Identify the problem

If you analyze incident data, you may find more than one incident that describes the same error, or incidents that do not match identified problems or known errors. For example, three separate service desk interactions in a single day report a network outage. The circumstances are similar and the affected Configuration Items are the same. The three incidents generate a problem record that describes the outage.

Ongoing analysis of the infrastructure might also identify a problem that is likely to cause errors in the future. For example, a technician finds a computer virus on the mail server, or the network administrator learns that there is a powerful new virus propagated by e-mail attachments.

When you identify the problem, there is a permanent record that contains information about the affected Configuration Item (CI) and related CIs, as well as the primary and secondary assignment groups who own the problem.