Geoffrey Lisch

I've spent too many hours tinkering with Zendesk and the SLAs and forums.  I won't even make a support ticket for this given my past success. The one addition to this post i'll make is that when we send a ticket to engineering or other internal teams or we're just waiting on something to occur i've made a field to put the jira link into conveniently called "Jira Link".  This field is a text box and you can use it in triggers or logic to search for null values etc.  Recently i've created a Jira Link Destination that lets me check the "location" of the ticket.  These fields can also be used for reporting and following tickets which makes the support more efficient. 

When we get a ticket and it goes to another team, I link it in the Jira Link and set a Jira Link Destination and put it on hold in one step. The SLA only fires in the absence of a Jira Link Destination and is unable to check for null in the Jira Link field. When a user replies and asks for an update, the Jira Link and Jira Link Destination don't change at all so the SLA doesn't get impeded.  I do not remove them via trigger per TIm's suggestions. 

This seems to be the only way to get the SLA to work following Tim's guidance.  The criteria for agent work time is really what I want to use (new and open status) but it fired SLAs when the amount of work done on a ticket exceeded that time.