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Incident trending for problem identification

Service Managerfacilitates incident trending for pro-active problem identification. Problem Managers can use charts and dashboards to view historical interactions or incident data.

The charts and dashboards allow sorting by certain incident characteristics which demonstrate relatedness (such as incident rates, related CI, category/area/subarea, and affected service). Therefore, the analyst is able to study the incidents types that occur on certain IT infrastructure or services, to measure both the frequency of those incidents over time and the rate of change (increase/decrease), to pinpoint which CIs/Services experience certain types of issues more frequently, etc.

With this information, Problem Managers can analyze the patterns and trends to draw hypotheses for the incidents and targets. More targeted queries as a result of initial analysis can support Total Quality Control (TQC) methodology that helps progress the investigation from identifying symptoms to uncovering root causes to prevent future incidents.

For example, reporting on historical incident data and determining an increasing trend of downtime incidents related to a particular CI might indicate the need for maintenance or replacement of that CI. An increasing trend of degraded-response-time incidents against a given service might be traced back to a capacity inadequacy on an infrastructure component of that service.

In addition, key information such as Related Incident Counts is associated with a Problem Record. This information can be consolidated in reports showing time-line related trends.