Introduction
ITIL provides the definition of incident and service request.
Explanation
Service Request
A service request is a request from a customer for information, advice, for a standard change, and/or access to an IT service.
Incident
An incident is an unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service.
It can also be a failure or reduction in quality of something that has not yet impacted IT service but has the potential to impact it. For instance, a failure of something for which a redundancy exists is still an incident.
Incidents may come to the attention of IT staff because they were:
- recognized by technical staff,
- detected and reported by event monitoring tools,
- communicated by customers, or
- reported by third-party suppliers and partners.