ITIL, ITSM and incident management. What are they and how do they fit together?

ITSM (IT Service Management) is an umbrella term for all the activities an IT team does to manage and improve the end-to-end delivery of its IT services. ITIL, on the other hand, is a widely accepted set of best practices to deliver ITSM. The ITIL certification provides guidelines on how to implement ITSM activities to the highest possible standard. Incident management is a part of ITIL's "practices" and it involves logging, recording, and resolving unplanned interruptions that disrupt normal delivery of a service. Its goal is to reach incident resolution as quickly as possible so you can resume normal service operation and minimise any negative impact on your business. ITIL 4 doesn't define a prescriptive incident management process but provides some core principles for incident management practice activities, including designing an incident management practice that reacts differently to different incident types based on the impact, prioritising incidents, agreeing classifications and timescales to response with customers up front, and using an incident management tool for logging and managing incidents. Incident management differs from Problem management as it refers to finding the root cause of one or more incidents after they have been resolved and usual operations have been restored. The purpose of problem management is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents and managing workarounds and known errors. Incident.io helps teams meet ITIL best practice standards for an incident management process, providing features such as response foundations, incident types, escalation, and communications. It also facilitates the integration of Incident Management and Problem Management by capturing all incident activities in a dashboard to help identify recurring pain points and prioritize areas for more permanent solutions.