A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between you and your customers that specifies performance measures for support by ticket priority. You can use SLA information, visible in views and tickets, to prioritize the tickets you address. SLAs are available on Professional and Enterprise.
For more information about setting up SLA policies, see Defining and using SLA policies.
Understanding SLA target statuses
- Active: An active SLA target is one whose metric has not yet been completed. For example, if the metric is "First Reply Time" and there has been no first public reply on a ticket, the "First Reply Time" target is still active on that ticket.
- Paused: A paused SLA target is one whose metric has not yet been completed, but we’ve temporarily paused the clock. A target can get into this state if its metric definition excludes certain statuses, like Requester Wait Time. When a ticket is put into pending, the Requester Wait Time target will be paused.
- Closed: A closed SLA target is one whose metric has been completed. For example, a ticket that’s already received a public reply will have a closed target for the “First Reply Time” metric.
- Active (breached), Paused (breached), and Closed (breached): There are also breached variants of each of these three states. Any given SLA target can be both active and breached, or paused and breached, or closed and breached. This just means that in addition to the definition above, the metric has surpassed the target time assigned to that ticket.
Seeing SLA statuses in views
You can view SLA target status in the Next SLA Breach view column.

If a ticket does not have an SLA policy applied or if all of the targets on that ticket are closed, the Next SLA breach value will be blank for that ticket.
If at least one target on the ticket is active, the calendar time remaining before that target is breached appears. Once the target has been breached, a negative time value, like -15m or 4h, appears in red.
If the next target is paused, a pause icon will appear in the Next SLA breach column. For targets that haven't been breached yet, a green pause icon appears. For targets that have already been breached, the pause icon appears in red.
If your view contains the Next SLA breach column, SLA information will appear in the ticket preview when you hover over the ticket in the view. This information won't appear if your view doesn't contain the Next SLA breach column.
Seeing SLA statuses in tickets
Once you start using SLAs, SLA information will automatically start appearing on any ticket where an SLA policy has been applied. The next action that needs to be taken by the agent will appear in the top-right corner of each ticket along with the amount of calendar time that is left before the target will breach. This should appear nearly identical to the formatting in views, with the exception of indicating the next action to be taken.
To view more information about the SLA target
Hover over the SLA badge in the top-right corner to see other active SLA targets for the ticket and the exact date and time when the target will be breached. Once the SLA policy is fulfilled, the badge disappears.

Viewing which SLA policies have been applied to a ticket
You can see which SLA policy and corresponding targets have been applied to a given ticket by checking the ticket's events (see Viewing all events of a ticket).
Each time a policy or target is applied, removed, or changed, an event will appear. However, no event appears when an SLA is breached or fulfilled.
8 Comments
Hi, I'm stuck with SLA metrics in Explore, trying to get an overall SLA % for all targets over all tickets in a certain time frame.
Researching this I ran upon this: period is oct-dec 2020 for one customer; There was 1 ticket still open on dec 31, all others were solved and closed.
However, the metric 'Tickets with an active SLA policy' indicates 4. Even when I look at all recent tickets, there are only 2 in jan (one open, one solved). How can there be 4 tickets with an active SLA policy?
(cf this in the article: Note: When a ticket status is set to Solved, all SLA targets are considered met, and closed as a result.)
Hi Harold! Would you mind elaborating a bit more on how you have this specific report setup?
I'm afraid I wasn't able to locate a built-in metric called 'Tickets with an active SLA policy' on my end. Are you perhaps referring to the 'Active SLA Tickets' metric, 'Active SLA Targets' metric, 'Active SLA Policies' metric, or something else?
Hi,
I'm sorry I didn't respond any sooner, I hoped it was just incidental.
But I just ran into this issue again. There's a ticket that has been closed in Nov 2020. According to Explore it still has one active SLA: Pausable Update Time.
I use a metric called D_COUNT(Active SLA tickets) and selected 'Status of SLA target' to be null (this is also how I found some tickets that an agent created on behalf of the customer which didn't get any SLA targets).
Hi Harold! According to Zendesk's help documentation, it says "Tickets set to Solved immediately fulfill all active SLA targets" so I'm not sure why you'd see an SLA Metric that was in a Closed Status without being able to inspect the ticket myself.
I'd recommend reaching out to Zendesk's Support team so that they can take a closer look at your Explore query and this particular Ticket ID for further assistance.
Hi ZD Community,
Apologies if this was asked or proposed already but would it be possible to add a third color for the SLA badges?
For example, it would be great to have the SLA badge turn yellow when it's getting closer to breaching. Ideally, Admins can choose when the badge would turn yellow (48, 24, or 12 hrs, etc. until breaching).
Visually, this would help Support agents identify pending breaches a little better than just the green and red badges.
Thanks!
Hi Nate, thanks for this feedback – for visibility, would you mind posting to our Feedback on Support topic and using our template to explain your use case? Thanks!
Is there an article with best practices for setting up Talk SLAs? We've committed to our partners that 70% of phone calls received during business hours will be answered within 20 seconds. How to we set this up in Zendesk?
Hi Heather,
Another user had a similar question, about how to calculate the Talk SLA % in Explore – there's an example of how to set that up in Hannah's comment here: Calculating Talk SLA % in Explore
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