HALO Implementation Series – Video 4 – SLAs

hey everyone and welcome to another episode in the Halo implementation series uh today with me again I have my favorite person from Halo Mr Halo himself Morgan aspel and today um we are going to be talking about um slas so hey Morgan how you doing and thanks for being with me again hey Chris yeah thanks for having me um yeah hopefully that Mr Halo name sticks at some point I'm sure it will you know of of all the people I've spoken to at Halo um which is pretty much you you you are Mr Halo in my eyes so um you know and I really appreciate everything you've done to kind of help me and um you know everything you're doing to to help help msps to kind of get this this product set up so I'm very interested in in um uh you know talking more about slas and also um you know from the customers point of view you know or or I guess Halo customers point of view you how do they set up slas what do they mean when do they use them all that kind of stuff so um over to you awesome all right let me just share my screen can you see that certainly can yeah perfect yeah um like you say SLA is a sort of a core metric that um and most if not all msps are going to want to be tracking um and we'll take a look at sort of how you create a particular SLA how we can create multiple slas some of the core features around SLA functionality in Halo PSA so as with uh most of the changes that are made in the system we're going to firstly want to head to our configuration module and within here we have our service level agreements option um so the first place that we'll go in here is we'll go to the general settings and I'll just highlight some of the core features within the the general settings um so slas in Halo track two core metrics they track an initial response time and a resolution time we'll talk more about what those refer to in a moment um but yeah we we start with the we we have those two that you can track and the first two options at the top are do you actually want to track both of those or potentially you're only concerned with the uh the fix by date at which point you could disable your response Target altogether below that as well uh we also have this feature that I I like to mention during implementations that's are SLA hold reminders so we can have um emails sent out on a scheduled basis to the customers when a ticket is awaiting their response and then if no response is provided within a given date range we can actually have the ticket closed off so I quite like this feature as a means of keeping the ticket moving forward right you don't just have a ticket in a a dormant state where potentially the the issue has been resolved but once it's been resolved the customer just never applies again and the ticket never actually gets closed so if you enable this option you'll find uh two Fields presented below where you can specify a number of hours between reminder emails so the frequency of those Chaser emails that are automatically sent and then a number of hours uh between which the ticket going on hold where no response is given and the ticket being closed off and you might be thinking at this point uh okay so we set a number of hours um but I don't necessarily want my my incident to be closed off at midnight on a Saturday I actually only want my reminder emails and closures to be sent during my working business hours now you can enable that by enabling the uh use workday hours option just below so at that point we'll be inheriting the uh the work days that are configured in Halo which leads me nicely onto the next Point within our slas so we take a step back and instead of going into general settings I can actually go into work dayss and these are going to be how you specify the hours during which your SLA time timer is ticking down again um if your your standard working hours are 9 to 5 and someone logs a ticket at 7 p.m. you're not going to want that SLA timer to be ticking down until 9:00 am. the next day so you can come into your work days uh and you can configure them to either use the same time each day at which point you specify a start and end time and of course the days that are applicable or if you have a work week that sort of has uh the hours broken up so potentially you have uh you know I don't know 8 to 4 Monday to Tuesday 9 to 5 Wednesday thday Friday at that point you can actually pick the start and end times each day by unchecking this I'd love to work at that company that you work at that does 8 to 4 Monday and Tuesday and then be the dream yeah yeah yeah living the dream right I I suppose that a functional example a more sort practical example of this could be um if you have a different teams in your MSP that work different shifts in order for you to provide service uh over sort of a larger time frame you might want to specify different slas uh and and have different work hours applicable to the different times that you're actually working so that makes sense part of that as well of course is going to be your holidays so we have a holidays tab at the top where you can put your your public holidays in at which point the the SLA timer is not going to be ticking down as well uh you know for for the unfortunate individuals that are working Christmas day um you know I mean this is this is off but for those unfortunate individuals that are working Christmas day at least they can be rest assured that they're they're not sort of having an SLA time tracked against their responses yeah so just to ask in terms of um and actually this is something that that that would be useful for me to know in there as well is I've always set those manually um every year is that something that you have to do or is that something that can be you know every year does it automatically kind of detect what those holidays should be in set then at the minute it's manual um but we are working on having those imported automatically and and updated each year according to uh region and and whatnot sure yeah yeah because and I think that's one of the things in in um you know every PSA tool I've ever worked with that is the same it's all it's always manual and I think it's one of the things people always forget to do because you know you get to a point where it's you know you suddenly got to the end of the year and then you forget to go put the holidays in for the following year and then um you you know your slas trigger at all kinds of weird times because it doesn't recognize those as holidays so yeah um yeah so that would be good to kind of have that whole side automated based on whatever country you're in and ab so yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure it's gonna um definitely save a lot of time once we have the ability to at a minimum import from some Json file or some CSV um yeah yeah yeah I mean even if it's you know even if it's a manual thing that somebody has to set up them like you know like like an integration that you set up yourself rather than you know then they can choose to integrate with whatever holiday system they want to integrate with somewhere but um yeah now that would that would actually be really cool so for sure yeah cool um and then the the final option in here and sort of tying tying everything together is to actually create the slas so I've mentioned that you can track an initial response and resolution time uh and the the SLA time will be ticking Down based on particular work days uh but how do we actually create our slas themselves and how do we establish the target response and resolution hours per priority SL SLA we do that within the service level agreements option within config service level agreements and so um you can create multiple slas in here each SLA is going to be uh composed of a series of priorities and where one is the the highest priority going down you can have as many of these priorities As You Wish uh just based on the the level that you have here and when you're setting your priorities up you can give it a level again sort of one being the highest and and working down that way we give our priorities a description and a priority color that establishes the the SLA window um that we saw on our our ticket details in our previous session below that as well we can override our workday hours so um this is quite a nice feature so you might have your standard uh incident SLA that ticks down during business day business hours but then a P1 is 247 so if P1 comes in you know any time of the day that needs to get resolved so you can override your workday hours per priority within an SLA okay that's good and then below that we have our response Target time and response resolution time uh in hours or days based on what we pick on the right hand side here okay cool um so we've got our slas um and our based on our priorities and we've got our work dayss and all of that stuff the last point I just want to mention is how do we actually apply these slas to a particular site in Halo a particular ticket type and so what we can do once we've got our SLA set up is we might want to head to configuration tickets ticket types and we might want to say that uh a particular ticket type is using a particular SLA we could do that from our ticket type configuration within the defaults tab just down here under our default service level agreement um where we can also set our default priority as well so you know you might have a a medium priority and everything comes in as medium medium initially and could be overridden potentially at the point of triaging or or based on some some uh other functionality such as ticket rules that we'll we'll mention in another session and then the other place that you might want to consider when sort of changing your slas is going to be within a site so you can also set a service level agreement at site level okay um and yeah I think that's that's slas in a nutshell um couple of other points that that we'll discuss in another session namely around those automated emails um you know what do those automated emails look like uh and that's based on some particular email templates uh just to briefly mention that can can you go through um just while we're talking about slas maybe talk about um you know you were talking about sort of setting up p1s p2s but but how do those relate to kind of tickets right so at what point in the tickets does that um you know when it when it status is new and then I changed the status you know how do I determine at what point that that hits what SLA um so I mean initially so yeah let's let's just talk through sort of a ticket ticket life cycle real quick and actually have a look at the uh the s and probably another important point to mention is when um when did those timers actually tick down so yeah first things first we have our ticket type with a default SLA and default priority and what that means is when I go to log a new incident uh well first ly we have our priority coming in here uh based on our default priority we'll just leave this it is and we'll see here again we'll take a look at what's happening here in another session but effectively a a ticket rule based on the impact and urgency selected has defined our priority um but for now we won't worry about that too much and we'll see that up top we've got uh our service level agreement section with our Target response and resolution times and our timer ticking down in accordance with the SLA default SLA and priority combination um in terms of establishing a First Response that's based on an action in Halo that is configured to uh respond to the SLA so if we were to go to config tickets actions and we were to take a look at private note for example I can't type we go um we have down here in the details tab for our action response Behavior now of course a private note we don't want to mark that as an SLA response however something like email user we would want that to Mark as an SL resp response and in practice what that means is in our ticket that is still ticking down and doesn't yet have a response Target a response marked against it if I were to write a private note then we're still down against our initial response Target um however if I was to uh click email user we'll see that now our response has been logged and that's based on that response Behavior at Action level and then there's um that leads us on to the next point of how do we actually establish when our SLA timer is ticking down so that's close enough um yeah so so we've sent our email we've marked our response we can actually see now below our resolution Target we've got this on hold so we we can now see that the SLA timer is not going to be ticking down um and that's all driven by the status of our ticket and um so how we can actually determine what statuses in Halo what ticket statuses in Halo pause or resume the SL timer we can do that by going to configuration tickets statuses and for each status we have this SLA hold action so of course the with user status is going to pause our SLA timer and that's what we just saw on the ticket um and while I'm here as well it's definitely worth mentioning this check box below this option below where we can establish whether or not SLA hold reminders are actually sent when a ticket is on this status so a good example of this is the with user status it kind of assuming that we're we're awaiting customer response here we're waiting for some feedback back from the the end user in question um so at this point we will want to be sending those hold reminders we are we require more information we don't want that um we don't want that email to not get back to us and if it doesn't get back to us then will'll close the ticket off however a status such as scheduled for example you might have a site visit scheduled for a month um or you might have some you know nonurgent issue that it we're going to follow up with the the customer next week on at that point we want to pause our SLA timer because we don't want to skew our metrics there's nothing else that the MSP can do at this point but at the same time we don't want to send those reminders to the customer because there's not actually any more information required from the customer so we could have uh a status in here that might be you know scheduled and that's going to pause our timer but it's not going to send hold reminders and then again um within our statuses we can also specify uh that we want to remove the ticket from hold so tying this back to our ticket type configuration we can see it again for our incident ticket type when the end user sends an update on that ticket either via the self-service portal or via an inbound email that's going to change the status of the ticket to updated and then based on our SLA hold action for the status we're going to be resuming our timer so um you've got your email user action that changes the status to with user and pauses the timer and then you've got your ticket type configuration such that the response back from the user changes status to updated and kicks off that timer again okay all right that makes sense yeah yeah so that's a a kind of really good way that you can you can kind of customize this and drive this from um from statuses and from um you know actions and and things like that so yeah yeah yeah makes a lot of sense it's um I I I imagine that initially it can be quite an overwhelming concept it certainly was for me when I um when I was first learning Halo but when you when you start to see it as sort of monkey chaining one bit of config to the next you can break it down quite nicely like that so you know we've got our got our SLA and we've got the timer ticking down well how do we uh pause or resume the timer well that's based on the status okay so how do we manipulate the status that's based on an action and and hopefully you can start to see how the different modules at this point would be tying together to provide an overall um effective experience for the MSP and for the customer yeah cool cool okay yeah makes sense makes perfect perfect sense so I um you know and I think as you say you know and again a lot of these things in terms of how this works and how things go on hold and come off hold and um you know the various SLA statuses I I I think are pretty similar to the way that that any other um PSA tool does this um and then also um you know so anyone who's been using any other kind of PSA tool in using the the slas this would be fairly um you know fairly familiar to them um because pretty much this this works in the same way ohol cool yeah excellent well um you know this was just a short one to kind of go through that stuff so I think that was that was really useful and um I really appreciate that so thank you very much Morgan and um we'll see you on the next video always a pleasure thank you Chris thanks see you on the next one cheers by