A Service Request is a user request for information or advice, or for a standard change (a pre-approved change that is low risk, relatively common and follows a procedure) or for access to an IT service. Service requests can be both non-chargeable and chargeable depending on your specific support agreement.
A ‘problem’ is the underlying issue that causes one or more incidents.
For example, a user might log a ticket saying: “In Power BI Desktop, I am unable to connect to my data warehouse. I am located in office location A and connected via LAN”. That’s an incident.
It’s only once someone in your IT department has spoken to the user that they can triage the call to determine what the problem is and the resolution.
This is problem management, and it focuses on finding long-term fixes for incidents and ways to prevent them recurring.
Incident management focuses on a quick fix or work around to resolve the incident and buy time for problem management (if needed).
For example, the user can connect to their data warehouse via Wi-Fi from office location A in Power BI Desktop so there is a work around for the user which resolves the incident.
To resolve the problem a change is raised to introduce network changes so that users can connect via LAN from office location A to the data warehouse.