Incident Management: How It Works

Incident management is the process for receiving, logging and resolving disruptions to IT services. An incident is anything that stops a service from working as it should – a system that is down, a login that fails, or a print job that will not go through.

The goal is simple but critical: restore service as quickly as possible and keep the impact on the business as small as you can. The lasting cause can wait – that is handled in problem management. When incident management works, you feel it straight away: shorter outages, fewer frustrated users, and an IT function that stays ahead instead of chasing.

Three terms that are often confused, but that drive the work in very different ways:

• Incident – a disruption happening right now. Something is not working, and the goal is to restore service.
• Problem – the underlying root cause behind one or more incidents. Here you look for why it happens, so the fault does not recur.
• Request – a planned order, such as new access rights, a phone or an account. Nothing is broken; someone wants something delivered.

Keeping them apart matters. If you treat every request as an urgent incident, routine orders eat up the time your real outages need.

A well-designed incident process follows the same path every time, regardless of who receives the ticket:

1. Log – capture the incident with all the relevant details: who is affected, what happened and when. Everything is recorded in one place so nothing slips through the cracks.
2. Categorise – sort the incident under the right service or area so it reaches the right team and stays searchable for the future.
3. Prioritise – assess how urgent and how widespread the disruption is. The priority decides the order in which tickets are handled and which SLA applies.
4. Escalate or resolve – handle the incident at first line where possible, otherwise escalate to the right specialist. Many tickets can be resolved straight away using known solutions in the knowledge base.
5. Close and document – confirm with the user that the service is restored, close the ticket and document the solution. What you document today makes the next similar incident faster to resolve.

Priority is usually set from two factors: how many people are affected (impact) and how urgent it is (urgency). A service that is down for the whole company outweighs a single issue for one user.

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the agreement that defines the time within which an incident should be responded to and resolved, often broken down by priority. The SLA makes expectations clear on both sides and gives you numbers to manage by.

A major incident is a serious, high-impact disruption – a critical system down, many users affected. It follows a separate, faster track with clear coordination and ongoing communication until the situation is under control.

An ITSM system like Freshservice supports the whole chain: automatic categorisation and prioritisation, SLA tracking with reminders, a knowledge base for quick solutions, and a dedicated track for major incidents. Scaly introduces the process and the tool tailored to your organisation.