MTTR Calculator
How fast do you recover from incidents?
MTTR benchmarks
| Performance | MTTR | Typical profile |
|---|---|---|
| Elite | < 1h | Mature SRE teams, automated remediation |
| High | 1-4h | Good observability, on-call processes |
| Medium | 4-24h | Basic monitoring, manual response |
| Low | > 24h | Limited visibility, reactive only |
Based on DORA research and industry data. Your ideal MTTR depends on your SLA commitments.
MTTR, MTTF, MTBF, MTTA; What's what?
MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery)
How long it takes to restore service after an incident starts. Clock starts when users are impacted, stops when they're not. This is what most teams track.
MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge)
How long until someone starts working on an incident. The gap between alert firing and a human responding. Long MTTA means slow pager response or alert fatigue.
MTTF (Mean Time To Failure)
How long a system runs before failing. Used for non-repairable components. If your SSD has a 1.5M hour MTTF, that's the average lifespan before it dies.
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
For repairable systems: MTBF = MTTF + MTTR. It's the full cycle time from one failure to the next. Higher MTBF means more reliable systems.
The one that matters most: MTTR. You can't prevent all failures, but you can get faster at fixing them. Elite teams focus on reducing MTTR rather than chasing zero incidents.
Breaking down MTTR
MTTR is the sum of four phases. Improving any of them improves your total recovery time:
Time from failure occurring to alert firing. Faster checks, better thresholds, synthetic monitoring. Most teams lose minutes here without realizing.
Time from alert to human engagement. On-call schedules, escalation policies, reducing alert noise. If pagers go unanswered, everything else is moot.
Time to understand what's wrong. Logs, traces, dashboards, runbooks. Good observability turns 30-minute investigations into 2-minute ones.
Time to fix and verify. Rollbacks, feature flags, automated remediation. The goal is safe, fast recovery, not necessarily fixing the root cause yet.
Where to start: Detection is often the biggest win. If you're finding out about incidents from customers, you're already behind. Monitoring that catches issues in seconds instead of minutes compounds across every incident.
Catch issues before your customers do
Start monitoring with fivenines.io