Business calendars
Business calendars define the working hours, holidays and one-off closures that every Quartz SLA timer counts against — nights, weekends and closed days are skipped, so a four-hour goal means four working hours, not four wall-clock hours.
Why calendars matter
An SLA promise like "respond within four hours" almost never means four real-time hours — it means four hours of your service desk's working time. A calendar tells each timer when the clock is running. Outside the calendar's open hours the clock is frozen and resumes automatically at the next working minute.
Every elapsed-time and deadline calculation is projected through the assigned calendar, so the same goal behaves correctly whether work pauses overnight, over a weekend, or over a public holiday.
Calendars only shape duration SLAs (business-elapsed working time). A date-field target breaches at the literal wall-clock value taken from an issue field — it is not projected through the calendar. See Create an SLA for target types.
What a calendar contains
Each calendar bundles four things that together decide which minutes count:
| Part | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Weekly schedule | Which days of the week are working days. |
| Business-day hours | The open hours within each working day. |
| Holidays | Dates the calendar is closed (fixed or recurring). |
| Closed exceptions | One-off closures for a specific occasion. |
Any minute that falls on a non-working day, outside business hours, on a holiday, or inside a closed exception is skipped by every timer using that calendar.
The two calendars that ship
Quartz seeds two calendars so you can start tracking SLAs immediately without configuring anything:
| Calendar | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Default | A standard business-hours week — working hours Monday to Friday, nights and weekends skipped. |
| 24/7 | Always open. Every minute counts, with no skipping. Use this for round-the-clock services. |
If an SLA has no calendar assigned, the timer falls back to a 24/7 calendar — every minute counts. Assign a business-hours calendar when you want nights and weekends excluded.
Create or clone a calendar
Setting up a custom calendar — anything beyond the two seeds — is what satisfies the "business hours" step on the Radar getting-started checklist. The fastest route is to clone a calendar that is close to what you need and adjust it.
Open the Calendars screen
In the Quartz hub, go to Calendars under CONFIGURE. Editing calendars requires the manageCalendars capability (Jira admins and the Full configuration umbrella always have it). See Permissions.
Set the weekly schedule and hours
Choose which days are working days and set the open hours for each business day. Hours outside this window are never counted.
Add holidays and closures
Add the dates the calendar is closed, and any one-off closed exceptions. Holidays can be fixed dates or recurring (the same date each year).
Save, then assign it to an SLA
Save the calendar, then open the relevant SLA definition and assign this calendar as its working-hours calendar. The timer starts honouring it on the next computation.
Holidays and one-off exceptions
There are two ways to mark a calendar closed, and one global option:
| Type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Holiday (fixed) | A closure on a specific calendar date. |
| Holiday (recurring) | A closure that repeats on the same date every year. |
| Closed exception | A one-off closure — a single occasion that does not recur. |
Beyond a single calendar, you can set company-wide holidays globally — fixed dates plus recurring ones — managed from the Calendars area alongside your calendars.
Put dates that affect the whole organisation (national public holidays, company shutdown weeks) in company-wide holidays so you set them once, and keep team-specific closures on the individual calendars that need them.
Time zone
A calendar's open hours and closed days are evaluated against the dates and times you configure on it. Set the business-day hours and holiday dates to reflect the working location the SLA serves.
How the clock honours the calendar
SLA status is computed on demand — nothing about elapsed time is stored or backfilled. When the engine projects elapsed time and the deadline, it counts only the minutes that fall inside the assigned calendar's open hours and skips everything else.
This is independent of, and works alongside, two other ways time can stop counting:
| Mechanism | What it skips |
|---|---|
| Calendar | Nights, weekends, holidays and closed exceptions — for every timer using the calendar. |
| Pause conditions | Time while a pause condition holds, e.g. "waiting on customer". Shown on the issue panel as "Paused — not counted". |
So a timer can be frozen because the office is shut (calendar) or because the clock is paused (a pause condition) — both reduce the working time counted toward the goal. The per-issue Cycle breakdown shows the worked time and pause intervals per cycle, all recomputed on demand.
Calendar gaps — weekends, holidays and closed hours — and pause conditions are all honoured when Quartz counts working time toward a goal.
Attaching a calendar to an SLA target
A calendar takes effect once it is assigned to an SLA definition. Each SLA references one working-hours calendar; the timer projects its duration goal through that calendar. Change the calendar and the next computation reflects it immediately — there is nothing to recalculate or migrate, because status is always derived fresh.
Editing a calendar changes how every SLA assigned to it is measured, including for in-flight issues — the next computation uses the new schedule. Review which SLAs use a calendar before changing its working hours.
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