Incident vs Problem
An incident is an unplanned disruption or degradation of service.A problem is a cause of one or more incidents.
To illustrate this further, let's take a practical example.You are driving your car and you got a flat tire. This is an incident because it disrupted the service - transportation to a destination. You fix this by either changing the tire yourself or calling road-side assistance. Once the tire has been changed, the incident is closed. But now, you have a problem - you are running on your spare tire.
To fix the problem, you need to repair the flat tire and put it back.
Another example would be that you are driving on an almost bald tire. This is a problem. If you continue to drive your car with that bald tire, you are bound to have an incident.
Normally, an incident needs to be fixed within a specific timeline. Problems can be left indefinitely until an incident happens.
