Valiantys has developed a JIRA plugin to manage SLA called VertygoSLA.
It enables to:

• calculate a due date according to criterias and work calendar
• compute in real time the consumed and remaining time.

Alice
Valiantys Plugin Team

We have http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Simple+Escalation
JQL also allows us to do

resolution is empty and updatedDate < "-4h"

.
Ernest, is there anything else that JIRA actually needs to do nowadays for this?

With the given amount of emails given by JIRA issues, it stands to reason that a "timed" notification defined by the user could be easily implemented.

Any documentation I've received does not assist with determining an ETA on the resolution (i.e. http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+and+Improvements).

Having JIRA users incorporate another application (i.e. Outlook) to send reminders to individuals to resolve/start issues causes workflow issues. Bottom line it would definitely be a nice to have to ensure Reporter, Assignee, and all Watchers receive a friendly reminder to ensure everyone is up-to-date on issues by a given date.

Hi Greg,

At the moment one must build the escalation as a plugin, using servvices and filetrs. For a sample see the 'Sample Escalation' section of the following document:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+as+a+support+system

Thanks,
Anton

Has there been any progress on this issue? Either making time based escalation possible, or the filter adds Jeff refers to.

Or – Ernest, is there a sample plugin which accomplishes this?

Most SLAs require that issues be addressed within a certain time period. In JIRA, this would mean defining a filter 'issues not updated in X hours'. Unfortunately this query cannot be defined in JIRA's current (3.2) issue navigator. So JIRA is quite far from being able to properly support SLAs.

Another option might be to define a search filter that find exactly the tasks that meet your "escalation" criteria. The filter can then be saved and re-run at any stage or even subscribed to. This way, the results will be emailed to the relevant party on a regular basis. Please see http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/issue_filters.html for more information on filters and subscriptions.

JIRA has a general Services architecture (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/services.html) which allows this. We should provide an example service showing how priority escalation can be done.