Incident Management Interview Questions and Answers

Today, we have prepared for you the top 35+ Incident Management Interview Questions and Answers (2022). This article will be useful for both hiring managers and candidates preparing for an Incident Manager job interview. It will be also helpful for all those who plan to work in IT support following ITIL best practices (service desk agents, IT technicians, administrators, developers, etc.).

Incident Management Interview Questions

What is an Incident?

An unplanned interruption in an IT service or reduction in quality of an IT service is known as an Incident.

Share some common incident examples?

Below are some common incident examples which happen in the organization.

1. A user wants to print but due to toner/ink or misconfiguration, the user is unable to use the printer is logged as an incident.
2. A user is unable to send and receive an email, due to an exchange server issue.
3. A laptop is crashed or unable to run some basic application.
4. The user is unable to connect to VPN.
5. The user is unable to connect to WIFI.
6. The user is unable to authenticate through the active directory.
7. Every company runs some server and some applications are running on them, due to an issue in the server application is down.

What is ITIL?

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a framework that provides best practices, guidance, and practical examples for delivering and managing IT services.

What is incident management in ITIL?

ITIL incident management is a process or practice to restore services as soon as possible. It can be reported by users through emails, telephone, chat, by technical personal, IT support person and it can be detected through any monitoring tools.

What is the difference between an incident and a service request?

• A service request is an orderable item that is predefined whereas an incident is unpredictable and unexpected.
• A service request is usually not bound by time frame, expectations are there (10 days to deliver a laptop) whereas incidents that are for IT services are SLA bound (unless it is a question or query).
• Reset a password (Service Request) vs user is unable to authenticate by AD (Incident).
• Service requests are usually less critical whereas incidents are more critical.

Service Request Interview Questions

What is the difference between an incident and a problem?

A problem is originated when recurring incidents happen or unresolvable incidents or any incident which provides a workaround and not a permanent fix. An incident is a single event that causes service destruction.

Incidents are much more focused on solving the issue, however, the problem is focused to find the root cause of the issue and then resolving it.

What are Incident templates?

There are prefilled templates or forms to register an incident, this functionality is useful for service desks or support teams to register faster incidents while on a call from a user.

ServiceNow Interview Questions

What is the priority?

Priority is measured by combining a matrix of impact and urgency, this helps a support team to understand what actions in the required time to be taken to solve the issue. Service level agreements are also designed based on priority and are often used to measure KPIs.

What are impact and urgency and how they are measured?

The impact is defined or measured by the effect of an Incident on the business. The impact can be low, medium-high and can be determined based on the Incident. For example, if an email server is down for one user then the impact is low and if the email server is down for whole company users then the impact is high. Determined how many users are affected and which business is affected.

Urgency is to be measured how important this incident be solved and importance for the business, an incident may have a high impact and may have low urgency it all depends on the business.

Project Manager Interview Questions

What do you understand by a workaround?

The workaround is a temporary solution to reduce the impact of the incident and which can be later investigated as a problem to find the root cause and permanent fix. The workaround is also done when we have a known error and a permanent fix is not yet found.

What is the importance of incident management?

• Restore the service and normal operations as soon as possible.
• Increase continuous delivery.
• The resolution, workaround for an Incident.
• Deliver service level agreement and provide quality service and service availability.
• Increase user satisfaction and trust.
• Higher productivity and efficiency.
• Improve documentation and analysis and provide reporting.

Share some examples of incident management KPI’s.

1. Average response time
2. First, call resolution rate
3. Average resolution time
4. SLA compliance rate
5. Percentage of major incidents
6. End-user satisfaction rates

Define self-recovery.

Self-recovery is an incident resolution type when the system has automatically restored or resolve the issue.

Define known errors.

Known errors are the issues that do not have a permanent fix but have a known root cause.

What is a dashboard and how to utilize it in incident management?

The dashboard shows the quick real-time insight of the incident reports which can be analyzed and then based on the data quick action can be taken to manage incidents resolution to adhere to service level agreement.

What is the main objective of the incident management process?

 

How to handle re-occurrent incidents?

Incidents, by nature, are unpredictable. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be prepared for them. Having a plan in place to deal with re-occurring incidents can help you resolve them more quickly and efficiently. Here are a few tips on how to handle re-occurrent incidents:

• First, identify the root cause of the incident. Is there a particular trigger that sets it off? If so, try to avoid or remove that trigger if possible.
• Second, document the steps you took to resolve the incident so that you can refer back to them if it happens again.
• Third, keep track of any trends in the incident (e.g., does it happen more often at certain times of day or week?) and take steps to address them.

 

What is business impact analysis?

What is incident escalation?

What is a major incident?

What is an alert?

Share the process involved in the incident management lifecycle?

When the incident can be resolved?

What is the difference between incident resolution and incident closure?

How to prevent incidents from happening in the first place?

Is it possible to re-open a resolved incident and, if yes, in what circumstances?

How does ITIL help in an event or service disruption?

Is it possible to relate an incident with another record, for example, a problem? If yes. How would you do it?

How do you know when to implement an incident management system?

Why is an effective incident response important?

Do you know any incident management best practices?

ITIL Certifications

Incident Manager Interview Questions

How much experience do you have in the incident management process?

What was the most complex incident management process you have handled?

Which incident management software systems you have worked on?

How do you handle incident escalations?

It was the last of our 30+ Incident Management Interview Questions which we prepared for you today. We hope that this article was useful.

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