An analyst reviews several months of incident records and notices a repeating pattern of similar failures that had each been resolved individually. Which phase of problem management is this activity part of?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct Problem identification
Correct. Trend analysis of incident records to detect duplicate and recurring issues is a core problem identification activity, alongside input from major incidents, suppliers, and development and test teams.
Not correct Problem control
Problem control begins after a problem has been identified: it analyses the problem and documents workarounds and known errors. The analyst here is still discovering that a problem exists.
Not correct Error control
Error control manages known errors that have already been analysed. Nothing has yet been analysed or recorded as a known error at this point.
Not correct Incident resolution
The individual incidents were already resolved. Looking across them for patterns is problem management work, and it is not a phase of the practice in any case.
Why
Problem management has three phases: problem identification, problem control, and error control. Identification is where problems are found — most commonly by analysing incident records for trends and repeats, but also from major incidents, supplier information, and internal development and test teams.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- Which statement best describes what the incident management practice is intended to achieve? machine-checked
- How is an incident defined in ITIL? machine-checked
- Several incidents are open at once and the support team must decide which to work on first. On what basis should the order be decided? machine-checked
- A difficult incident is worked on by pulling several specialists from different teams into the same session at the same time; once it becomes clear who is best placed to continue, the others step away. What is this technique called? machine-checked
- Why does an organisation define a separate procedure for major incidents rather than handling them exactly like all other incidents? machine-checked
- A support team routinely fixes incidents by phone and updates the incident record only with the word 'fixed'. What is the most significant consequence of this? machine-checked