Use priority to group SLA goals

You can group several priorities under a goal to increase the amount of time targets that goal can handle. A goal with several priorities grouped under it still only counts as one goal. Only priority time targets can only be grouped under a goal.

To see any changes or improvements to your goal configuration, you’ll need to review and edit your SLAs so your priorities are grouped under the relevant goals.

An example of how improved SLAs increases your overall goal capacity

If you had High, Medium, and Low priorities, and the Service requests ticket category, you would need 3 goals total. This goal number also potentially multiplies every time you add another value to your JQL, such as Organization, Assignee, or a custom field value.

You can take those High, Medium, and Low priorities and group them under a parent JQL expression "Ticket category = "Service requests" and this would be calculated as 1 goal. An All remaining priorities field is also present as a default value that catches any other priority values, including None. Each priority value under the parent JQL can be given a time target that is represented in the agent queue and issue view as normal.

At the current goal limit of 90, this new structure effectively gives you 90 * priority as your new capacity for time targets. For example, if you have 90 goals and 5 priorities, this would be 90 * 5 = 450 time targets.

What happens if you don’t group goals by priority

If you don’t group your goals by priority, issues will continue to be checked against goals in the list from top to bottom against the JQL in the parent goal and the calendar and time target you define in All matching priorities.

The All matching priorities field contains the calendar and time target values for the parent JQL expression. If you do not group any priorities under a goal, we’ll match the goal to the JQL expression by itself.

How to group your SLAs by priority

You must be a project administrator or Jira administrator to edit or create an SLA. When you first add a priority to a goal, the All matching priorities field will change to All remaining priorities. This field will always be matched last within a list of priorities and will always match with issues based on the parent JQL expression after all other priorities have been checked.

1. From your service project, go to Project settings > SLAs. All existing SLAs are displayed here.

2. Navigate to an existing SLA and select Edit.

3. Select Add priority under a goal to add a priority.

4. Select the appropriate priority from the dropdown menu. Priorities in the dropdown menu are populated based on Jira settings. Learn more about configuring priorities.

5. Give your priority a time target and calendar value.

6. Repeat from step 3 to continue adding priorities to your goal.

Priority values added via the Add priority button act as an individually calculated AND statement to the parent JQL expression. To ensure configuration works as efficiently as possible, we recommend you review your SLA configurations so that you do not have goals with AND "Priority" = JQL expressions that create duplications.