Workflow: How to alert your team to tickets nearing an SLA breach

In Zendesk, you can define service level agreements, or SLAs, to specify and measure the response and resolution times that your support team delivers to your customers. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create automations that alert your team when an SLA is about to breach and notify you of a breached SLA.

In this article:

• Create an automation to notify team of a nearing SLA breach
• Create an automation to notify team of a breached SLA

Note: Automations run once every hour, so an automation can send a notification as close as the hour before or the hour after an SLA breach. You can't send a notification at the exact moment of an SLA breach or use intervals smaller than hourly automations.

Create an automation to notify team of a nearing SLA breach

The condition Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach lets you build an automation that notifies a team or an individual user of an SLA about to breach.

To create this automation

1. Add a new automation
2. Under Meets all of the following conditions, select:
   • Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach | Less than | 2
   • Ticket: Status category | Less than | Solved
     
     • This condition ensures the automation saves successfully. You can also use conditions for Type, Group, Assignee, or Requester to meet this requirement.
   • Ticket: Tags | Contains none of the following | sla_alert
3. Under Perform these actions, add:
   • Notifications: Group email | (assigned group)
   • Email subject:

     SLA about to breach: {{ticket.id}}

   • Email body:

     This is a notification to inform you that a ticket assigned to your group 
     is approaching its SLA breach time.
     
     Ticket: {{ticket.link}}
     
     Time remaining until SLA breach: Less than 2 hours
     
     Prioritize this ticket to ensure it is resolved or addressed promptly.

   • Ticket: Add tags | sla_alert
     Use the Ticket: Tags condition and the Ticket: Add tags action to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once. For more information, see this article: About automations and how they work.
4. Click Create automation

This workflow notifies your team when the SLA breach happens in less than two hours. If you need a longer or shorter timeframe, change the value under Ticket: Hours until next SLA breach.

Create an automation to notify team of a breached SLA

The condition Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach lets you build an automation that notifies a team or an individual user after the SLA was breached by your agents.

To create this automation

1. Add a new automation
2. Under Meets all of the following conditions, select:
   • Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach | Less than | 1
   • Ticket: Status category | Less than | Solved
     
     • This condition ensures the automation saves successfully. You can also use conditions for Type, Group, Assignee, or Requester to meet this requirement.
   • Ticket: Tags | Contains none of the following | sla_alert2
     Use the Ticket: Tags condition and the Ticket: Add tags action to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once.
3. Under Perform these actions, add:
   • Notifications: User email | (You or the agent responsible for monitoring SLA breaches)
   • Email subject:

     SLA recently breached: {{ticket.id}}

   • Email body:

     This is a notification to inform you that a ticket had an SLA breach.
     
     Ticket: {{ticket.link}}
     
     Time elapsed since the last SLA breach: Less than 1 hour
     
     Prioritize this ticket to investigate the cause of the breach.

     • Ticket: Add tags | sla_alert2
       Use the Ticket: Tags condition and the Ticket: Add tags action to ensure the automation doesn't fire more than once
4. Click Create automation

This workflow notifies your team when the SLA breaches in less than one hour. If you need a longer timeframe, modify the value under Ticket: Hours since last SLA breach.