SLAs

Automate SLAs for issues that should be completed within a certain amount of time.

Overview

SLAs (Service-level agreements) automatically apply deadlines to issues when they match your defined parameters. While traditionally used to describe service level agreements with your customers, SLAs can also be used to maintain internal standards for how quickly bugs will be fixed and time-sensitive issues will be resolved.

Configure

SLAs are available to workspaces on Plus and Enterprise plans. Enable the feature in settings under Workspace > SLAs, then use the workflow builder to create rules for when to apply an SLA to a newly created issue.

Basics

SLAs appear on issues as a fire icon which transitions from gray > yellow > orange > red as an issue nears and breaches the SLA. Once the issue is completed, the SLA field remains and indicates completion time down to the minute and whether the SLA was achieved early or failed.

SLAs are automatically created on any issue that matches the rules set in SLA settings. You can also manually add SLAs to issues if desired.

Default SLAs

When you enable SLAs, you'll enable a set of default rules:

• When Priority is Urgent, add a 24 hour SLA
• When Priority is High, add a 1 week SLA
• When Priority is Medium, Low, or No Priority, remove the SLA

You can edit, delete or create new SLA rules as desired.

Create new SLA Rules

Select New Rule to create a new SLA rule.

Set the time interval to any of the following durations:

• 12 hours
• 24 hours
• 48 hours
• 1 week
• 2 weeks
• 4 weeks
• Custom time

You can filter by almost any field to specify when SLAs should be applied, including Team, Status, Assignee, Creator, Priority, Labels, Project, Project Status, and Roadmap, and filters can be combined.

Remove SLAs

Linear's default SLA rules contain conditions to remove SLAs when priority is marked as Medium, Low, or No priority. These "removal" rules are helpful to maintain data hygiene, so that if an issue's priority is downgraded, SLAs which are no longer relevant will be removed. We recommend keeping these in the workspace.

SLA status and filtering

Linear groups SLAs into different SLA statuses. You will be able to filter and organize views of issues by their SLA status, and the different statuses will be indicated by the color of the SLA icon.

SLA notifications

Subscribers to an issue with an SLA receive notifications in their Inbox when SLAs are 24 hours away from being breached as well as when SLAs are breached. Individuals can opt in to receive notifications whenever any issue in their Team has an SLA, too. Manage these notifications in settings under Account > Notifications.

Viewing SLA issues

You can filter any view to see issues according to SLA status: Breached, High Risk, Medium Risk, Low Risk, Achieved, Failed, and No SLA.

Insights offers a helpful way to evaluate how well you're meeting your SLAs. Filter a view by SLA, set Insight parameters to Issue count (measure) and SLA status (dimension) to see a clear breakdown of how well you're meeting your SLAs.

Manually apply SLAs

You can add SLAs to issues even when they don't apply to a predefined rule. Select the three dot menu from the issue creation modal to apply an SLA.

Note that if you create an SLA that conflicts with a "removal" rule, the SLA will automatically be removed after the issue is created. In these cases, you can override the rule but only if you add the SLA by editing the issue after it's created (not during issue creation). Do so from the issue view by selecting the three dot menu, then Set SLA.

FAQ