Service Support is a major part of IT Service Management. It includes the processes necessary to ensure service quality. These processes manage problems and changes in the IT Infrastructure and are technical in nature.
ITIL service Support forms part of the ITIL Foundation curriculum. ITIL Service Support is made up of the following parts.
Service Desk
The Service Desk is the focus for all service requests and problem reporting. The service desk tracks and escalates procedures. The Service Desk is responsible for sharing information with others regarding planned outages and/or implementation of changes impacting production services.
Incident Management
The focus of Incident Management is the restoration of services following an unplanned outage. IM is a reactive process – it provides guidance on diagnostic and escalation procedures required to quickly restore services. Incidence Management processes are closely integrated with Help Desk, Problem Management
Problem Management
Problem Management identifies the causes of service issues and enacts corrective work to prevent recurrences. Problem Management processes are both reactive (responding to incidents) and proactive (preventing future incidents). Its processes are closely integrated with Incident Management, Change Management and Availability Management.
Configuration Management
Configuration Management is responsible for the collection, archiving and report of individual component specifications. The Configuration Database is a repository of information for the entire enterprise. The Configuration Management database also contains information regarding the relationships and dependencies among infrastructure components.
Because risk assessments must take into consideration all relationships and dependencies, Configuration Management databases are also used by Capacity, Availability and IT Service Continuity Management processes to accurately perform their work.
Change Management
Change Management manages all changes introduced into the IT infrastructure. Change Management teams assess risks of individual changes, use configuration information to identify dependencies and authorize or deny change requests.
The goal of Change Management is to identify functional and performance defects and correct them before they have any negative impact on clients.
Release Management
Release Management functions much like Change Management, but on an enterprise-wide scale. Release Management addresses large-scale changes to the business such as installing a new database or managing widespread changes to a business application. Change Management is concerned with singular changes, while Release Management is concerned with managing a large number of changes that may be introduced simultaneously.