Jira Service Management SLA Reporting: Understanding SLA Status and Breach Types

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define the expected response and resolution times for service requests, helping teams meet customer expectations. They are commonly used by IT support teams, customer service departments, and other service-oriented functions to ensure timely delivery and accountability. In Jira Service Management (JSM), SLAs are configured by setting time goals based on issue criteria such as priority, request type, or custom fields. However, understanding your team’s ability to meet SLA objectives goes beyond simply seeing “Met” or “Breached” in a report.

That’s why we’ll explain the meaning of the various SLA status icons in JSM, briefly touch on SLA configuration, and share effective SLA reports built with the Performance Objectives app – so you can get the most out of this powerful JSM feature.

 Here’s a breakdown of the icons you may encounter, as per Atlassian documentation:

The image above showcases a range of SLA status icons in Jira Service Management, applied across both open and resolved issues from different work types. Each icon represents a specific SLA state:

• Green check – SLA met

• Blue clock – SLA in progress and on track

• Pause icon – SLA temporarily paused (typically when the issue is in a status like Waiting for customer, On hold, where the next action lies outside the team’s control; these statuses are defined in the SLA configuration)

• Red clock and red cross – both represent breached SLAs

If you want to set up SLAs – or create custom ones – in your Jira Service Management project, we recommend visiting the official JSM documentation. Below is an image of the SLA configuration (the Conditions part) from our service management demo project, used to generate the sample reports shown in this article.

As mentioned earlier, both the red clock and the red cross icons indicate a breached SLA in Jira Service Management. But why are there two different icons for the same breach state?

The difference lies in how the SLA is configured and whether the SLA timer is still active.

• The red clock appears when an SLA has been breached, but the timer is still running – meaning the issue remains in a status that keeps the SLA counting, and the breach time continues to accumulate. Usually, this means the SLA’s end condition hasn’t been met yet. In our demo project, we have configured a “Finish counting when” condition to “Resolution set” – refer to the SLA settings image above.

• The red cross appears when an SLA has been breached and the timer has been stopped – typically because the issue has met its end condition or transitioned into a status that ends the SLA cycle (e.g., Resolved or Closed), so the breach time is no longer increasing.

To better understand this, let’s look at two examples from our filtered list:

• MP-17995 shows a red clock, indicating the issue is breached and still active in a status that continues counting the SLA time. Hovering over the Time to Resolution SLA shows this issue is 6h 32m past its goal time.

• MP-17922, on the other hand, displays a red cross, meaning the SLA was breached but has now stopped accumulating further time because the issue reached a terminal status (end condition). Hovering over the Time to Resolution SLA shows that it was breached  30m (the time indicates the time that has passed since the SLA breached).

If you want to report on issues with active (timer still running) and completed (timer ended) SLAs in Jira Service Management, you can use the Performance Objectives app and its newly introduced field –  SLA – Is Active.

By combining the SLA – Is Active and SLA – Is Breached fields, you can even configure a report that visualizes only breached SLA issues and clearly distinguishes whether they are active (red clock) or completed (red cross). For step-by-step guidance on how to configure these and many other SLA reports in Jira using the Performance Objectives app, please refer to our Confluence documentation.

This distinction between breached SLAs active and completed is valuable because active breaches are often seen as recoverable – since it’s end condition has not been met, the team can take action to reduce the impact of the breach. In contrast, completed breaches are seen as non-recoverable and better suited for retrospective analysis and process improvement. Differentiating between the two may help teams prioritize responses, make informed real-time decisions, and generate more actionable SLA reports in Jira.

Understanding Service Level Agreement statuses in Jira Service Management, and knowing how to report on them effectively, can give teams better control over service performance. With the help of the Performance Objectives app, you can go beyond “Met” or “Breached” and gain meaningful insights that drive action and improvement.