special operational hours

special operational hours

Several enhancements were included for Operational hours in build 15200. In addition to these, a long sought feature "Special Operational Hours" was also introduced designed to handle planned periods of reduced team capacity without distorting SLA performance.

Let's walk through a common real-world scenario.

Use Case: Year-End Change Freeze

During the year end period (late December to mid-January holiday season):

  1. No deployments or non-critical changes are allowed.
  2. A large part of the team is on leave.
  3. A small on-call team handles only critical issues.
  4. Standard SLAs (e.g., 4-hour response, 8-hour resolution) assume full staffing.

With Special Operational Hours, you can:

  1. Define a temporary schedule for specific duration.
  2. Reduce operational hours (e.g., 9–5 or 10–2 or on-call only).
  3. Relax or pause SLAs for non-critical tickets.
  4. Keep strict SLAs active for critical tickets.


Without Special Operational Hours:

  1. Tickets continue to follow corresponding SLA timers.
  2. Low-priority tickets breach SLAs unnecessarily.
  3. Escalations and notifications increase.
  4. SLA reports show misleading performance drops.
  5. Teams return in mid-January to a backlog already marked as "failed".


With Special Operational Hours:

  1. SLA timers pause or slow down for non-critical tickets.
  2. Tickets raised outside business hours are queued instead of triggering immediate SLA breaches helping teams focus on priority issues during working hours.
  3. Notifications are limited to high-impact issues.
  4. SLA metrics reflect planned reduced capacity, not failure.
  5. Teams resume work with clean and accurate SLA tracking.

Why This Matters.

This feature goes beyond avoiding SLA breaches. It helps ensure:

  1. Accurate reporting that reflects real operational conditions.
  2. Reduced alert fatigue during low-capacity periods.
  3. Clear stakeholder expectations around delays.
  4. Fair performance evaluation for IT teams.

Refer to the following documentations for more information.




We welcome your thoughts on these enhancements and how they fit your environment along with any suggestions to further improve their value.