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SLA Alerting in Minutes

Planned


Posted Sep 01, 2015

Currently, the smallest breach you can set up to be alerted is coming up, is an hour. Everyone I've talked to who uses Zendesk deeply and desperately needs this to be a much much more granular time set. Many of us have critical priorities of MUCH less than an hour. This renders SLA breach alerts completely useless on the most critical of our tickets. 


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This feels a little like shouting into the void at his point, but I will add that our support team also needs more granular SLA timing.  We have a 2-hour SLA, so being notified halfway through is not especially helpful for us, and paying extra for an addon that should really be natively supported is a tough pill to swallow for those budgeting.  Zendesk, we would love to hear if you have a plan for this.

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Hi Aaron, I just want to make sure you saw Scott Allison's official comment at the top of the first page of this comment thread.

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Hi Dave,

I did see that, but the four-month-old comment about SLA functionality being a priority this year doesn't inspire much confidence in a five-year-old thread as we move into the fourth quarter of the year.  Are there any updates?

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Even once every 15 minutes or 10 minutes would be a massive improvement for a lot of us.

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I would like to echo Aaron's comment/request for an update. We have a 3 minute and a 10 minute SLA alerting need and the SLA Timers app is causing other issues on our tickets so it doesn't fully solve our needs. 

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@... may I know what issues you're having with SLA Timers app?  I was just looking at possibly implementing it in our instance, but I'm curious to know the side effects.

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@... We're running into race conditions with tags being removed if the action adding a tag is occurring at the same time as the Timer action. I've reached out to Zendesk who said it would need to be handled by the Developer and I reached out to Sweethawk who said it should be handled by Zendesk and that I was only the second customer to report this issue.

With the race conditions, the tag will just be removed but you won't even see a removal event in the ticket event history and you have to assume its based on the timestamps of two similar actions.

We have several automations/triggers that run off of other tags and we are in an emergency industry so the fact that tags are being removed is impacting ticket workflow, agent response, and reporting. Makes it very difficult for other other processes to run smoothly with the tags removed and our Agents questioning what they did wrong on a ticket when they didn't do anything wrong, it was the Timers app throwing off the flow. 

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

We've now kicked off our project to enhance SLA capabilities and have a team dedicated to this. It's an ambitious roadmap, and we'll be shipping in phases. As things progress I'll share updates, but near real-time notifications is a significant part of this initiative. For now apps like Sweethawk, Cloudset or Myndbend are still the way to go, but sometime in 2022 we'll have this natively. 

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Thanks for the update, Scott!  Looking forward to hearing more as things progress!

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@... Thank you so much for the update!

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@... and @..., Pete here from SweetHawk - Just chipping in regarding our SLA Timers app. We carried out thorough testing on this after this was brought to our attention and found that the issue is not related to this app or apps in general. It is an issue with the way Zendesk tickets allow updates. If multiple updates to a ticket are attempted at precisely the same time (ie. in the same millisecond) then one of those updates will not materialise on the ticket, however, in the events log, Zendesk will show both updates. You can test and confirm this by setting two triggers to update the same ticket with a webhook at the same time. 

The good news is that it is incredibly rare for this issue actually to happen in the wild because Zendesk seems to have measures in place that try to prevent this and cause errors to show if updates close together are detected. It’s just, very occasionally, those measures don’t work. Nonetheless, if this is of particular concern for any workflow or any app that makes a change to a ticket, you can setup a backup workflow. For example, in the SLA timers app, set an extra timer to go off a minute after the first. That being said, the ideal solution here would be for Zendesk to address the underlying update issue - no matter how rare its occurrence is. I hope this help shed some light on things.

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@... - It would be nice if Zendesk and Sweethawk got together to resolve this issue since both companies are passing the issue off to the other. I have open tickets with both that specifically direct me to reach out to the other company.

We have so many tags and layers of automations/triggers that your workaround is a large effort to put in place and honestly not very feasible for a normal workflow, especially in emergency situations that my company deals with on a regular basis where updates are happening very quickly and we don't have time to check to make sure if an app is wiping out other needed data.

Additionally, we are not seeing this happen on a rare basis. We are seeing this happen regularly.

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Dear Sara and others, SweetHawk is still working on this issue and we are collaborating with Zendesk. It's not consistently reproducible so it's been challenging. We'll certainly keep everyone posted.

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Quick update: we've had word from Zendesk this is going to be addressed by one of their core teams, however they could not advise an ETA at this time.

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I would like to add that I was very surprised to find out that this feature is not available. We would like to be able to create a trigger once an SLA has been breached so we can send some type of notification to the customer and alert a lead or manager to respond. Thank you!

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 @... @... Adrian McDermott @... an ETA on when the granularity of SLA timer notifications will be implemented is of the utmost importance. 

Considering this was originally posted in 2015 and has been a sentiment of many users, how does Zendesk intend to meet this pressing need?

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

Thanks everyone for your patience and support! Last year I provided an update that SLAs were a top priority, and we had plans for a number of enhancements. I can confirm that work is in progress, and the very first customer facing change will start to roll out next week: an easier way to see upcoming SLA breaches.

The next big change will be the ability to put OLAs (internal SLAs between teams) on tickets, and that will come sometime in Q3 this year.

After that, we'll be working on this request, to alert on SLAs in minutes. Instead of being tied to Automations once an hour, you'll be able to set up alerts for SLA notifications in near real-time. 

I'll share more details later this year as that work begins, but in the meantime - as others have mentioned below - if this is functionality you need now, check out some of our partners who offer this today.

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

Daniella Jones Thank you for bringing this up! I replied yesterday but I just wanted to highlight it in case you missed that. It's pinned at the top of page 1.

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We really need this functionality. We have our first response SLA set to 30 minutes, and having the ability to be notified of near breaches would really help. 

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Any update on this issue?

 

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey Erkin,
 
We did make some updates to make upcoming SLA breaches easier to see. More information here: An easier way to see upcoming SLA breaches
 
Let me know if this isn't what you're looking for!
 

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Brett Bowser That is not what I am looking for, that feature unfortunately meets 0 of the needs laid out in this feature request thread. That feature does not allow you to set up accurate alerts. There is still no way to be notified of breaches in smaller increments than 1 hour. These are vital. Can you give us an update on this feature request? 

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An update on this request would be great. We're still trying to plan for how to better track SLA times, and this feature is one that is high on our priority list. 

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey CJ and Stephen,
 
Thanks for clarifying! I will reach out to our product team involved with this feature and see if we have an update to share.
 
Hang tight and we will follow up as soon as we can :) 

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

Thanks everyone for your continued interest in this important functionality. About a month ago we released our new back end SLA platform which gives us a solid new base to build additional functionality for SLAs.

The first part of that is "Group SLAs" announced at Relate. This is set to open to early adopters in Q4, and be released generally in Q1. If you'd like to express interest in being part of that EAP release, please use this form. 

Once Group SLAs are out we'll be working on real-time alerts for SLAs, as well as some greater options for SLA targets, including some new targets and configurability. Expect this to ship sometime in 2023. 

In the meantime, I recommend you check out some of our marketplace apps, like Sweethawk Timers for the ability to get minute level notifications for SLAs.

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Scott Allison the EAP form doesn't say anything about what this feature is, does, or what the limitations or problems with it might be during the EAP. Is there anywhere we can review this and understand what exactly "Group SLAs" is? I don't want to sign up my account for something that could potentially have devastating effects on my workflow. 

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

CJ Johnson The form is to express interest in general. Prior to the next EAP release I will reach out with full details of exactly what is ready to EAP, any limitations, and at that point get your  confirmation if you want to take part. 

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Scott Allison What am I even expressing interest in, though? All I know is that this EAP is called "Group SLAs". That's not really enough information for me to be able to tell if that would be something my account would be interested in joining. 

Also -- could you clarify what exactly is changing next week to be customer facing? Is this saying that customers will be able to see the SLA timers and breaches on tickets? From your pinned message: 
>  customer facing change will start to roll out next week: an easier way to see upcoming SLA breaches.

The linked article has no mentions of custom facing changes and I'm a bit concerned. 

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

CJ Johnson Sorry for the confusion there. I should've removed that comment when I edited my response. There are no customer facing changes next week.

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Hey @..., is there an update on this request that you can share? 

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