Question
How do I automatically alert my team about tickets nearing an SLA breach?
Answer
Begin by creating and applying SLA policies to tickets in your account. For general instructions for creating SLAs, see the article: Defining and using SLA policies.
To automatically alert a team about an SLA that is about to breach, create an automation to notify the team by email.
To create the automation
- Create a new automation.
- Under Meets all of the following conditions, select:
- Ticket: hours until next SLA breach | Less than | 2
- If you have business hours set in your account, choose (business) Less than as opposed to (calendar) Less than.
- You may also want to specify a custom ticket field, like an About field value, to narrow down when this automation will fire.
- The Ticket: Status category | Less than | Solved condition makes sure the automation saves successfully. You can also use conditions for Type, Group, Assignee, or Requester to satisfy this requirement.
Note: In accounts without custom ticket statuses enabled, use the condition Ticket: Status instead of Ticket: Status Category.
- The Ticket: Tags condition and action are used to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once. Learn more about these concepts in this article: About automations and how they work.
- Ticket: hours until next SLA breach | Less than | 2
- Under Perform these actions, notify an individual user, a group of users, or even an external target or integration.
10 Comments
We were really hoping to implement this, but under the duration, you must enter a whole number for hours. We have a 30-minute SLA time, and we wanted it to notify us when it gets to 10 minutes until breach. Is there a way for us to accomplish this?
Madison, thanks for sharing this idea which is a good starting point to use alerts to prevent SLA breaches.
I do have a few questions, to help me and others get more out of it.
In the interim, if you guys could allow us to use decimals for notification instead of changing to minutes would be fine. For our large clients, this presents a huge problem.
Is there any news for the use in minutes, or any application that can help us with this execution?
Thank you very much for your question!
Answer: The one you want to address for that automation. If Calendar, then Calendar. If Business Hours, then Business Hours.
Answer: You can add more to your trigger/automation instead of using only one tag/priority etc. For example, you could add another tag to distinct one from the other.
Answer: The Automation suggested by Megan is already targeting less than 2 hours to avoid any issue that could be caused by the time the automation will run. Using that less than 2 would be the workaround.
Best regards,
Hey everyone - I've had some luck with the Sweethawk SLA Timers App.
Hope this helps!
Brett Bowser This presents a big problem for us, we want to be able to set automations based on 30 minutes or at Brittany says above even using 0.5 hours
Madison Hoffman
How would you set this up to send the SLA Breach notification to a particular slack channel?
Referring to the sample in this article, you will just replace the Trigger Action similar to the following to send notifications to an external target via webhook, here's a sample:
Here is an example of what it looks like in Slack:
See Push notifications from Zendesk to Slack for more detailed steps.
It looks like we made some recent changes to how our upcoming breaches are displayed as mentioned here: An easier way to see upcoming SLA breaches
One of our Product Managers also mentions that SLA breach notifications in minutes is something they intend to look into next. Check out his comment here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4409217598490/comments/4534105641626
I hope this helps!
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