Managing tickets under service level agreements

Tickets associated with an SLA can present unique issues. SLA associated tickets can have up to three separate deadlines before the ticket is completed. And, those deadlines are based on SLA objectives related to ticket priority, issue, and sub-issue type settings that can change. Autotask provides the following options to help manage these SLA related concerns.

You can create ticket widgets that will filter your tickets by the SLA status.

EXAMPLE  If you filter by Waiting Customer and group the tickets by Account Manager, your account managers can easily locate customers who may need to be called to advance the ticket.

The Ticket page can optionally display the Timeline section. The Ticket Timeline is a visual representation of the ticket lifecycle. The timeline shows two horizontal parallel bars. The lower bar represents the target timeline, the upper bar the actual performance. SLA events are represented with markers.

Refer to The ticket timeline.

SECURITY  Requires System Administrator security level to add or edit the Service Level Agreement.

NAVIGATION   > Admin > Features and Settings > Service Desk > Service Level Management > click New or click Edit icon.

In most cases you will want to base the due date and time of a ticket associated with an SLA on the time specified for the SLA resolution. The easiest way to do this is to have the SLA set the ticket due date when it is associated with the ticket.

To use the SLA to set the ticket due date/time, an Administrator must enable the option "Use SLA to automatically set date and time". The check box to enable this option appears on the New or Edit Service Level Agreement page.

When this feature is enabled, the due date and time of all new tickets associated with the SLA will be calculated based on the "Resolved" setting for the SLA objective that best matches the priority, issue type, and sub-issue type of the ticket. Autotask will take the number of hours calculated for the Resolved event objective and add those hours to the Create Date/Time of the ticket.

The calculations will respect Internal Location or custom Business and Extended hours when they are specified. When no Business or Extended Hours are specified, calculations are based on all hours (24x7). For information on setting the Resolved objective and Timeframe, refer to Adding and editing service level agreements .

NOTE  When the SLA sets the due date/time, it will override a default, Template, manual, or workflow rule due date/time setting.

SECURITY  All resources with access to ticket lists.

It is important that technicians are aware of upcoming SLA events on the tickets assigned to them. To quickly see which tickets have upcoming events, display SLA due dates and times on any Autotask ticket list including Ticket Search Results and any list under My > Service Desk. You can then sort the ticket tables by SLA Due Date columns to make sure you are working on the most urgent tickets.

You can also display SLA event due dates on the Ticket Work List.

NOTE  Event Date column cells will be empty if the event has not yet occurred.

How to...

Click the icon to open the column chooser. Refer to Searching and managing tickets.

Click the gear symbol at the bottom of the work list to open the Work List Settings window. If needed, refer to Using work lists.

NOTE  You can add a widget to one of your custom dashboards to display SLA Due Date information without accessing a ticket list. Refer to Managing dashboard widgets.

IMPORTANT  When the Priority, Issue Type, or Sub-issue Type on a ticket changes through a manual edit or a workflow rule, it may reset the SLA times.

This occurs when a different SLA objective is a better fit with the new Priority/Issue Type/Sub-issue Type combination. Refer to Define SLA objectives.

If the new objective has a different Timeframe or uses different hours, the SLA event due dates/times and the SLA elapsed time between SLA Events on the ticket will be adjusted.

If your Autotask instance has workflow rules that might automatically change the priority, issue, or sub-issue types on a ticket, you can set up the following practices to prevent those rules from impacting tickets with an associated SLA.

SECURITY  Some of these steps require an administrator security level

  1. Have an Administrator add SLA to the list of ticket Sources. Refer to Ticket sources.
  2. For all tickets with an SLA applied, select SLA as the ticket Source. Refer to Adding, copying, and editing tickets.
  3. For all existing and new Workflow Rules that might change the Priority/Issue Type/Sub-issue type on tickets with an SLA applied, add a Condition where Source <> to SLA.

The rules that include this condition will not affect tickets where the Source is SLA.

Refer to Adding, editing, and copying workflow rules.