Pause SLA when comment added on Service Desk

[Angelica Polen]

I want to be able to pause the SLA if a comment is added to the ticket (for example, need more information from the customer) but when looking at the SLA metrics in Jira Admin I only see the ability to start/pause/stop based on Assignee or Status... is there a way to Pause when a comment is added?  Thanks for the help!!

[rafaelnsbrazcubas]

Right, 
Normaly comments won't trigger transitions, and while either a service desk agent as a customer can transition from a status to another using the transitions links they might stick only with comments.

So for service desk agents I recommend to stick with transitions and avoid automating it on comments, because your agent can place a comment without any intention to retrieve info for the customer, they might place a comment to state that some kind of solution was tried or to let the customer know that someone is looking into their request, so I seriously disencourage you to think about it.

I see however a need to setup triggers to transition on comment when the customer make the comment, sometimes your customers may think that just by commenting they are resplying the agent (not every comment is a reply that represents a intent for the agent to take over the request), some customers depending on your model may not even know how to use properly the customer portal, so in this case I see a advantage.

What can be done in those cases is setup an autommation rule like this.

Trigger (WHEN): Comment added
Condition (IF): Comment is public and User is a customer
Action (THEN): Transition to waiting support (there is a transition that can be triggered).

Like in this screenshot below.

You can do the other way arround, so when a agent comment you transition to waiting customer, but as I said it may not be the agent intention every time.

Then once that you can change status using comments as triggers you can use the status as keys to manage when to start/pause/resume your SLAs.

Hope it helped.