SLAs and business hours

Who this is for: Mostly Service Desk admins

Setting SLAs up is an admin job. Reading them is not — On the ticket is what every agent sees, and it is worth knowing what “overdue” is counting.

An SLA is a promise about time: how fast a ticket gets answered, and how fast it gets solved. Attach one to a ticket and the ticket carries deadlines.

What an SLA sets

Settings → SLAs. Each one has three windows:

• First response — from the ticket arriving to the first reply that goes to the customer.
• Update — the longest acceptable silence while it’s being worked.
• Solution — from arrival to closed.

The list shows them in human units (4h, 2d, 8h), the business-hours calendar each one counts in, and how many tickets are currently on it.

Business hours

Settings → Business hours defines a calendar: a timezone, and the open windows for each weekday. An SLA that points at a calendar counts only the minutes inside those windows, so a four-hour response target on a ticket that arrives at 5pm on Friday is due mid-morning on Monday, not overnight.

An SLA with no calendar counts around the clock instead.

A known wrinkle

The SLA panel on the ticket page currently says “Deadlines run around the clock, from when the ticket arrived” whether or not the SLA has a calendar attached. The calendar is applied — the panel’s caption just doesn’t say so yet. Trust the dates, and check Settings → SLAs to see which calendar a ticket’s SLA is really counting in.

On the ticket

The SLA panel shows both clocks with their state: met, due in some amount of time, or overdue by some amount. The list view has an SLA column showing the most urgent of the two, which is what makes it worth sorting on when you’re deciding what to do next.

Changing an SLA changes live tickets

This is the part worth knowing before you edit one:

Changing a first-response or solution window re-clocks the open tickets already on this SLA, measured from when each ticket arrived. Closed tickets keep the deadlines they were worked under — their attainment is measured against the rules in force at the time.

So tightening a target doesn’t just apply to new work; it can put open tickets into breach immediately. And it doesn’t rewrite history — last quarter’s numbers stay measured against last quarter’s promises.

Holidays

A business-hours calendar can carry holidays, and those come out of the countable minutes the same way a closed evening does.