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In ITIL, a problem is the cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents. Incident management restores service quickly; problem management investigates why it broke and removes the cause so it doesn’t come back. Once the cause and a workaround are known, the problem becomes a known error. Set a ticket’s to Problem to track that investigation as its own piece of work.

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When to use Problem

Open a Problem ticket when you need to find and fix a cause, not just restore service:
  • The same incident keeps coming back, such as VPN drops every Monday morning
  • A major incident is resolved with a workaround, and the root cause still needs work
  • A trend in your reports points at an underlying fault, such as rising printer errors on one floor
  • You want to record a known error and its workaround for the team
Keep reporting each outage or failure as an incident. The Problem ticket sits alongside them and owns the investigation.

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Set the Problem type

In the web app

  • Set Problem as the default type on the for this kind of request, such as an internal “Problem investigation” form. See Configure default types.
  • Change the Type property on a ticket, or select several tickets in a list and update their type with a bulk action.
Ask Copilot to set or change the type on a ticket you’re looking at, or to find tickets of this type.

Reclassify a ticket with Copilot.

  • Add an that sets the type, for example: “If the user describes an issue that keeps recurring, set type to Problem.”
  • Set Type in a workflow’s Create Ticket or Update Ticket action.

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Put Problem tickets to work

Connect the incidents

Link the affected tickets to the Problem ticket so the investigation has the full history. Use ticket relations to make them child tickets of the problem, or make the Problem ticket the incident tracker when you also want status, priority, and replies to reach every affected requester. Being a tracker is separate from type, so a tracker can stay a Problem.
Break the root cause analysis into tasks with owners, and apply a task template if you run the same steps for every problem.
When you find the cause and a workaround, generate a knowledge article from the ticket so agents and the AI agent can answer the next report straight away.
Save a view filtered to Type is Problem for regular problem reviews, and track how long problems stay open in analytics.
Learn more about ticket types
Last modified on November 12, 2026