Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are critical tools in your helpdesk that allow you to establish specific objectives for resolving tickets. They assist your agents in monitoring these objectives efficiently.

You might establish these objectives as part of a formal SLA with a client who is paying for a specific level of support, or as an internal standard to ensure quality service.

A ticket is put in a Warning status when it is nearing the failure of the set objective (the "warning" criteria is something that you pre-define). A ticket is marked as Failed when it has surpassed the set objective.

You define the type of action that's required to fulfil the SLA such as response or criteria matching.

One of the primary functions of SLAs in your helpdesk is to trigger automated actions that update the ticket status upon warning or failure.

For example, you might have an SLA for VIP customers that says you must triage the ticket and set the urgency within 30 minutes, which goes into a warning state after 15 minutes.

You could automate that if the ticket enters the warning status a label "Priority" is added, and if it fails that the urgency is increased by 5 and the team's manager is added as a follower to make them aware that the SLA has failed.

The SLA status can be viewed in the ticket properties panel, or in your queue if you have included SLAs in your view: