Service management practices is the second of the three categories of ITIL 4 practices. This group of practices is the largest among the three with 17 of the 34 ITIL 4 practices falling under this category. That is more than half of them already.

Over the last 20 to 30 years, service management practices have been developed in the service management and IT service management industries. As mentioned under ITIL 4, there are 17 practices that are going to be in the service management category. Of these 17 practices, you just need to know six of them in depth, and you need to know four of them at the recall level of the exam. On the exam, you have to be able to understand and explain how change control, incident management, problem management, service desk, service level management, and service request management practices work and function. Also, you need to be able to recall the purposes of IT asset management, monitoring and event management, release management, and service configuration management practices.

After we've covered those first 10, the rest of the 7 practices under this service management category are good-to-know information for now. These are ones that are for a general awareness, not that you need to know them for the exam. This includes availability management, business analysis, capacity and performance management, service catalog management, service continuity management, service design, and service validation and testing practices.