When the clock is running and the ticket is yours
SLA from the tech's seat
A response target is a promise the shop made to a client, and working out what it is was never the technician's job. What a technician needs is narrower: which of the conversations in front of me has a clock running, how much of it is gone, what stops it, and what to type next. This walk stays in that seat on one instance. It covers every state a ticket's SLA control can be in, the exact words on screen for each, and what to do about it.
What you will have
- A reading of every SLA state a ticket can show you, in the words the screen actually uses.
- One place to look first in the morning, already ranked by which promises are late.
- The two honest ways a ticket leaves the response clock: somebody answers it, or somebody stops it.
- A plain account of what the colour on a waiting ticket is counting, and what it is not.
Why it works this way
The clock on a ticket is about the first reply, not the fix. Every state below is about one question: has a human answered this client yet. The resolution target is a separate, optional field on the same policy, and it is left unset on this instance, so no ticket here carries a second countdown.
The target counts the client's working hours, not the wall clock. A ticket filed at twenty to five on a Friday and a ticket filed at nine on a Monday get the same amount of working time to be answered in. That is why a four hour target on a ticket filed before the office opens comes out as noon rather than half eight.
Nobody is asked to do the arithmetic. The target comes from the ticket's priority, the countdown is derived when the page is fetched, and the reason a clock is stopped is recorded on the ticket rather than in somebody's memory. A technician reads a chip and a sentence.
One thing on this page is worth knowing precisely, because it is the piece people assume works the other way. Before anyone replies, the colour of the chip follows a shared elapsed-time schedule that every ticket uses, not the distance to that ticket's own deadline. The deadline is on the chip's tooltip and in the morning list. Step 7 shows the schedule itself.
Steps
Sign in and read the counts under the handover card before you open anything.
Three numbers, each a link. "2 my open", "6 SLA risk", "0 customer replied". The middle one is the only figure on the page about promises rather than volume: tickets whose first reply is already late, plus tickets close enough to being late to count. Do this first, because it is the one number that tells you whether today starts with an apology.
Sign in and read the counts under the handover card before you open anything. Read the list above it, which is already in the order you should work.
Under "Start here" each row carries the ticket, the client, who owns it, and a line saying why it is there. The top three read "SLA breached 3 days ago", "SLA breached 2 days ago" and "SLA breached 37 hours 47 minutes ago". The wording is plain and the age is the point: the oldest broken promise is first. Work down it. A row that has no owner is the one to claim before anything else, because nobody is going to answer it by accident.
Read the list above it, which is already in the order you should work. Open Service Desk and read the Needs Attention card at the top.
Each row carries a chip saying why it is listed. "Awaiting reply" means the ticket is assigned to you and nobody has answered the client yet, which is exactly the condition the response clock measures. "Unclaimed" means it is sitting in a pod you belong to with no owner, and the row carries a Claim button. The other two reasons are an escalated ticket and one the dispatcher could not place. An Awaiting reply row is a reply you owe. An Unclaimed row is a decision you owe.
Open Service Desk and read the Needs Attention card at the top. Look down the SLA column on the ticket list.
The column has three shapes and you can read a whole board from them. A counting number means nobody has replied yet and the clock is still running. A circled tick means somebody has, and the colour of that tick is how fast. A dash means the ticket carries no response target at all, which is what project tickets and boards excluded from SLA look like. Sort your eye by the numbers, not the tick marks: a tick is finished business.
Look down the SLA column on the ticket list. Open one that is still counting and read its SLA control, then hover it.
At the top of the ticket the control reads "RESPOND BY" and then the count, here "0s". Hovering it prints the deadline itself: "Waiting for first response - SLA due: Sep 18, 12:00 PM". This ticket was filed before the client's day starts, which is why nothing has counted yet and why the target lands at noon rather than four hours after it arrived. The deadline is the number to plan around. The count is only how long the client has been waiting.
Note: The tooltip covers the word SLA above the chip while it is open. The chip sits in the field row with Board, Status, Priority and Assigned To, on every ticket that has a response target.Open one that is still counting and read its SLA control, then hover it. If you want to know where that noon came from, open Settings, then Service Levels, then SLA Display.
One card per priority. High reads "Current Response Target" and under it "4 hours (business hours)", with a Business Hours badge beside it. Medium on the same page reads "1 business day". So the target is not something a technician chooses or calculates: it is the priority on the ticket, read through this page. Changing a ticket's priority moves its deadline, which is the one lever on this screen a technician actually pulls.
Note: The words in brackets on the Counting choice are a fixed example, not your own window. The hours the clock really runs on are set under Settings, then Service Levels, then Business Hours & Holidays.If you want to know where that noon came from, open Settings, then Service Levels, then SLA Display. Now read what the colour on a waiting ticket is keyed to, on Settings, then Service Levels, then SLA Policies.
Two things in one card. "Excellent Response (minutes)" is 10, "Responses within this time get a green checkmark". "Good Response (minutes)" is 30, "Responses within this time get a blue checkmark". Those grade the tick you see after somebody replies. Under them, "Timer Color Thresholds" is a row of chips reading 5m, 10m, 15m, 30m, 1h, 4h, 8h, 1d, 2d, described on the page as "The elapsed-time marks where a ticket's live timer shifts color (green toward red)". That schedule is shared by every ticket. Before anyone replies the chip's colour comes from it and from how long the ticket has been open, not from how close that ticket is to its own deadline. So treat the colour on a waiting ticket as age, and the tooltip in step 5 as the promise.
Note: The card below it, Breach Alerts, is what raises the warning: it fires when an unanswered ticket is within 60 minutes of its deadline, and the re-alert interval is 0, so each ticket alerts once and never repeats.Now read what the colour on a waiting ticket is keyed to, on Settings, then Service Levels, then SLA Policies. File a ticket yourself and watch the clock not start.
A ticket you raised and kept is a ticket nobody is waiting on you to acknowledge, so there is nothing to acknowledge. Its SLA control shows a green circled tick reading "0s" the moment it exists, and the tooltip reads "Responded in 0s". That is deliberate, not a missing number, and it is why logging your own work never drags the desk's response figures down. Nothing to do here. Just do not go looking for a countdown that was never meant to start.
Note: The rule is narrow. It only applies while you are still the assignee. Hand the ticket to someone else as you raise it and the clock runs normally, because that person now owes the reply.File a ticket yourself and watch the clock not start. Open History on that ticket and read the row that says so.
The row reads "system", then "SLA self-acknowledged: creator took the assignment", then "for help+kb1", then the change itself, "SLA self acknowledged". A whole sentence, and the actor on it is the behaviour rather than a person, because no person did it. Under it sits the plain "Created" row with your own name on it. Worth knowing because a manager asking why this ticket reads as answered instantly has the answer on the ticket, not in your inbox.
Open History on that ticket and read the row that says so. When the ball is genuinely in the client's court, move the status and watch the clock stop.
Set the status to Waiting on Client and the SLA control changes shape: a pause glyph and the word "Paused", in grey rather than a colour. Hovering it reads "SLA paused since Sep 18, 4:51 AM - countdown stopped". Four statuses on this instance carry that behaviour: Waiting on Client, Waiting on Equipment, On Hold and Locked. When the client answers and you move the status back, the time it sat paused is credited to the deadline, so you get back the runway you had. This is the honest move when you are waiting on somebody. Using it is not gaming the number, it is what the number is for.
When the ball is genuinely in the client's court, move the status and watch the clock stop. Open one that is past its target and read it before you type.
The chip is solid red and reads "RESPOND BY" and "1d 3h", and the tooltip reads "Waiting for first response - SLA due: Sep 16, 3:00 PM". Two days ago, and still nobody has answered. This is the state the morning list in step 2 was pointing at, and the state the hourly check raised a warning about while the deadline was still an hour away. There is exactly one action: reply. Nothing else on the ticket clears it, and a status change will not.
Open one that is past its target and read it before you type. Send the reply, then read the same control again.
The counting chip is gone and in its place is a red circled cross with "1d 3h" beside it, and the tooltip now reads "Responded 11h 0m after SLA". The number beside the cross is how long the client waited. The number in the tooltip is how far past the promise the answer landed, counted in the client's own working hours, which is why two calendar days reads as eleven hours. It stops moving here. A missed target is a fact about one reply, recorded once, and it does not keep counting against the ticket for the rest of its life. Finish the work. The clock is no longer the reason to hurry.
Send the reply, then read the same control again.
The pages behind each click
Other ways to do this
Sort the whole board by what is late
Open Service Desk, then All Tickets, and read the SLA column down the page. The counting chips are the only rows still owing a first reply.
Let the ticket escalate itself
A pod can be set to escalate its own tickets when they get close to the deadline, on the pod's own page under Team, then Pods. The ticket then arrives with an Escalated chip on Needs Attention instead of quietly running out.
Ask for a different target instead of beating the current one
Change the ticket's priority. The deadline is recomputed from the priority's own target, and the new one shows on the chip straight away.
If it did not work
- The ticket shows no SLA control at all: it has no response target. Project tickets never carry one, and a board can be set to sit outside SLA entirely.
- The number in the SLA column and the number on the ticket's own page are not the same: they are counting differently today. The column counts plain elapsed time since the ticket was filed; the ticket's own chip counts against the client's working hours, so it is frozen at night and over the weekend.
- A paused ticket is still listed under Awaiting reply on Needs Attention: that list is about who holds the ticket, not about whether its clock is running. The chip on the ticket itself is the authority on the clock.
- The chip went red on a ticket that has hours of target left: the colour before the first reply follows the shared elapsed-time schedule in step 7, not the ticket's own deadline. Hover the chip for the deadline.
- You replied and the tick is amber rather than green: amber means the reply landed inside the target but slower than the Good band. It is not a breach. The red cross is the breach.
- You cannot find a resolution countdown: the resolution target is optional and is left unset on every priority here, so only the first reply is timed.
Questions this page answers
How are SLA timers shown on tickets?
Each ticket shows a first reply timer. Its target comes from the ticket priority. Green means you are inside the target. Amber means the deadline is close. Red means it was missed. Once someone replies it turns into a check or an X. Set your targets at Settings > Service Levels > SLA Policies. Tune what each priority shows under SLA Display.
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