SLA attainment is the percentage of eligible support tickets that met their service-level agreement's response and resolution targets. Support leaders and account managers use it to review service against each account's own contract, by priority.
SLA attainment means how often you kept the promise in a service-level agreement. Of all the tickets the SLA applies to, it is the share that met every response and resolution target. If 96 of 100 eligible tickets were answered and resolved within their contracted times, SLA attainment is 96%.
SLA attainment (%) = tickets meeting all applicable SLA targets / eligible tickets in the reporting population x 100
For a ticket-level measure, a pass meets every applicable response and resolution target in that account's contract. Zendesk's metric definitions distinguish tickets that met all applied targets from those that breached at least one. Calculate separately by account and priority before rolling up.
Name the population and cutoff: completed tickets, an opening cohort or another agreed basis. Show open breaches, pending outcomes, exclusions and unknown results separately; SLA denominator rules explains the reconciliation. If no tickets are eligible, report N/A rather than 100%.
Do not mix ticket-level attainment with target-instance attainment. One ticket can supply several response obligations; Zendesk's reporting guidance explains why instance-based reports can count multiple achievements and breaches on the same ticket.
Support leaders use it to find missed service commitments; account managers use the per-account result in customer reviews. A team average is useful for the overall workload, but it does not replace attainment against each account's contracted SLA.
In this illustrative completed-ticket population, every ticket is eligible and has a known outcome:
| Scope | Met all targets / eligible | Attainment |
|---|---|---|
| Team | 1,152 / 1,200 | 96.0% |
| Account A | 17 / 24 | 70.8% |
The team calculation is 1,152 / 1,200 x 100 = 96%. Account A has a 4-hour response term: 17 / 24 x 100 = 70.8%, or about 71%. The check is 17 passes + 7 breaches = 24 eligible tickets. Its contract pays a service credit of 10% of the monthly fee when attainment falls below 90%. On an $18,000 monthly fee, the credit is $1,800.
There is no universal benchmark: a good rate is one at or above the threshold written into that customer's contract. Contracts often state the threshold as a round figure such as 90%, 95% or 99%, and the stricter the response time, the harder the same percentage is to hold. So compare each account with its own threshold, not with the team average. In the example, 96% for the team looks healthy, while Account A at 71% is well under its 90% threshold and owes a credit.
The two terms are often used for the same thing. Where a team separates them, SLA attainment is the measured percentage of tickets that met their targets, and SLA compliance is whether that percentage met the contract's threshold for the period: a yes or no per account. Account A above has an attainment of 71% and is out of compliance.
The tightest contracts breach invisibly. If every ticket is measured against the default target, an account with a four-hour response term looks like the best-served customer, because its tickets clear the looser default. Measured against its own term, it is the worst.
Credits before claims. When attainment is computed from each account's clause every month, the service credit is known and issued before the customer has to ask for it.