how retroactive pause functionality works?

[hasthipooji]

Can you give me one good example for retroactive pause sla...Im confused between retroactive start and pause ...Please explain the functionality how they works..

[Siddhesh Jadhav]

Hi @hasthipooji 

Please look at the following scenario for better understanding:

Retroactive Pause – in simple terms

Retroactive Pause means the SLA clock stops from the actual time the ticket goes into a pause state, even if the SLA engine detects that change a little later.

Example:

• SLA started at 9:00 AM

• Ticket moved to On Hold at 11:00 AM

• SLA engine detects this change at 11:15 AM

If Retroactive Pause = ON

• SLA pauses from 11:00 AM

• The 15 minutes (11:00–11:15) are not counted in the SLA

If Retroactive Pause = OFF

• SLA pauses only from 11:15 AM

• The extra 15 minutes get counted, which leads to incorrect SLA calculation 

Hope this helps clarify the concept.
If this resolves your question, please mark it as Accepted and Helpful.

Thanks & regards,
Siddhesh Jadhav

[fknell]

Hi @hasthipooji,

A good example of „retroactive pause“ is when an incident’s priority changes and a new SLA is applied:

- Incident created at 10:00 with an SLA that pauses when `state = Pending`.  

- At 10:10, the agent sets the incident to Pending, so the SLA pauses.  

- At 10:30, the agent changes priority to 1, which triggers a P1 SLA with Retroactive start = true and Retroactive pause = true.  

Because of retroactive start, the P1 SLA’s start time is set back to 10:00 (when the incident was created), not 10:30.  

Because of retroactive pause, the 10 minutes of pause time (10:10–10:30) are added to the P1 SLA’s breach time, so the breach is pushed out by those 10 minutes.  

In short:  

- Retroactive start = new SLA starts counting from an earlier time (e.g., when the task was created).  

- Retroactive pause = any pause time that already happened between that earlier start time and now is added into the new SLA’s breach time, so the clock isn’t unfairly tight.

Hope this helps to understands the concept.

[SohamTipnis]

Hi @hasthipooji,

You can use this documentation; it will give an answer to your question.

https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/conversational-interfaces/virtual-agent/va-pause.html

https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/it-service-management/service-level-management/t_UseSLARetroactive...

If you find my answer useful, please mark it as Helpful and Correct ‌😊

Regards,
Soham Tipnis
ServiceNow Developer ||  Technical Consultant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sohamtipnis10

[sanketpatil09]

Retroactive start means the SLA starts counting from an earlier time in the past, while retroactive pause means the SLA ignores time in the past when the pause condition was already true. For example, an incident is created at 10:00 AM with an 8-hour SLA, at 11:00 AM the incident is moved to On Hold and stays there until 1:00 PM (2 hours), then the state is changed back to In Progress; because retroactive pause is enabled and the pause condition is State = On Hold, ServiceNow looks back and removes those 2 hours from SLA calculation, so the breach time is automatically extended by 2 hours, whereas retroactive start would only control from when the SLA begins counting, not the pause time.