Why is incident management important?

It reduces downtime, improves response time, and ensures IT services are restored quickly and consistently.

What Is Incident Management? A Full Introduction

Q: What is incident management?

Incident management is the IT process for identifying, logging, prioritizing, investigating, and resolving incidents that disrupt normal service.

Incident management is the process IT teams use to identify, log, categorize, investigate, and resolve incidents that disrupt normal operations. This beginner-friendly introduction explains how the process works and why it is essential for reducing downtime in modern IT environments.

What Counts as an Incident?

An incident is any unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service. Examples include application outages, email not working, login failures, network interruptions, or degraded performance. The goal of incident management is to restore service as quickly as possible.

How the Incident Management Process Works

Most teams follow a structured workflow to ensure issues are handled systematically:

1. Identification: The issue is detected by users or monitoring systems.
2. Logging: A ticket is created with context, timestamps, and impact details.
3. Categorization & Prioritization: IT determines urgency and business impact.
4. Investigation: Agents troubleshoot the issue or collect required data.
5. Resolution: The issue is fixed, and services are restored.
6. Closure: The ticket is documented and formally closed.

Why Incident Management Matters

Structured incident handling helps organizations minimize business disruption, improve response times, and create predictable IT operations. It also provides valuable data for trend analysis and problem management.

Industry Perspective

According to Atlassian, incident management requires clear processes, communication channels, and well-defined roles to maintain service reliability.

Learn the Basics of IT Service Management

For a broader understanding of ITSM principles, you can explore ITSM background information on Wikipedia.

How TicketingNext Supports Incident Management

TicketingNext offers automation rules, SLA-driven escalation, smart routing, and analytics designed to help IT teams resolve incidents quickly. Explore more on our TicketingNext features page or review our support use cases.

If you want help setting up your incident workflows, you can contact our team.