in the following ways:
    • Understand the impact of the problem on services and service offerings.​
    • Dynamically route problems.
    • Identify one or more impacted services to address the problem.​

    CSDM data elements available for use by Problem Management.

    The CSDM data elements used in Problem Management are:

    1. Subscription: Related lists on service offerings that identify who has access to the offering and thus might be impacted in an outage. A problem can identify impact using the subscribed by tables. The related lists are as follows:
      • Service Subscriptions by Company [service_subscribe_company]
      • Service Subscriptions by Department [service_subscribe_department]
      • Service Subscriptions by Group [service_subscribe_sys_user_grp]
      • Service Subscriptions by Location [service_subscribe_location]
      • Service Subscriptions by User [service_subscribe_sys_user]
    2. Business service offering might be used by problems to provide the business approver based on approval_group and business_criticality. A business service may have multiple offerings, each with a different criticality.
    3. Technology management offerings might be used by problems to provide the technical approver approval_group and technical assignment group on the attribute assignment_group.
    4. Service instance may be used to provide prod and non-prod (DEV, QA, UAT, and so on) environments. Non-prod environments may be filtered out if desired. The legacy used_for attribute maps to the environment attribute. You should use the environment attribute.
      Note:
      Some service offerings may identify the environment of the offering as well.

    Results of the Problem Management use case

    The CSDM framework provides Problem Management context for problems on what CIs may be involved.

    To determine the impact and root cause, compete the following steps:
    1. Populate the Configuration Item attribute on the Problem form, configuration_item, with the CI item or service affected.
    2. (Optional) Use the Service and Service Offering attributes on the Problem form to help narrow down the list of configuration items to choose from. This feature is not available with the base system and needs additional configuration.
    3. (Optional) Use the Affected CI related list to identify the CIs that may have caused the problem.