Desktop Support Technician Interview Practice Test

An SLA in IT support sets the service levels you’re obligated to meet—specifically, the target times for responding to and resolving tickets. It creates clear expectations with users and guides how work is prioritized and tracked. Prioritizing tickets hinges on two ideas: impact and urgency. Impact is about how widespread the problem is and how many people or business functions it affects. Urgency is about how time-sensitive the issue is and how quickly it needs resolution to prevent harm or downtime. By combining these two factors, you assign a priority level (often described as P1, P2, etc.) so the most serious issues are addressed first and within the SLA’s target times. If you’re at risk of missing a target, you escalate to the right on-call staff or management to ensure timely action. For example, a complete outage of email affecting many departments is high impact and high urgency, so it gets top priority. A password reset for a single user is low impact and low urgency, so it’s handled after more critical issues. The other options don’t fit because SLAs aren’t just for vendor contracts and they do influence how tickets are handled; prioritization isn’t always first-come, first-served and should consider impact and urgency; and SLAs aren’t about hardware procurement timelines.