How do incident management and problem management differ?

How do incident management and problem management differ?

• A. Incident management restores service quickly; problem management identifies root causes to prevent recurrence.
• B. Incident management finances budgets; problem management handles user requests.
• C. Incident management does change planning; problem management deploys releases.
• D. Incident management only for security incidents; problem management only for outages.

Answer: (A)

The main idea is to distinguish goals and focus: incident management aims to get the service back up quickly after a disruption, while problem management seeks out the underlying cause to prevent future incidents. Incident management prioritizes rapid restoration, often using workarounds to minimize user impact and downtime. Problem management goes deeper to analyze root causes, identify trends, and implement permanent fixes or known errors to reduce or prevent recurrence. That’s why the best answer pairs quick recovery with root-cause prevention. The other options mix in activities that belong to budgeting, user requests, change/release processes, or security-only scenarios, which aren’t the core functions of incident or problem management.

The main idea is to distinguish goals and focus: incident management aims to get the service back up quickly after a disruption, while problem management seeks out the underlying cause to prevent future incidents. Incident management prioritizes rapid restoration, often using workarounds to minimize user impact and downtime. Problem management goes deeper to analyze root causes, identify trends, and implement permanent fixes or known errors to reduce or prevent recurrence. That’s why the best answer pairs quick recovery with root-cause prevention. The other options mix in activities that belong to budgeting, user requests, change/release processes, or security-only scenarios, which aren’t the core functions of incident or problem management.