What is MTTR?
Mean time to recovery (MTTR) is a metric that shows how quickly your team can get systems back up and running after they fail. It's like a scorecard for your incident response that measures the average time from when something breaks to when it's working again.
This includes everything from detecting the problem to implementing and verifying the fix.
This includes everything from detecting the problem to implementing and verifying the fix.
Do you have any examples of MTTR?
Here's a typical month of incidents:
- Database crash: 45 minutes to recover
- Network outage: 30 minutes to recover
- API failure: 75 minutes to recover
- Cache failure: 30 minutes to recover
The formula for MTTR is:
- MTTR = Total recovery time ÷ Number of incidents
So:
- MTTR = 180 minutes ÷ 4 = 45 minutes This shows your team typically takes 45 minutes to recover from failures.
Why is MTTR important?
MTTR helps testers identify system weaknesses and set realistic recovery targets. It directly impacts your SLAs and shapes how you test system recovery. A rising MTTR often signals problems with monitoring, troubleshooting procedures, or insufficient automation.
What are the challenges with MTTR?
Accurate MTTR measurement is tough because incident timelines aren't always clear. You need to define exactly when an incident starts and ends, handle multiple related failures, and distinguish between temporary fixes and true recovery. Testing recovery procedures also requires carefully balancing realism against the risk of causing actual outages.
