What is the difference between incident and problem management?

Incident management restores service; problem management removes the cause. In ITIL terms an incident is an unplanned interruption or degradation, and incident management ends when service is back, whether or not anyone knows why it failed. A problem is the underlying cause of one or more incidents, and problem management ends when the cause is identified, recorded as a known error, and either worked around or permanently fixed. Root cause analysis is a problem management activity. Most enterprises are well staffed for incidents and thinly staffed for problems, which is why the same outage tends to recur and why the RCA document is usually late.