A visual countdown for your SLA violations

Do you know about the 45-minute productivity trick? It's a simple rule that's helped me get through mountains of tasks. Well, here's how it works: I usually pick one or two tasks that can be completed in 45 minutes; then I set a 45-minute timer and work with the countdown to complete the tasks. This trick has never failed me because knowing exactly how much time I have left, I can easily adjust my pace and complete my tasks on time.

The important thing here is time - knowing exactly how long you have until touchdown helps you pick up your pace and complete your work on time. Likewise in the helpdesk scenario, setting up a n SLA countdown report for active tickets lets you see exactly how long you have until your SLAs are breached so you can reallocate, reschedule, or make changes to the technician workload to avoid a SLA breach. This will be a good report to run on a live feed so your technicians can see how much work they have cut out for them.

To create this report, populate your axes with fields as shown below:

X-axis: Time to breach (Actual)

Y-axis: Request ID (count)

Color: Request ID (count)

Filter: Time to breach (Choose "Actual". And set Range between -500 and +500. This will set your SLA violation focus window to ~8 hours)

"Time to breach" is not available out of the box. It is a formula column that can be created using the following formula:

if("Request Pending Status"=true,dateandtimediff(MiNUTE, currentdate(), "DueBy Time"),NULL)

SLA violation threshold value should be set at 0. This line will serve as our marker. The bubbles to the right of the threshold line represent requests approaching SLA violation. The ones on the left represent the ones that have already violated the SLA.

Here's a tip: Set an auto-refresh interval and project it on a large screen so this report serves as a live tracker for SLA violations.

To check out more interesting reports and dashboards that can help you track your helpdesk tickets, please visit our demo page.