[solved] SLA escalation calculation

[sguter90]

Infos:

Important:
If you are a Zammad Support or hosted customer and experience a technical issue, please refer to: support@zammad.com using your zammad-hostname / or company contract.

• Used Zammad version: 2.7.0-1542850410.0203025d.stretch
• Used Zammad installation source: Repository
• Operating system: Debian 9 Stretch
• Browser + version: -

Expected behavior:

• Ticket escalation should be documented with examples (inc. business hours)

Actual behavior:

• There is a existing documentation how to configure und handle escalation, but no documentation about how the escalation dates are calculated.

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

I’ve already searched the web and the source code of zammad. I still don’t surley know how the calculation of the 3 escalation dates works.

[MrGeneration]

I’ll try to clarify this, let me know if it helps or if you need further information, I could update the documentation then.

General
The SLA is only accounted within the provided business hours (that’s why you need to define a calendar).
So short: The SLA will respect weekend, holidays and times where your company is not in service.

This means if you have a first response time of let’s say 2 hours, your business time ends at 5pm and your customer sends his mail at 4pm, then the ticket will not escalate on this day (as it would have to escalated at 6pm). Instead, it will escalated one hour after your next working day has started.

Valid responses
When using SLA it’s important to know, what Zammad counts as response and what not.

Responses are all article types that are public / the customer can see so:

• Calls
• Public Notes (not default! Can be adjusted via Console)
• E-Mails sent to the customer

Private messages are no response, even though you’ve been working on the ticket!

Tricking SLA
Most SLAs are only set to open tickets (which makes sense) but not to pending states.
So if you have a ticket in a pending state all the time (no matter if you’re waiting for a customers feedback or not) the SLA will not kick in, the ticket won’t escalate.

First response Time
First response time can be up to 99 hours (if you use arrow up you can trick zammad, not sure how this affects calculation!). This actually is about the first response you give your customer to the ticket (and is one time).

If you have no upcoming values like update time or solution time, the SLA chain will end at this point.

Update Time
Update time can get quite troublesome, it describes the time frame between each valid response the agent has time for working on the issue. If you choose this value too small, you’ll have escalating tickets all the time. This value is calculated from the last ticket update with public article and so can be “extended”.

Resolution time
This one is global and can’t be resetted. It should always be bigger than first response, as otherwise you don’t have the slightest chance.

This calculates the resolution time from the ticket creation time. So if the ticket solution is set to 1 hour you have one hour from ticket creation to solve the issue, other wise it will permanently escalated.

[sguter90]

This is exactly what I wanted!
Please add this to the offical documentation!

I know some parts are documented here:
https://zammad-admin-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manage-slas.html

But the text you wrote here is much clearer and has more examples.

What I would add also is that there is a mail notification (if enabled) every day at 00:00 UTC as long the ticket is “escalating”. This is something I haven’t expected.