IT Service Management (ITSM)
Overview
The workflows an IT department uses to support the business: handling outages and requests (Incident Management), finding and fixing root causes (Problem Management), and making changes safely (Change Management). This is the most common entry point into ServiceNow and the family with the deepest GlideFast delivery experience.
Modules in this family
- Incident Management — restore service fast when something breaks
- Major Incident Management — coordinated response for the big ones
- Problem Management — stop repeat incidents at the root
- Change Management — make changes without breaking things
- On-Call Scheduling — who answers when it breaks at 2am
(Further ITSM capabilities — request management, service catalog, SLM, knowledge — to be ingested in later batches.)
Modules in this family
Change Management
A controlled way to modify anything that could impact an IT service — updating a server, deploying an application, swapping network gear. Each change gets assessed for risk, approved by the right people, scheduled to avoid collisions, and reviewed afterward. The goal isn't bureaucracy; it's making beneficial changes with minimum disruption.
Incident Management
The system your IT team uses when something breaks: a user reports it (or a monitoring tool detects it), the right team gets it, works it, and restores service as fast as possible. An "incident" is simply an unplanned interruption or degradation of a service — from "my laptop won't start" to "email is down for everyone."
Major Incident Management
A dedicated response process for the incidents that hurt: highest impact, many users, crucial services down. It adds what a regular ticket can't — a coordinated response team, structured stakeholder communications ("here's what we know, next update at 3pm"), and a post-incident review so the organization actually learns from the event.
On-Call Scheduling
Schedules, rotations, and escalation rules that answer one question reliably: *who gets contacted right now when a critical system breaks?* When an incident lands, ServiceNow works out who is on shift, notifies them, and automatically escalates to the next person if nobody acknowledges.
Problem Management
Where Incident Management fixes the symptom, Problem Management finds and eliminates the cause. When the same thing keeps breaking, a "problem" record tracks the investigation into why, documents the temporary workaround so every technician knows it, and drives a permanent fix.
Official docs: IT Service Management ↗