Service Level Agreements (SLA)

A Service Level Agreement is a promise about how quickly your team responds to and resolves a ticket: "first response within 1 hour for Urgent tickets." DevStride tracks the promise for you. It starts a timer when a matching ticket arrives, counts only the hours your team is open, pauses while you're waiting on the customer, and warns you (or acts) before the deadline passes.

Two settings work together:

Setting up business hours (Schedules)

1. Open Settings → Service Desk → Schedules and click + Schedule.
2. Give it a Name and choose a Timezone.
3. Set the Weekly hours: one or more open windows per day, or Closed.
4. Add Holidays: dates the schedule is fully closed, with an optional name.
5. Save.

Two windows on the same day can't overlap. A schedule can be edited any time; future calculations pick up the change. You can also skip schedules and leave a policy running 24×7, which counts every hour.

The same schedules drive business hours in time-based automations, resolved per ticket: the team's schedule, then the default business schedule, then calendar time.

Creating a promise (SLA Policies)

1. Open Settings → Service Desk → SLA Policies and click + Policy.
2. Give it a Name and a Schedule (or leave 24×7).
3. Set the Match: ALL or ANY of a list of conditions. Each condition is a field, is / is not, and a value. Fields: Priority, Work type, Customer importance, Channel, Company. No conditions means the policy matches every ticket.
4. Fill in the Targets (minutes) grid, one row per priority and one column per metric. Leave a cell blank for no target.
5. Save.

When more than one policy could match

Policies are evaluated top to bottom and the first match wins; a ticket is never timed by two policies. Reorder with the Move up / Move down arrows in the list and keep specific policies above a general catch-all.

How timers behave

• Requester required. Timers only run on tickets with a requester. Every inbound email and form submission creates one, so intake always starts the clock.
• Business hours. Outside the schedule's open hours a timer stops counting and resumes when you're open again.
• Pausing statuses. A work-type status can be marked as pausing SLA, for a Waiting on customer lane. The Resolution clock pauses while the ticket sits there and resumes, with its remaining time, when it leaves. (This flag lives on the work type's status settings and has no screen yet; see customer statuses.)
• Re-evaluation. Changing a ticket's priority, importance, work type, or status re-evaluates which policy applies. A reopened ticket gets a fresh resolution clock.
• Converted items start their clocks at conversion.

Watching timers run: the SLA at-risk view

Open Service Desk → SLA at risk for every ticket currently being timed, soonest-due first, with its Item, Metric, SLA due (in 2h 15m or 45m overdue), and State: Running, Paused, Met, or Breached. Click a row to open the ticket. The tab requires the Manage Requesters permission. For a sortable queue inside the Inbox, add the SLA Due column instead (Finding & Filtering Tickets).

Reacting automatically

SLA timers raise two automation triggers, under the Service Desk category in the automation builder:

• SLA At Risk fires when a timer enters the last 20% of its allowed time without being met.
• SLA Breached fires the moment a target is missed.

Both carry the ticket, so any work-item condition applies, and the metric and target are available to action templates. Pair them with Send Notification to alert a lead, or Send Customer Reply to apologize and reassure the customer automatically. See Setting Up Basic Automations.

Reporting

The SLA Attainment report shows the share of covered tickets that met their promise, and every report has an SLA-policied only toggle. See Reports.

Permissions

Creating and editing schedules and policies needs Manage Service Desk Settings. Viewing the SLA at risk tab needs Manage Requesters. See Permissions.