Operational Level Agreements (OLA) policy lets the support team have internal agreements with the teams that they collaborate with. Admins can configure OLA Policies that dictate the time within which Agents should complete ‘Tasks’ within Tickets or Problems or Changes or Releases, ensuring continuous service delivery and compliance.


Setting up OLA policies

Freshservice will use your OLA Policies to determine the "Due By" time for each task that satisfies the specified criteria.

Quick guide for creating a new OLA policy

  • Navigate to the Admin > Service Desk Settings > SLA and OLA Policies 
    If your account has more than one workspace: 

    To modify global workflows, navigate to Admin > Global Settings > Service Desk Settings > SLA and OLA Policies

    To modify workspace-level workflows, navigate to Admin > Workspace Settings > {Workspace Name} > Service Desk Settings > SLA and OLA Policies



    Important Notes:

1. Workspace admins can create SLA policies at a workspace level.
2. Global SLA policies apply to tickets across all workspaces
3. Default SLA policy is created and enabled by default at the global level.

Order of execution: The SLA policy for the ticket is determined by the local
SLA policies created for a specific workspace. If the specified conditions in the local SLA policies do not match, then it follows the global policy. If both do not apply, then the default SLA policy becomes applicable to the ticket.

  • Choose SLA and OLA policies

  • Select Create New Policy

  • Choose Task

  • Give a new title to the policy you are creating

Select Parent entity from Ticket, Problem, Change, Release (OLA Policies dictate the time within which Agents should complete ‘Tasks’ within Tickets or Problems or Changes or Releases.)



Configuring OLA policies:

  • Remember to choose whether the OLA times must be calculated based on Business or Calendar hours. 
  • If ‘Business Hours’ is chosen, the Business Hours tied to the Agent Group assigned to the Task will be applied.

Defining Trigger Conditions

  • You will need to define at least one trigger condition for each OLA policy. 
  • You can define different OLA conditions based on custom fields. This will give users the flexibility to set multiple OLAs based on any ticket/change/problem/release fields or ticket/change/problem/release task form. You can set multiple trigger conditions and choose whether to match all or any of those conditions to trigger an OLA.
  • You can also add multiple sub-conditions and choose to match all or any of those conditions for an OLA to trigger.


Defining Escalation Rules

  • The escalation rules can also be established when creating custom OLAs. For example, you can choose who you want to escalate the task to when the task hasn't been resolved for a specific time interval. 
  • You can set up three levels of Escalation, for task resolution.

Remember - the order of your OLA policies is important. If you have multiple OLA policies, the first one with matching conditions will be applied to a task. 

You can reorder your OLA rules and organize them in such a way that the most restrictive (strict) rules are higher up in the order. 

Clone OLA:

  • Click the Clone option next to the OLA policy ( for eg. OLA for Procurement) and the following policy will be cloned immediately.