ITIL4F The ITIL Service Value System Practice Question
You are the IT service manager for a medium-sized e-commerce company that processes online orders. The company uses a three-tier application architecture: a web server, an application server, and a database server. Recently, the company has been experiencing intermittent service degradation during peak hours (12:00-14:00 and 18:00-20:00), causing slow page loads and occasional timeouts. The monitoring system shows that CPU utilization on the application server spikes to 95% during these periods, while the web server and database server remain below 60%. The incident management team has been opening multiple tickets for the same issue, but each ticket is resolved by restarting the application server, which temporarily restores performance. The problem management team has been assigned to investigate the root cause. They have discovered that a recent software update to the application introduced a memory leak that gradually consumes resources until the server becomes overloaded. The development team has identified a fix but needs two weeks to fully test and deploy it. Meanwhile, the business is losing revenue due to poor performance. Which of the following actions should the problem management team take FIRST?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often choose Option A (root cause analysis) because they confuse the problem management process with incident management, failing to recognize that the root cause is already known and the priority is to restore service with a workaround first.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Implement a workaround, such as scheduling a restart of the application server every hour during peak times.
The problem management team should first implement a workaround to restore service and minimize business impact while the permanent fix is being developed. Restarting the application server every hour during peak times directly addresses the memory leak symptom by freeing accumulated memory, preventing CPU saturation at 95% and avoiding timeouts. This aligns with ITIL 4's guidance to apply a workaround as an interim measure when a known error exists and a fix is pending.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Conduct a root cause analysis to fully understand the memory leak.
Why it's wrong here
Conducting a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a core activity of Problem Management, aimed at identifying the underlying cause of an incident to prevent recurrence. While crucial for long-term stability and preventing future incidents, RCA is not the immediate priority during active incident management, which focuses on restoring service as quickly as possible. The question implies an active incident where the immediate goal is service restoration, not deep investigation into the already known memory leak.
- ✓
Implement a workaround, such as scheduling a restart of the application server every hour during peak times.
Why this is correct
Implementing a workaround, such as scheduled restarts, directly addresses the immediate impact of the memory leak by temporarily freeing up resources and restoring service functionality. This aligns perfectly with the primary objective of Incident Management: to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible, minimizing business disruption. A workaround provides a temporary solution, allowing time for Problem Management to identify and deploy a permanent fix without ongoing service degradation.
- ✗
Increase the application server's CPU capacity to handle the load.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the application server's CPU capacity would not resolve a memory leak, as the issue stems from inefficient memory utilization, not a lack of processing power. A memory leak causes the application to consume increasing amounts of RAM until exhaustion, leading to performance degradation and eventual crashes, regardless of CPU availability. This action merely delays the inevitable impact by providing more resources for the leak to consume, failing to address the fundamental problem.
- ✗
Escalate the incident to the service desk for faster resolution.
Why it's wrong here
Escalating the incident to the service desk is inappropriate because the service desk is typically the initial point of contact for users reporting incidents, not a higher-level technical resolution group for complex issues. For a known technical problem like a memory leak, the incident would likely already be with a technical support team or specialist. Escalation usually involves moving the incident to a higher technical tier or management for specialized expertise or decision-making, not back to the front line.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This ITIL4F practice question is part of Courseiva's free PeopleCert certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ITIL4F exam.