Zendesk SLA Breach Escalation

Overview

This flow gives a support team a reliable SLA safety net on top of Zendesk. On a 30-minute schedule it reads open (unresolved) tickets, computes how far each one is through its priority-based SLA target, and escalates any ticket at or past a configurable warn threshold — posting an alert to a Microsoft Teams channel, emailing the support manager, and adding a private internal note to the ticket itself.

Why it matters: Zendesk's native triggers fire on single events and can miss cross-policy or slowly-aging cases. A consolidated, scheduled SLA sweep catches everything in one pass and routes it to where the team actually works (Teams + email), with an audit note left on the ticket.

Status: Built and verified Off (demo). Flow Checker: 0 errors / 0 warnings. Going live requires only authorizing the connections and setting the environment-variable values.

Use Case

A support operations team runs SLA policies by priority (e.g. urgent tickets must be actioned within an hour, low-priority within a day). They want proactive escalation *before* a breach, surfaced to a manager, with a trail on the ticket — without rebuilding Zendesk's native trigger logic for every edge case.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Zendesk	shared_zendesk	GetItems
Microsoft Teams	shared_teams	PostMessageToConversation
Office 365 Outlook	shared_office365	SendEmailV2

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

SLA targets

Edit flowlibs_SlaPolicyMap to match your real SLA policies (minutes per priority). Add keys if you use custom priorities and extend Compose_SLA_Minutes accordingly.

Warn threshold

flowlibs_WarnPercent controls how early to escalate (e.g. 80% = escalate at 80% of the SLA clock). Set to 100 to escalate only on/after breach.

Business hours

The demo measures wall-clock elapsed time. For true SLA accuracy, subtract non-business hours/holidays from Compose_Elapsed_Minutes (e.g. via a business-calendar lookup).

De-dupe repeat escalations

Add a Dataverse/SharePoint ledger keyed by ticket id + sweep window so the same ticket isn't re-escalated every 30 minutes.

Tiered escalation

Branch on Compose_Elapsed_Percent to notify higher tiers as breach nears (e.g. >100% pages on-call).

Open-ticket scope

Adjust flowlibs_ZendeskOpenFilter (e.g. include pending/hold, or filter by group/brand).

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@toLower(coalesce(items('Apply_to_each_Open_Ticket')?['priority'],'normal'))

@if(equals(outputs('Compose_Ticket_Priority'),'urgent'), int(variables('varSlaPolicyMap')?['urgent']), if(equals(outputs('Compose_Ticket_Priority'),'high'), int(variables('varSlaPolicyMap')?['high']), if(equals(outputs('Compose_Ticket_Priority'),'low'), int(variables('varSlaPolicyMap')?['low']), int(variables('varSlaPolicyMap')?['normal']))))

@div(sub(ticks(utcNow()), ticks(items('Apply_to_each_Open_Ticket')?['created_at'])), 600000000)

@if(greater(outputs('Compose_SLA_Minutes'),0), div(mul(float(outputs('Compose_Elapsed_Minutes')),100.0), float(outputs('Compose_SLA_Minutes'))), 0)

@greaterOrEquals(outputs('Compose_Elapsed_Percent'), variables('varWarnPercent'))

@{concat('https://', variables('varZendeskSubdomain'), '.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/', string(items('Apply_to_each_Open_Ticket')?['id']), '.json')}

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