An Incident is any event which is not part of the standard operation of a service and which causes, or may cause, an interruption to, or a reduction in the quality of that service. In Metron, this is known as an ActionLine Query.

The primary goal of the Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.

This includes ensuring that faults are corrected, preventing any recurrence of these faults, and the application of preventative maintenance to reduce the likelihood of these faults occurring in the first instance, as well as implementing any interim bypassing solution.

Incident Management covers the processes used to log, track, manage, escalate and resolve calls (incidents). Thus, if you implement an effective Help Desk, this process is an integral activity in that function.

A request for new or additional service (i.e. software or hardware) is often not regarded as an Incident but as a Request for Change (RFC). Practice shows, however, that handling of both failures in the infrastructure and of service requests are similar, and both are therefore included in the definition and scope of the process of Incident Management.
 
Within the more technically oriented systems-management function, an automatically registered event such as exceeding a disk-usage threshold, is often regarded as part of 'normal' operations. These events are included in the definition of Incidents even though service delivery to Customers is not affected.

However, despite all the definitions of boundaries and dataflows across them, this is the essential initial process of a Help Desk. It may lead on to the raising of a Request for Change (typically to eliminate a "bug" in the software application itself) but typically more frequently it does not.

Applying the 80/20 rule, it may well be that 80% of calls are from the 20% of users who do not understand the application and will not read the manual.