For those of us who administer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in the Jira Service Desk, the ability to associate a calendar with an SLA is critical to configuring the SLA. Out of the box, JSD comes with 2 calendars: a 9-5 weekday calendar and a 24×7 calendar. For most of us, this is all we need. When you configure a calendar, you indicate the days of the week that will count against an SLA and the hours of each day that are included. Naturally, for the 24×7 calendar, the SLA is always counting. For the 9-5 weekday calendar, this is 9 am to 5 pm (or 17:00) Monday through Friday. Changing these calendars or adding a new one is simple.
What has not been as simple as adding in the holidays that need to be accounted for in the SLA. For instance, you probably don’t want to count Christmas or New Year’s Day against your SLA. This has required filling out the holiday calendar each year. Only those days that recur on a specific day can be entered regularly. However, this doesn’t work for holidays whose observance moves each year, such as Thanksgiving Day in the US and Canada.
Fortunately, starting in JIRA Service Desk 4.4, Atlassian has added a much-needed capability to import a holiday calendar. They support the Internet Calendar and Scheduling (ICS) format (.ics files). There are several free sources for holiday calendars for many different countries. Having looked through several sites, the best one appears to be https://www.calendarlabs.com/ical-calendar. (Note, I have no connection with this organization). When you look for an ICS calendar, make sure that you can download it, not just subscribe to it. There are ways to download a subscribable calendar – those are outside the scope of this article.
Once you have downloaded the .ics file, click on Import Holidays under the holiday section and import that file.
This will provide you with a list of holidays that are defined in this file. As you can see in the image below, using the 2020 U.S.A holiday calendar, there are holidays that we don’t need to include in our files such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day (we love you all, but these don’t affect our SLAs).
You can remove these from your holiday calendar by clicking on the “x” to the left of the holiday. Then click import and you will have an updated list of holidays for your specific location.
This makes setting up our calendars so much easier than in the past.