As defined by ITIL an ‘Incident’ is an unplanned disruption or reduction in quality of service and a ‘Problem’ is the underlying thing that caused the Incident. They are obviously related and there are endless pages on the internet going into incident and problem management as part of ITSM, so we won’t delve into this topic in any detail.

The key issue is resolving the incidents themselves isn’t always enough, you need to get to the route cause of the problem.

For example an Incident for “Database transaction log is full” could be fixed by clearing out the transaction log. But, if you’re getting many Incidents for the same thing, over a short period of time, there is clearly an underlying problem. In ITIL (and in ServiceNow), this means you will want to raise a Problem to find out the route cause and fix things, for example, in this case a fix might involve increasing transaction log size or finding out why there is more to log than before.

In ServiceNow you can manually associate a problem with an Incident but if you are looking to do this programmatically, the short function below allows you to quickly associate an Incident by its number to a Problem record by its number.

This is a server-side function and can be used in business rules to help track root cause analysis.