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On this page, you’ll learn how the SLA Pause function works as well as how to use it. This page has two main parts:
SLA Pause Function Overview
In many cases, you may want to pause the SLA calculation when the ticket is in a certain status (often as you wait for a customer response) or, depending on the individual contract, on holidays or outside of working hours.
This is especially useful if you are supporting products in different time zones, and your contracts specify response times dependent on your customer's time zone. You can also pause the SLA on company holidays and/or on specific dates and days of the week.
When the SLA is paused, the Target Date will be moved forward for as long as the pause duration itself. For example, if your SLA is paused for 10 minutes, the Target Date will also be 10 minutes later than what was originally calculated. This change will also be reflected in the elapsed duration.
Within Time to SLA, you can select statuses and field values that trigger the SLA countdown to pause.
Your options for Pause are:
Status is any of the selected status(es) – You can pick various statuses (To Do, In Progress, Done…). Once your SLA is in one of these statuses, it will stop counting and will continue to count only when it leaves this status.
The field value satisfies a condition – To pause the SLA on a certain field value, simply set the field you want for the statuses where it should be paused. You have numerous field options.
If the SLA Goal is a negotiation date, keep this in mind:
When the Pause condition is met and your SLA is paused, the Target Date won't be moved forward. For example, let's say your SLA has been paused for 5 minutes. If the SLA Goal is not a negotiation date, the Target Date will be moved 5 minutes forward.
You can see what a paused SLA looks like on the SLA Panel below.
Next, we’ll go over how to set Pause conditions for SLAs. Your options are:
Pause the SLA when the status is any of the selected status(es)
Go to SLAs, and click Add New SLA Definition.
Scroll to the Pause section, and click the Add one now button.
Select Status is any of selected status(es)..., and click the drop-down menu to see all possible field values.
Click the status that the SLA requires in order to pause.
Click Confirm, and the selected condition(s) will now appear in the box.
Pause the SLA when the field value satisfies a condition
Go to SLAs, and click Add New SLA Definition.
Scroll to the Pause section, and click the Add one now button.
Select Field value satisfies a condition..., and click the drop-down menu to see all possible field values.
Click the status that the SLA requires in order to pause.
Click Confirm, and the selected condition will now appear in the box.
🔁 Recap
We just learned how you can pause an SLA, which concludes the Creating SLA Conditions chapter. Let’s do a quick recap of some of the most important points:
You can add more than one condition. There is an “OR” function (not “AND”) between conditions, which means when any of the conditions are met, the SLA will start.
When there are multiple pause intervals, all of them will be applied to the SLA. Let’s take “assignee is EMPTY” and “team is EMPTY”, for example. Here, the SLA will be paused when the assignee is EMPTY, the team is EMPTY, or both of them are EMPTY.
For the resetting of finished SLAs, there are 3 use cases to keep in mind:
A finished SLA is a closed contract and a reset cannot change that⭐ A finished contract might be reactivated from zero with a reset
A finished contract might be completely invalidated with a reset. Even in FIRST cycle SLAs, the SLA can start from zero with a new START event.
With all that in mind, we will learn next how you can create SLA goals that meet your business goals.