Incident Management can be utilized to manage any event which disrupts, or has the potential to disrupt an IT service and associated business processes. Careful distinction needs to be made between the role of Event Management and Incident Management, as only events that indicate exception to normal service operation and are determined by the Event Correlation engine to be significant are escalated to Incident Management. This means that incident records may be generated as a result of:
* End users calling the Service Desk to notify of a disruption to their normal use of IT services
* Events representing an exception that are resolved using automated means, with an associated incident record also being generated for informational purposes
* An IT staff member noticing that a component of the IT infrastructure is behaving abnormally, despite no current impact on the end user community
* An end user logging an incident using self help means, which is then resolved by IT operations staff
* An external supplier observes that a portion of the IT infrastructure under their control is experiencing issues, and logs an incident ticket via email.
While the process of Request Fulfillment does typically operate in a similar fashion to Incident Management, a service request does not involve any (potential) disruption to an IT service.