MTTR (mean time to repair, also mean time to recovery) is the average time from an incident to the restoration of a service. It is the central operations metric because it directly determines how much downtime accumulates per incident — and thus the real costs.
MTTR never stands alone: MTTA (time to acknowledge) measures how quickly handling begins, MTBF (mean time between failures) describes how often incidents occur. Together they form the picture of operational quality.
How do you lower MTTR?
The biggest lever lies before the repair: proactive monitoring detects incidents before users report them — shortening detection time, which in many environments is the lion’s share. After that, clear runbooks, rehearsed escalation paths and access to the right systems count; ideally automation resolves standard cases without any human at all.
Equally important: clean documentation and reversible changes. If you first have to figure out how the system is configured during an incident, you lose the most expensive minutes.
Using MTTR correctly
- Measure per severity — an average across everything blurs critical incidents.
- Separate detection, response and remediation shares: where is time really lost?
- Watch trends rather than single values: is the operation getting structurally faster?
- Combine with MTBF: rare, short incidents are the goal — not just fast repair.