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Workflow: How to alert your team to tickets nearing an SLA breach



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Madison Hoffman

Zendesk Digital Resources Team

Edited Oct 10, 2024


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16 comments

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.

  1. If you have two SLAs and one uses Business Hours and the other Calendar Hours (or even a mix of both in one SLA), which operator should you use against Ticket: hours until next SLA breach?
  2. If you have 1st response and resolution SLAs defined for the same priority, won't the tag set when the 1st response SLA alert is sent, preventing anything going out for the resolution SLA? How can you handle that?
  3. If the SLA is 1 hour, the Hours breached is compared to < 1 rather than 2 and the ticket is created 2 minutes before the automation runs, the alert will correctly send, 2 minutes after creation as the SLA will have 58 minutes left which is < 1 hour. However, if the ticket is created 2 minutes after the automation runs, the ticket alert will be sent when only 2 minutes remain. Worse, of course, if the SLA is less than 1 hour and you just missed an automation cycle, the breach will occur before the next cycle so no alert is sent and the ticket SLA is breached. I guess this is a problem with Zendesk running automation hourly and having hourly intervals in conditions. Have you any workarounds?

 

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Gustavo Oliveira

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Martin,
 
Thank you very much for your question!
 
  1. If you have two SLAs and one uses Business Hours and the other Calendar Hours (or even a mix of both in one SLA), which operator should you use against Ticket: hours until next SLA breach? 
    Answer: The one you want to address for that automation. If Calendar, then Calendar. If Business Hours, then Business Hours.
     
  2. If you have 1st response and resolution SLAs defined for the same priority, won't the tag set when the 1st response SLA alert is sent prevent anything going out for the resolution SLA? How can you handle that? 
    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.
     
  3. If the SLA is 1 hour, the Hours breached is compared to < 1 rather than 2 and the ticket is created 2 minutes before the automation runs, the alert will correctly send, 2 minutes after creation as the SLA will have 58 minutes left which is < 1 hour. However, if the ticket is created 2 minutes after the automation runs, the ticket alert will be sent when only 2 minutes remain. Worse, of course, if the SLA is less than 1 hour and you just missed an automation cycle, the breach will occur before the next cycle so no alert is sent and the ticket breached. I guess this is a problem with Zendesk running automation hourly and having hourly intervals in conditions. Have you any workarounds?
    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,

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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?

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey Stephen,

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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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.

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Jordan Forsythe

Zendesk Luminary

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 

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Is there any news for the use in minutes, or any application that can help us with this execution?

 

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Brandon (729)

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group LeaderThe Humblident Award - 2021Community Moderator

Hey everyone - I've had some luck with the Sweethawk SLA Timers App.

Hope this helps!

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Madison Hoffman 

How would you set this up to send the SLA Breach notification to a particular slack channel?

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Christine

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Derrek,

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.

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Any news on the decimal usage or selection of Minutes as the SLA target?

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Christine Diego

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Jason,
 
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. 

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@... Do you have any updates to when this SLA notification tool may be implemented? This would be incredibly useful to us.

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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.

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What is the best way to remove the ‘SLA_Alert’ Tag after the SLA has been fullfilled and a new one applied?

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This was SUPER easy in Jira.  Really surprised this has been a requested feature for so many years.  

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