---
Title: "What Is Incident Management? Process and Steps"
Url: "https://computer.io/glossary/incident-management"
Topic: "ITSM"
Description: "Incident management is the process of responding to unplanned disruptions to restore normal service quickly. Steps, roles, metrics and incident vs problem."
---

# What is incident management?

Incident management is the process of responding to an unplanned disruption or degradation of a service, such as an outage or error, to restore normal service as quickly as possible and minimize impact on users and the business.

## Steps

1. Detect and log the incident.
2. Categorize and prioritize.
3. Investigate and diagnose.
4. Resolve and recover.
5. Close and communicate.
6. Review lessons learned.

## Incident vs problem

|  | Incident | Problem |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Goal | Restore service | Fix root cause |
| Timing | Now | After or ongoing |

## Metrics

MTTR, number of incidents by severity, and SLA compliance.

## FAQ

### What is an example of an incident?

Email is down for a team, or customers can't log in.

### What is a major incident?

A high-impact incident that needs a dedicated response team.

### How does AI help incident management?

It detects patterns, groups related tickets, suggests fixes and updates users.

## Related terms

- [ITSM (IT service management)](https://computer.io/glossary/itsm)
- [Mean time to resolution (MTTR)](https://computer.io/glossary/mean-time-to-resolution)
- [Swarming (support)](https://computer.io/glossary/swarming)
- [Trouble ticket](https://computer.io/glossary/trouble-ticket)

## How Computer helps

- [Service desk automation](https://devrev.ai/solutions/service-desk-automation)

## Further reading

- [It service desk](https://devrev.ai/blog/it-service-desk)