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Problem Management

The mission of the problem management process is to minimize the number of incidents. The Problem Management module supports this goal by managing problem investigations, known errors, and solution database entries. Problem management can proactively prevent the occurrence of incidents, errors, and additional problems.

Problem investigation

An important ITIL objective is investigating and resolving problems in a continuing effort to cut costs and improve services. A problem investigation helps an IT organization get to the root cause of incidents.

It initiates actions that help to improve or correct the situation, preventing the incident from recurring. For example, if computers are running low on disk space, ideally the problem can be resolved before it becomes an incident.
Problem investigations are usually triggered by either an incident review or by an application such as BMC Event Manager. BMC Event Manager can generate an event about a capacity threshold being reached. This might cause the problem coordinator to create a problem investigation to prevent a capacity shortage from causing outages.

After a problem investigation identifies the cause, this information can result in:

  • A known error, which describes the root cause as well as the proposed structural solution to remove the root cause
  • A solution entry that describes how to work around the issue

Known error

A known error is a problem that has been successfully diagnosed and for which a permanent solution has been proposed.

After the root cause analysis of a problem investigation is completed and a structural solution has been proposed, a known error is created to request that the proposed solution is implemented. The implementation of the proposed solution is part of the change management process. A known error process can have one of the following results:

  • A change request to implement the needed fix
  • Closing the known error as an accepted issue, with updates to the knowledge database containing steps to avoid the issue

Solution database

The solutions database provides a simple repository of potential solutions or workarounds to infrastructure issues. A solution database entry contains information that might be required to provide or restore a service.

The data from the solutions database becomes input into a full knowledge management system with the use of the Remedy Knowledge Management application.

For more information about Remedy Knowledge Management, see the BMC Knowledge Management documentation.

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