Glossary / ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)
ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)
A widely-adopted framework of best practices for IT service management — organizing work like incident, problem, and change management into a consistent, repeatable structure rather than ad hoc firefighting.
ITIL organizes IT operations into a set of defined processes with specific vocabulary: an incident (something's broken, restore service) is handled differently from a problem (the underlying root cause of one or more incidents) and again from a change (a planned modification to an environment, run through a controlled process specifically so it doesn't become the next incident). Distinguishing those three is arguably ITIL's most-copied idea, adopted by teams that have never read the framework itself.
The framework has gone through several major versions — ITIL v3 (2011) is still the version most practitioner certifications and legacy process design reference, while ITIL 4 (2019) reoriented around value streams and a more flexible, less rigidly prescriptive service-management model, better suited to teams also running agile or DevOps practices.
For an MSP, full ITIL adoption is usually overkill — the framework was built for large enterprise IT departments — but its core concepts (a defined incident-to-problem-to-change lifecycle, a record of what's actually deployed, formal change control) scale down well and show up, often unnamed, in any mature MSP's ticketing and change process.
How Nexus handles this
Nexus's PSA keeps tickets and the devices they're about in the same tenant-isolated record, which is the same incident-to-asset relationship ITIL formalizes — without requiring an MSP to reconcile a separate configuration database by hand.
More terms
MSP (Managed Service Provider)
A company that remotely manages a client's IT infrastructure and end-user systems on an ongoing, proactive basis — usually a flat-fee contract, not break-fix billing.
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)
Software that lets an MSP monitor device health and perform remote management tasks — patching, scripting, remote control — across every client site from one console.
PSA (Professional Services Automation)
Software that runs the business side of MSP operations — ticketing, SLAs, billing, contracts, and client records — the system of record most MSP work flows through.
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