How to configure SLA calendars & escalation ladders#

Audience: admin — SLA policy is a settings-owner responsibility; staff consume the result but cannot bend it.

When a client has an agreement for a 2-hour response on urgent tickets, you don't want the SLA clock ticking at 3 AM on a Sunday unless they pay for 24/7 coverage. In Marula, business-hours calendars control when the SLA stopwatch runs, and escalation ladders automatically notify leads when a ticket approaches or breaches its deadline.

Prerequisites#

• Admin access to Settings → SLA (under Delivery).
• The IANA timezone name for each support office or region you cover (for example, America/New_York or Europe/London).
• Your target response and resolution times for each priority level (P1 through P4).

1. How calendars and escalation ladders fit together#

The Settings → SLA page is built around two rules:

"Business-hours calendars govern every SLA clock; escalation ladders fire once per ticket when consumed budget crosses an offset."

In practice:

• Calendars define when the clock ticks: your open hours for each day of the week, observed holidays, and timezone. Outside those hours (or when a ticket sits in a Waiting status column), the SLA timer pauses automatically.
• Escalation ladders define who gets alerted and when: threshold offsets against the ticket's SLA budget, firing once per threshold on a ticket.

2. Create a business-hours calendar#

Click New calendar and enter:

1. A descriptive name (for example, Standard Business Hours — Eastern or 24x7 Critical Coverage).
2. The IANA timezone (America/New_York, UTC, etc.). Because the SLA engine calculates deadlines directly from this timezone, double-check that it matches your contractual hours.
3. The open start and end times for each day of the week, plus any company holidays.

3. Set priority targets and escalation steps#

In the policy section below the calendar, set your response and resolution targets for P1 through P4 tickets and configure the escalation offsets that fire as time runs low.

4. Test on a live ticket#

Open a test ticket on your board and check the SLA ring in the ticket header. Move the ticket into a Waiting column to verify the countdown pauses, then move it back to In progress. When a ticket crosses an escalation threshold, it surfaces at the top of /today and breaks through staff notification quiet hours automatically.

What you learned#

• SLA countdowns run only during the open windows on their assigned business-hours calendar and pause automatically when a ticket is waiting on the client.
• Escalation steps fire once per threshold and route into your alert and automation queues (see Author automation rules).