Service Level Agreements (SLA)

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a promise about how quickly your team responds to and resolves a customer's ticket — for example, "first response within 1 hour for Urgent tickets." DevStride can track that promise for you automatically: it starts a timer when a matching ticket comes in, counts only the hours your team is actually open, and warns you (or takes an action) before the deadline is missed.

Two settings work together to make this possible:

Setting up business hours (Schedules)

A Schedule defines when your team is open, so a timer doesn't keep ticking overnight or over the weekend if you aren't working then.

1. Open Settings → Service Desk → Schedules.
2. Click New.
3. Give it a name, choose a timezone, and set your open windows for each day of the week (leave a day empty to mark it closed).
4. Optionally add holidays — specific dates the schedule treats as closed regardless of the weekly pattern.
5. Save.

You can also skip a schedule entirely and leave an SLA Policy running around the clock (24×7) — useful for a promise that should count every hour, not just business hours.

A schedule can be edited at any time — future timer calculations pick up the change.

Schedules aren't just for SLAs

The same schedules define business hours for time-based ticket automations — so an escalation like "no staff reply in 8 business hours" pauses overnight and over the weekend exactly the way an SLA timer does. Which schedule a given ticket is measured against is resolved per ticket: its team's schedule first, then the organization's default business schedule, then calendar time.

Creating a promise (SLA Policies)

An SLA Policy is the promise itself: which tickets it covers, and how many minutes each matched ticket gets.

1. Open Settings → Service Desk → SLA Policies.
2. Click New.
3. Give it a name and choose a Schedule (or leave it 24×7).
4. Set the filter — the conditions a ticket must match for this policy to apply. Today a filter can match on:
   • Priority
   • Work Type
   • Customer Importance
5. Set the targets — the number of minutes allowed, per priority, for each response type:
   • First response — time to the first Reply to customer.
   • Resolution — time to the ticket being marked resolved.
6. Save.

When more than one policy could match

Policies are evaluated in order, top to bottom, and the first one that matches wins — a ticket is never double-timed by two policies at once. Reorder policies with the up/down controls on the list to change which one takes priority; put your most specific policies above your general catch-all.

Watching timers run: the SLA at-risk view

Open Service Desk → SLA At Risk to see every ticket currently being timed, with its response type, remaining time (or how overdue it is), and current state — Running, Paused, Met, or Breached. Clicking a row opens the normal ticket detail view, so you triage it exactly the way you'd triage any other ticket.

A timer pauses automatically outside your schedule's open hours (for example overnight or over a weekend) and resumes counting down the remaining time once your team is open again — so a ticket that arrives Friday evening doesn't quietly blow through its target before Monday morning.

Reacting automatically when a promise is at risk or missed

SLA timers raise two events your team can automate against, alongside DevStride's other Automations:

• SLA At Risk — fires when a ticket crosses into the last stretch of its allowed time (currently the final 20%) and hasn't been met yet.
• SLA Breached — fires the moment a ticket misses its target.

A new action, Reply to Customer, can be attached to either trigger — for example, automatically apologizing and reassuring the customer the moment a response time is breached, without anyone needing to be watching the at-risk list in real time.

Permissions

Creating and editing Schedules and SLA Policies requires the Manage Service Desk Settings permission — the same permission that controls channel addresses and request forms. See Permissions for the full breakdown of Service Desk roles.