Set business hours and SLAs
Stop Atlas from promising replies your team can’t make, alert the right people when an SLA is about to breach, and decide what happens when a ticket lands at 3 a.m.
Plan availability
Business hours and SLA configuration are Enterprise-tier features. They’re not part of Free, Basic, or Pro - see pricing for the full breakdown.
Set your hours
Open Configuration > Business hours. You define one schedule per weekday: a start time, an end time, and a timezone. Set days off to closed. Add holidays individually or as recurring entries (e.g. yearly).
The schedule is evaluated at ticket-creation time, so timezone or holiday changes take effect on the next incoming ticket.
What happens outside hours
Pick a behaviour per server:
- Block - refuse to open new tickets outside hours. Show the customer the off-hours message you wrote.
- Add all - accept the ticket, ping everyone in your staff role list regardless of on-call.
- Add all with warning - accept the ticket, ping staff, and post the off-hours message into the channel so the customer knows replies might be slower.
The off-hours message has its own title, description, and a toggle for whether tickets can be created at all - useful for posting a clear “we’ll reply at 9 a.m.” instead of dropping the ticket entirely.
SLA timers
Toggle SLA tracking on and define a priority matrix with first-response and resolution targets per level:
- Low, Medium, High, Critical - each with a first-response budget and a resolution budget, in minutes.
- Business-hours-only toggle - when on, timers pause outside your hours (and over holidays). When off, they run 24/7.
- Notification channel - pick where breach alerts get posted.
Escalation rules
For each priority you can define escalation rules that fire at a threshold:
- Trigger percentage - fire when this much of the SLA budget is consumed (e.g. 80 % means: alert before breach, not after).
- Notify roles / users - who gets the ping.
- Action - ping in channel, send a DM, post a separate channel alert, or reassign the ticket to someone else.
Most teams chain two rules per priority: a soft alert at 75 % to the on-call role, a hard reassign at 100 % to a senior. You can layer more if you want a full ladder.