In Zendesk, you can define service level agreements, or SLAs, to specify and measure the response and resolution times that your support team delivers to your customers. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create automations that alert your team when an SLA is about to breach and notify you of a breached SLA.
In this article:
- Create an automation to notify team of a nearing SLA breach
- Create an automation to notify team of a breached SLA
Create an automation to notify team of a nearing SLA breach
The condition Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach lets you build an automation that notifies a team or an individual user of an SLA about to breach.
To create this automation
- Add a new automation
- Under Meets all of the following conditions, select:
-
Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach | Less than |
2
-
Ticket: Status category | Less than | Solved
- This condition ensures the automation saves successfully. You can also use conditions for Type, Group, Assignee, or Requester to meet this requirement.
-
Ticket: Tags | Contains none of the following |
sla_alert
-
Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach | Less than |
- Under Perform these actions, add:
- Notifications: Group email | (assigned group)
-
Email subject:
SLA about to breach: {{ticket.id}}
-
Email body:
This is a notification to inform you that a ticket assigned to your group
is approaching its SLA breach time. Ticket: {{ticket.link}} Time remaining until SLA breach: Less than 2 hours Prioritize this ticket to ensure it is resolved or addressed promptly. -
Ticket: Add tags |
sla_alert
Use the Ticket: Tags condition and the Ticket: Add tags action to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once. For more information, see this article: About automations and how they work.
- Click Create automation
This workflow notifies your team when the SLA breach happens in less than two hours. If you need a longer or shorter timeframe, change the value under Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach.
Create an automation to notify team of a breached SLA
The condition Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach lets you build an automation that notifies a team or an individual user after the SLA was breached by your agents.
To create this automation
- Add a new automation
- Under Meets all of the following conditions, select:
-
Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach | Less than |
1
-
Ticket: Status category | Less than | Solved
- This condition ensures the automation saves successfully. You can also use conditions for Type, Group, Assignee, or Requester to meet this requirement.
-
Ticket: Tags | Contains none of the following |
sla_alert2
Use the Ticket: Tags condition and the Ticket: Add tags action to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once.
-
Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach | Less than |
- Under Perform these actions, add:
- Notifications: User email | (You or the agent responsible for monitoring SLA breaches)
-
Email subject:
SLA recently breached: {{ticket.id}}
-
Email body:
This is a notification to inform you that a ticket had an SLA breach. Ticket: {{ticket.link}} Time elapsed since the last SLA breach: Less than 1 hour
Prioritize this ticket to investigate the cause of the breach.-
Ticket: Add tags |
sla_alert2
Use the Ticket: Tags condition and the Ticket: Add tags action to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once
-
Ticket: Add tags |
- Click Create automation
This workflow notifies your team when the SLA breaches in less than one hour. If you need a longer timeframe, modify the value under Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach.
16 comments
Martin Cubitt
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.
3
Gustavo Oliveira
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,
-1
Stephen Skobel
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?
5
Brett Bowser
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!
-1
Brittany Mandel
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.
2
Jordan Forsythe
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
0
Jose Herrera
Is there any news for the use in minutes, or any application that can help us with this execution?
1
Brandon (729)
Hey everyone - I've had some luck with the Sweethawk SLA Timers App.
Hope this helps!
1
Derrek Hennessy
Madison Hoffman
How would you set this up to send the SLA Breach notification to a particular slack channel?
0
Christine
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.
0
Jason Turner
Any news on the decimal usage or selection of Minutes as the SLA target?
0
Christine Diego
As of the moment, what we're planning is the ability to allow you to set rules for SLA alerting, so you could get notified in near real-time when an SLA breaches. Or even get a reminder say 10 minutes prior to a breach. (It would be customizable). While you can define SLAs today in minutes, the only way to alert is via Automations, and those only run once an hour. So, essentially, our plan is to have a separate notification system for SLAs. Unfortunately, this isn't trivial and there's no quick fix; it requires a significant investment on our side to make this possible at the scale we operate at.
But we will definitely post this once available.
1
Matthew Toenjes
@... Do you have any updates to when this SLA notification tool may be implemented? This would be incredibly useful to us.
0
Ethan Hartman
Question: currently we are using a URL target to push “nearing SLA” notifications into Slack. It seems like the upcoming shutoff will affect this - can you share some tips on a good way to do this (I don't see a way to have the automation use the Zendesk <> Slack connector app).
Edit - I was able to create a new Slack app and switch to a webhook.
0
Mark Veldhoff
What is the best way to remove the ‘SLA_Alert’ Tag after the SLA has been fullfilled and a new one applied?
0
Gifford Holmquist
This was SUPER easy in Jira. Really surprised this has been a requested feature for so many years.
0