SLA Hold

The SLA Hold feature can be used to put a ticket on hold if you are waiting to receive further information.

For example, if you receive a ticket and you need more information in order to resolve the issue, you can put the ticket on hold until you receive that information. The hold time for the ticket is calculated in business hours only. For example, given a standard working day from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, if a ticket with a 4-hour target resolution is created at 3:00 PM on day 1, the resulting resolution date and time is calculated to be 10:00 AM the next day.

If you put the ticket on hold at 4:00 PM on day 1 and take it off hold at 9:00 AM the next day, the standard business day hold time is 2 hours (4:00 PM to 5:00 PM on day 1, 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM on day 2).

The adjusted target resolution time is now 12:00 PM, that is 10:00 AM plus 2 hours. Hold time outside of normal business hours does not count in the target resolution time calculation.

The accumulated SLA hold time and adjusted target dates are displayed in the Ticket application.

When SLA hold is enabled for a ticket, the elapsed time is calculated based on the target date plus the accumulated SLA hold time. A ticket in SLA hold status cannot escalate.

Note: By default, SLA Hold is not enabled. Users can enable SLA Hold from the Organizations application. Although SLA Hold is not enabled by default, the SLA Hold check box is present on the SLA application under the Service Level Agreement tab, but the check box is disabled.

The Progress Map - SLA Hold indicator will only be displayed when an SLA (that has SLA hold enabled) has been applied to a ticket. This can be changed by modifying the ISSLAAPPLIED condition.

Through configuration in the Organizations application it is possible to enable an SLA that does not allow a Hold, and also to apply multiple SLAs to a single ticket. If the multiple SLAs option is enabled the Progress Map will display SLA Hold if there is at least one SLA applied that is SLA Holdable.

Reports and SLA Hold

There are four SLA Hold attributes in the Ticket application (incidents, problems, and service requests) that are maintained (persistent). These values are stored in Ticket table and are available so that BIRT reports can be used to display these values in reports. These attributes are:

ADJUSTEDTARGETCONTACTTIME
ADJUSTEDTARGETRESOLUTIONTIME
ADJUSTEDTARGETRESPONSETIME
ACCUMULATEDHOLDTIME

The accumulated SLA Hold time attribute (ACCUMULATEDHOLDTIME) is stored as a ‘DURATION' data type in the database. This value is a floating point number that represents the number of hours. For example, 2 hours and 30 minutes is stored as the value 2.5.

In the Service Request application, the value for the accumulated SLA Hold time attribute is displayed in hours and minutes (HH:MM format), but when this attribute is chosen to be displayed in a Query Based Report (QBR, also known as an ad-hoc report), the value displayed is the number of hours a ticket was placed in a hold state. If you want to display the value in hours and minutes format (for example, 02:30 instead of 2.5), a custom report will need to be created and the decimal format converted within the report implementation.

For BIRT reports, the getDuration() method is provided, and this returns a formatted string in the HH:MM format. For example, for a data set within a report, here is how this method would be called within the fetch() section:

 row["accumulatedholdtime"] = dataSet.getDuration("accumulatedholdtime")

The dataSet object is created in the open() section using the MXReportDataSetProvider.create method.