Incident management and problem management solve different questions and get conflated constantly. Incident management asks how do we restore service right now, and closes the ticket the moment the symptom is gone. Problem management asks why does this keep happening, and it's a question that has no place inside an active incident because answering it properly takes longer than the business can tolerate being down.
The gap most IT teams fall into is never doing the second half. A server that restarts every Friday gets restarted every Friday, forever, because each incident is individually resolved quickly and nobody has been given the time or the mandate to ask why it keeps happening. The recurring cost — in engineer time, in the risk of it happening during a moment that actually matters — never gets weighed against the cost of investigating properly, because it's spread thin across many small incidents rather than showing up as one visible number.
The trigger that works is a threshold: any incident category recurring more than a stated number of times in a period automatically opens a problem record, separate from the incident tickets, with its own owner and no expectation of same-day resolution. This removes the decision of whether an issue deserves investigation from individual judgement — which under pressure always favours closing the ticket — and makes it a rule.
Root cause analysis doesn't need to be elaborate to be useful. A short, honest account of what actually happened, traced back past the immediate trigger to the underlying condition, is worth more than a formal five-whys template followed mechanically. What matters is that the analysis produces a specific fix with an owner, not a report that gets filed and never actioned — a problem record that closes with 'monitoring for recurrence' and no actual change made has usually just deferred the same incident to next quarter.
