What is Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)?
MTTR is a key metric that measures the average time it takes to detect, diagnose, and fully resolve an incident or service disruption.
How Does MTTR Work?
MTTR is calculated by summing the time taken to resolve all incidents over a period and dividing it by the total number of incidents — providing a critical measure of operational efficiency.
What Are the Benefits of Tracking MTTR?
- Provides insight into system reliability.
- Highlights opportunities for process improvements.
- Helps measure the effectiveness of incident response teams.
- Improves customer satisfaction by reducing downtime.
How Can MTTR Reduce Mean Time to Resolution?
By monitoring MTTR actively, teams can identify patterns in slow responses and optimize processes, tools, and communication to shorten resolution times consistently.
What are the Challenges of MTTR?
- Can be skewed by outliers (very long or very short incidents).
- Requires clear definitions of “incident start” and “resolution.”
- May not fully capture customer experience (e.g., partial service outages).
Leading Tools – of Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
These tools help teams detect, respond to, and resolve incidents faster by streamlining alerting, root cause analysis, and cross-functional collaboration:
- PagerDuty (Incident Response Metrics) – Provides intelligent alerting, escalation, and MTTR tracking to accelerate incident resolution.
- ServiceNow ITSM – Centralizes incident, change, and problem management with workflows that reduce manual handoffs and delays.
- Datadog Incident Management – Integrates monitoring, alerting, and response coordination with detailed timeline tracking and RCA tools.
- Opsgenie – Delivers alert routing, on-call management, and incident timelines to reduce downtime and improve response coordination.
LOCI – Proactively reduces MTTR by analyzing compiled software artifacts during CI/CD, surfacing hidden defects and runtime risks early—so issues are caught and resolved before they become production incidents.
