Question
Can I be notified of an SLA breach?
Answer
Yes. It is possible to build automations that send notifications of upcoming SLA breaches by using the condition Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach or to be notified of past SLA breaches by using the condition Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach. Automations run once every hour, which means an automation can send a notification as close as the hour before or the hour after an SLA breach.
For more information, see the article About automations and how they work.
Unfortunately, there is no native method to send a notification at the precise moment of an SLA breach or to use intervals smaller than hourly automations.
For more information see Creating and managing automations for time-based events.
13 Comments
Hello, just noting that, as our team works in much tighter time constraints, hourly automations unfortunately do not do the job here. Ideal would be for some version of a trigger to fire upon SLA Status = Breached. Alas.
Hi Max!
I can definitely understand why you'd need more granular SLA breach notification on your most critical tickets. Other folks have mentioned this need as well, in our Product Feedback topic.
While I can't guarantee that someone from our Product Team will be able to weigh in on the request, I'd still encourage you to head over to the post and share your detailed use case. This information is helpful for our Product Managers to understand what kinds of functionality our customers need.
In the meantime, if you haven't already looked into it, you can create a View that shows any tickets that are approaching a breach in a timeframe you determine. It's not a notification, but it can help to give more visibility to tickets that are on the verge of going over the SLA time.
Hello Jessie,
Do we have a SLA for the SLA notification that is less than 1 hour?
thanks,
Vijay
Hi Vijay!
Unfortunately not. In my comment right above, though, I mention that you can set up a View to show tickets that are closer to approaching a breach.
I need to fire an SMS 10 minutes after a specific type of ticket is solved. Since there is no way to have conditions in "minutes since solved", I'd like to trigger it with an SLA breach.
Anyone faced a similar situation?
Pedro,
There's no direct way you can do this with Zendesk. But with the Apps. There are two apps that can do this AFAIK.
The third way is, you can write a cron that fire the Tickets API /api/v2/tickets/<ticket_id>?include=slas. This give the following output along with other information of the ticket.
"slas": {
"policy_metrics": [
{
"breach_at": "2018-06-28T06:04:31Z",
"stage": "achieved",
"metric": "agent_work_time",
"minutes": -32
}
]
},
You can use breach_at variable or stage and minutes (if -2) and trigger your SMS service.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for helping out, Vijayaragavan!
Many thanks, Vijayaragavan, I'll review those options.
I have implemented this automation, but I would rather just have one email per day that lists all the tickets that will breach in the next 24 hours. Is that possible?
Hi Andrew Yoward, it's not exactly what you want, but you could consider the following workaround:
Add a specific tag with an automation to the tickets. Then create a table in Insights so that you can schedule it once per day.
The automation should include time-based conditions, and another one for the tag.
For example:
Please note, however, that automations run every hour. This means that every hour there will probably be a few additional tickets that will match those conditions.
Now you can create your table in Insights, filtered for this tag, and schedule it.
Alternatively, you might consider creating a View with similar conditions (except the tag). In this case, you can be more accurate with the hours (i.e. more than 23, less than 25). Then all you have to do is export the view on a daily basis.
Perhaps other members of the community can share other and better workarounds. For the time being, hope this helps!
Earlier comment stated that "you can create a View that shows any tickets that are approaching a breach in a timeframe you determine."
This is not true. You still can't get down to minutes. When you're creating a view, the only choice is < 1 hour. I don't need to see every ticket that will breach in < 1 hour. On a busy day, that could be A LOT of tickets, which is fine. I need to know about tickets that will breach in < 15 minutes.
There REALLY needs to be a way to do this.
I get that automations only run every hour, so a notification isn't possible. But if the standard View can display a green icon with the number of minutes left until breach, there HAS to be a way to let users make use of that information. If you're displaying it on the screen, you should be able to surface that to end users as criteria for creating views, even if an automation can't use it because automations don't run that often.
It shouldn't be hard.
^^ This. I'm bringing back a dated post here, but I found this searching for a way to create a view that moves tickets to another queue when SLA's have been breached. Is there still no way to do that on a more granular level than > or < 1 hour?
Hi James,
No, the > or < 1 hour mark is still what is used in views and automations.
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