BMC Helix Problem Management policy

The primary objective of Problem Management is to identify the root cause of service-impacting issues and introduce corrective actions to prevent recurrences. Problem Management focuses on reducing the number of incidents; either reactively, by preventing them from recurring, or proactively, before they occur.

• Reactive problem management — analyzing and resolving the causes of incidents.
• Proactive problem management — aims to detect and prevent future problems/incidents. 

Proactive problem management includes the identification of trends or potential weaknesses.

There are several inputs that can trigger the Problem Management process. Examples include:

• Reactive incident management process — a Problem record should be opened when recurring incidents are resolved with a workaround and the root cause was never identified.
• Proactive problem management — Problem records can be opened before an incident occurs. An example of this is when data center monitoring tools send alerts that a storage drive is reaching capacity and service is at risk.
• A proactive Problem record can be opened to replace a drive or purge old data before an incident occurs. 
• Major incident process — a Problem record is opened for all major outages. An example of a major incident is where more than one customer is being impacted for an extended period of time.

See Root Cause Analysis documents for related content.