Configuring SLA policies

An SLA policy is what Helmdesk uses to decide when a ticket is "on time" versus "breached," and to trigger breach alerts for your team before a client notices you missed a commitment.

The default policy

Every tenant gets a default SLA policy the moment it's created, with a first-response and resolution target for each of the four priority levels (low, normal, high, urgent). You can edit every part of it from Settings → SLA Policy.

What you can configure

• Targets per priority — how many minutes are allowed for a first response and for full resolution, set independently for low/normal/high/urgent tickets.
• Business hours — turn this on if you only want SLA time to count during your team's actual working hours, plus which days count as business days and what your start/end times are.
• Timezone — the timezone your business hours are evaluated in, so "9am" means 9am where your team actually is, not UTC.

Calendar time vs. business hours

With business hours turned off, a target is just calendar time — a 60-minute first-response target means 60 minutes, full stop, nights and weekends included.

With business hours turned on, the countdown pauses outside your configured hours and picks back up when they resume. A ticket that comes in at 6pm Friday with a 4-hour target, business hours 9–5 Monday–Friday, doesn't breach over the weekend — it's due 4 business-hours into Monday instead.

How breaches are caught

Helmdesk checks for SLA breaches two ways, so nothing waits unnecessarily long to be noticed:

1. The instant it happens — the moment an agent's first reply lands, or a ticket moves to resolved, Helmdesk checks whether that happened before or after the deadline.
2. A periodic sweep — every few minutes, a background check scans every open ticket across your account for anything that's quietly gone past its deadline without any activity at all.

Either way, agents currently online get a live notification the moment a breach is detected — no one has to go looking for it.

Tips for setting realistic targets

• Start with your default policy's targets and adjust after a few weeks of real data — the reporting page shows your actual SLA compliance rate, which is the best signal for whether a target is realistic or aspirational.
• If your team doesn't work 24/7, turn business hours on — an "always-counting" clock against a team that isn't always working will show breaches that aren't really failures of service.