What is MTTR and How Does It Impact Your Bottom Line?
Mean time to repair (MTTR), sometimes referred to as mean time to resolution, is a popular DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) team metric. MTTR identifies the overall availability and disaster recovery aspects of your IT assets or application workloads.
The acronym MTTR can cause some confusion since it has different meanings across different industries. Sometimes, MTTR refers to mean time to respond: the amount of time needed to react to a problem. However, in this article, we look at how long it takes to reach a resolution since this is the more commonly accepted definition that deeply impacts customer satisfaction.
Organizations must be vigilant and cyber resilient to succeed in modern IT environments. Any IT incident could affect your operations, resulting in missed deadlines, lost revenue, and frustrated customers, which can negatively impact your reputation and public image.
Therefore, you need to evaluate MTTR, a critical metric, to manage better operations and customer satisfaction and deliver reliable products.
What is MTTR?
MTTR stands for mean time to repair. This incident management metric enables businesses to measure the average time needed to troubleshoot and repair IT systems’ problems. MTTR tells us how much time it takes to return to a healthy and stable system.
MTTR is a well-known term for DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams. It is an important metric to check because it assesses the severity of the incident and how reliable the IT systems and equipment are to repair it. It also encourages best practices for service dependability by training your team to collaborate to resolve issues effectively.
By evaluating and tracking MTTR networking, you can identify trends in failures and areas where you need to improve your teams’ incident management capabilities. The goal is to get this incident management metric as low as possible with more efficient repair processes and teams.
As a valuable “failure metric” for DevOps teams, MTTR also illustrates how to put software security development first. Cost, speed, and quality are essential for software development and compliance. According to Google’s 2019 State of DevOps Report, “top-tier performers are companies who can recover from incidents 2,604x faster, deploy code 208x more frequently, and meet their organizational goals 2x as often as their lower-tier counterparts.”
How Does MTTR Impact Your Bottom Line
By minimizing downtime through efficient maintenance processes, companies save costs, boost productivity, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. To do that, companies need the right incident management software to manage MTTR.
xMatters drastically lowers the business impact of service issues and incidents with products such as xMatters Incident Console. This unified incident console increases collaboration, visibility, and faster incident resolution to keep customers happy and service reliable.
Here is an example of seamless collaboration in xMatters Incident Console:
Sony Interactive Entertainment chose xMatters products for its global operations, switching from PagerDuty and Splunk Oncall, which it felt lacked the advanced features and flexibility it needed to scale.
With xMatters products, Sony could automate workflows and incident management, modernize operations, and gain access to tools that fostered improved communication and collaboration among team members. As a result, Sony experienced cost savings by minimizing the financial impact of service disruption and operational expenses dedicated to incident resolution.
In 2024, we experienced “the largest IT outage in history” when 8.5 million Windows devices crashed during a CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company update. This incident wreaked havoc on airlines, causing 911 services, healthcare facilities, and banks to be out of service. CrowdStrike IT teams worked around the clock to repair the outage, which took a while to fix.
This is a perfect example of the importance of MTTR in an IT environment and how it affects the bottom line of a business.
Given the importance of MTTR, how is the mean time to recovery calculated?
Calculating MTTR
The MTTR formula measures IT environment availability and reliability in DevOps and SRE practices. Given its focus on the repair process, it can also refer to the service quality of the DevOps and SRE teams rather than the IT systems themselves.
To calculate, use the following MTTR formula:
Total Hours of Unplanned Maintenance Time
________________________________
Total Number of Repairs
Imagine you run an application workload that fails three times. It would take six hours to fix those three issues. In this example, the MTTR is 6/3 = 2 hours.
To accurately calculate MTTR, keep in mind these considerations:
- Consistency in Data Collection: Ensure downtime and repair incidents are carefully logged. Automation tools or maintenance software can help avoid inaccuracies.
- Exclude Planned Maintenance: MTTR focuses only on unplanned repairs due to failures, not scheduled or preventive maintenance.
- Use a Consistent Time Unit: When calculating MTTR, ensure all downtime records and results are expressed in the same time unit (e.g., hours or minutes).
Factors Affecting MTTR
MTTR starts when you detect a failure and stops when you repair the issue, returning the impacted workload to a running state. This time typically encompasses diagnosis, troubleshooting, developing a solution, and implementing it.
Causes of a high MTTR may include:
- A major system failure
- A delayed realization that there is an issue
- A delayed or incorrect issue diagnosis
- Inefficient incident response processes
- Lack of parts, resources, knowledge, or expertise to fix the issue
- Lack of automation to streamline detection, escalation, and resolution
- Building a high-quality, long-lasting resolution
A high MTTR can mean different things for an organization. For example, it may be related to a complex outage that takes the team a long time to resolve.
There is a difference between response time and resolution time. Even if your responders act immediately, troubleshooting and figuring out a repair solution may take a long time, leading to a high MTTR.
Overall, a high MTTR can harm your company’s reputation. As word of mouth spreads, customers are frustrated with long downtimes and empty promises.
Most service level agreements (SLAs) between a customer and a service provider include some guarantee of MTTR networking. Extended outages can lead to high penalties for SLA violations.
Causes of a low MTTR may include:
- A minor issue
- Quick notifications and response
- Fast and accurate issue diagnosis
- Effective incident management practices
- Access to parts, resources, knowledge, and expertise to fix the issue
- Automation to streamline detection, escalation, and resolution
- Implementing a solution that is quick but not long-lasting
A low MTTR allows organizations to respond to incidents quickly and continuously improve.
An incident may result from a minor issue that your team can fix with a quick notification to minimize the damage and repair time.
Organizations with low MTTR pay attention to the training of their DevOps and SRE teams. IT teams are ready to fix issues and have access to the appropriate parts. A knowledgeable team can quickly and accurately diagnose a problem, usually leading to a quick resolution of system failure.
Strategies To Reduce MTTR
Organizations can implement the following strategies to improve systems and processes to reduce MTTR:
- Extensive monitoring—You can implement a monitoring system that lowers the number of incidents by providing real-time data streams and analytics to alert your team of potential problems. Even better yet, automate your monitoring system to detect anomalies quickly.
- Automated incident management – You can leverage automation to reduce incident response times and manage workflows that are part of the resolution process.
- Post-incident review: You can conduct a post-mortem with the team to point out where things went wrong and prepare the team for future success by learning from mistakes.
- Preventative maintenance – You can run programs to help identify potential problems before they result in unplanned maintenance tasks. You can also manage alert systems to help spot red flags before they become incidents.
- Training and upskilling staff—You can invest in your IT team to set them up for success. Sometimes, a high MTTR can also result from underperforming or undertrained staff who lack the skills to manage an incident.
- Improving analytics tools—You can leverage state-of-the-art diagnostic and analytics tools to identify systems prone to failure before an incident. This practice improves your organization’s reliability and maintainability of systems.
- Streamlining repair processes—You can monitor MTTR metrics closely and take proactive measures to streamline repair procedures and costs, train technicians on new technologies, and prevent costly emergency repairs.
- Culture of collaboration and communication— Encourage open communication across teams and foster collaboration during incidents. Shared visibility and alignment enable quicker decision-making and problem-solving.
- Root cause analysis (RCA) for each incident— Conduct thorough reviews of resolved incidents to identify their root causes. Learning from past issues helps prevent recurrence and improves recovery times for similar problems in the future.
- Integrated solutions— Streamline workflows by integrating monitoring, alerting, and incident response tools. Seamless integration ensures smoother data sharing and faster resolution.
MTTR vs Other Metrics
In an IT environment, MTTR is one of many relevant incident metrics for your business. Other significant metrics include mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to failure (MTTF), and mean time to acknowledge (MTTA), MTTD (Mean Time To Detect), which all indicate the health of IT systems.
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
MTBF (mean time between failures) can still impact your business even if you have a low MTTR. This means that you are fixing issues quickly but have frequent outages. When repetitive problems occur, and SLAs are continuously violated, customers become frustrated and disillusioned with your business performance. Furthermore, this can detract new customers as you gain a reputation for being an unreliable service provider.
MTTF (Mean Time To Failure)
Another “failure metric” you can use to measure repair efficacy like MTTR is MTTF (mean time to failure). It is defined as the average time of nonrepairable failure of a technology product. This metric is better suited for measuring the overall lifecycle of a product or system with a short product lifespan, as it calculates complete system failure. It is not advisable to apply MTTF if you are calculating time between outages that require repair; in that case, it is better to apply mean time between failures (MTBF).
MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge)
MTTA (mean time to acknowledge) is a different metric that measures failure incidents. It is calculated as the average time from an incident to when work begins on the issue. The formula for MTTA is simple: divide the time between alert and acknowledgment by the number of incidents. This is a valuable metric when testing your team’s responsiveness and how quickly incidents are addressed in your organization contributes to overall MTTR scores.
MTTD (Mean Time To Detect)
MTTD (mean time to detect) is the average time it takes to detect an issue or failure after it occurs. This metric highlights the responsiveness of monitoring and alert systems to uncover problems. To formulate this metric sum up all the incident detection times and divide by the total number of incidents.
Next Steps
Maintaining a healthy MTTR is essential for maintaining a healthy bottom line. Keeping your MTTR low ensures you meet your SLAs and continue providing customers with the best service possible. When your MTTR begins to creep upwards, you risk frustrating customers, who can quickly turn to your competition and leave. You may even risk further financial losses if you need to compensate customers for SLA violations.
However, it’s also essential to remember that although MTTR is an important metric, so is the mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to failure (MTTF). Improving just one of these metrics is of limited use because they all interact. Quick resolutions are great, but customers may become frustrated with frequent interruptions if your systems constantly fail. They may be more forgiving of a long resolution time if it is a rare occurrence. For the best user experience, you should improve all three metrics in unison.
Good incident management, including detailed postmortems, helps you improve all three metrics. You can identify which components fail frequently and take action to replace them regularly, have backups in place for unrepairable systems, and quickly access information for a quick resolution.
By integrating communication, workflows, and data-driven insights, xMatters enhances collaboration among teams, ensuring swift resolutions and reduced MTTR. To learn how to bolster your operational efficiency to shorten your MTTR, request an xMatters demo today!