What is MTTR? And why should you care?

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) measures the average duration to restore regular operation for an application, service, or infrastructure component. It’s a key performance indicator for incident management (KPI). To tie MTTR directly to customer satisfaction, you need to understand how it affects service and application reliability and availability. From there, you can make informed decisions, operate efficiently, and provide a seamless customer experience.

MTTR measures how quickly a system recovers after an issue. The goal is to minimize downtime and get things back to normal as soon as possible. Several components contribute to the total resolution time:

• Detection: This is the time it takes to spot an issue. Monitoring tools, alerts, and automated detection systems play a significant role in reducing incident detection time. The faster you catch the problem, the better your chances of keeping MTTR low.
• Acknowledgment: After detecting the issue, the team needs to acknowledge it. This step involves confirming the problem and identifying the next steps. Delays here can prolong the overall resolution time.
• Investigation and diagnosis: Often the most time-consuming part, diagnosis may require troubleshooting, reviewing logs, or running diagnostics to uncover the root cause.
• Repair: After you’ve diagnosed the issue, it’s time to fix it. Whether you’re restarting services, applying a patch, or replacing hardware, minimizing downtime is critical.
• Recovery and testing: After fixing the issue, you must restore and test the system to ensure everything functions correctly. This step often involves verifying that there are no other issues and that you’ve successfully restored operations.
• Restoration and communication: The final step involves updating dashboards, notifying stakeholders, or closing the incident ticket to communicate that the resolution is complete.

MTTR calculation divides the time spent resolving incidents by the number of incidents resolved within a given period. This MTTR formula depicts how quickly and effectively an IT team can address and solve problems.

MTTR = (Total of time to resolve all incidents) ÷ (# of incidents)

For example, let’s say a system had two incidents in a year. The resolution time for the first incident was six hours. The resolution time for the second was 10 hours. The MTTR would be 8 hours.

8 = (6 hours + 10 hours) ÷ 2 incidents

A lower MTTR signifies a more responsive IT environment, underscored by faster response and better customer satisfaction. Quick resolutions help maintain operational continuity and safeguard against revenue and reputational damage caused by outages or service degradations.

MTTR vs. Other important metrics

While MTTR is critical for measuring incident resolution efficiency, discussions often include related metrics to provide a more complete picture of system performance.

For example, mean time to detect (MTTD) measures how long it takes to detect an issue after it occurs. A high MTTD means it’s taking too long to spot problems, which slows down the entire resolution process.

In addition to mean time to resolution, MTTR is used for various terms, including repair, recover, respond, or resolve. While these measure similar ITOps areas, their definitions differ. Be sure to confirm the specific incident metric represented when discussing MTTR.

• Mean time to repair: The average time required to repair and restore a failed IT system or component to operational status. It typically includes the full repair process — diagnosing, fixing, and confirming the resolution — and indicates the technical teams’ efficiency.
• Mean time to recovery: A broader measure that quantifies the average duration to recover an IT service from a system failure and resume normal operations, including repair, data restoration, system restarts, or switching to a backup system.
• Mean time to respond: The average time before a service team takes initial action to a reported or detected issue is a crucial measure of service-desk responsiveness and sets user expectations for service delivery.

Mean time between failures (MTBF) tracks system reliability by measuring the average time between breakdowns. While MTTR focuses on how quickly an issue is fixed, MTBF indicates how often problems happen in the first place. Together, MTBF and MTTR provide a balanced view of system resilience: MTBF shows reliability, and MTTR measures recovery efficiency.

Learn more in “Guide to incident-response metrics and KPIs.”

Before BigPanda, Autodesk struggled with a flood of alerts — more than 100,000 every month — and the inefficiencies of juggling multiple monitoring tools. The volume and complex toolset slowed the ability to identify the root cause and added extra manual steps, which slowed MTTR.

By adopting BigPanda, Autodesk streamlined its processes with contextual data enrichment and smart ticketing that integrated seamlessly with ServiceNow and Slack. Event correlation with BigPanda reduced the alert noise, reducing incidents by 69% and MTTR by 85%. These improvements helped the IT team detect anomalies faster and manage resources more effectively. Read the full Autodesk case study.

Five reasons lowering MTTR for IT operations is essential include:

Maintaining high system and service availability

High availability is a top priority to ensure access to systems and services with minimal interruptions. MTTR directly affects system uptime: The faster you resolve issues, the less downtime for users and customers. Keeping MTTR low means systems stay operational, even when unexpected issues arise.

Improving user experience

Whether users are internal employees or external customers, faster issue resolution means less downtime, fewer service disruptions, and smoother operations. This becomes even more crucial for customer-facing services, where downtime can damage trust, result in lost sales, and create frustration.

Reducing impact to business operations

Contain and resolve incidents before they escalate into bigger issues. For example, if an e-commerce site goes down, every minute of downtime can lead to significant revenue loss. By improving MTTR, IT teams keep disruptions brief, minimizing their operational and financial impact.

Improving compliance and SLA adherence

Many organizations have strict service-level agreements (SLAs) that specify maximum allowable downtime or resolution times. Failing to meet these targets can lead to penalties, reputation damage, and strained customer relationships.

Organizations operating in industries with regulatory requirements — such as financial services and healthcare — may face compliance issues if downtime affects critical operations. Keeping MTTR low to meet SLAs and regulatory standards can protect your organization from legal and financial consequences.

Enhancing operational efficiency and resource allocation

The faster IT teams resolve issues, the more they can focus on tasks that improve overall productivity. They can also manage resources more effectively, balancing keeping systems healthy and driving business growth. On the other hand, high MTTR means they’re spending too much time firefighting, which pulls resources away from proactive initiatives like system or security enhancements.

Reducing mean time to resolution isn’t easy. Common IT operational and technical challenges include:

• Complexity of IT infrastructure
• Alert noise and false positives (alert fatigue)
• Siloed tools and data
• Siloed teams and inadequate knowledge-sharing
• Poor visibility into complex IT environments
• Inefficient workflows
• Lack of context in alerts
• Manual processes and human error

One hurdle is the increasing complexity of hybrid IT environments with diverse systems, applications, and infrastructures. These growing tech stacks make diagnosis and resolution more difficult. Given the frequent need for integration between monitoring and management tools, critical data becomes siloed, reducing the visibility of system performance and issues.

Many organizations need to improve documentation and knowledge sharing. Poor communication causes delays if teams have to start from scratch to identify and resolve each incident. The sheer volume and variety of alerts can overwhelm IT teams, leading to alert system fatigue and risking missing critical incidents. These challenges underscore the need for a more holistic, integrated, and automated approach to IT operations management.

BigPanda streamlines IT incident management using AI-driven event correlation and root-cause analysis. The platform integrates monitoring tools, normalizes real-time event data, and transforms it into actionable insights. Instead of becoming overwhelmed by alerts, your IT team can focus on diagnosing and resolving issues faster.

BigPanda uses AI to correlate events, helping teams diagnose incidents and pinpoint their root cause faster. More efficient problem identification is crucial for lowering MTTR and maintaining high service availability.

Another notable feature is the BigPanda Similar Incidents component, which identifies recurring patterns from past issues. BigPanda pulls relevant historical data when a new incident occurs, allowing IT teams to apply previous solutions and avoid repetitive troubleshooting. This accelerates resolutions and reduces manual work.

Next steps

Read about more organizations that reduced MTTR by implementing the BigPanda platform:

• At FreeWheel, a Comcast company, reducing MTTR by 78% lowered the average resolution time from 25 hours to 5.5 hours by delivering high-quality, actionable incidents to response teams.
• “BigPanda has enabled us to get more real-time, relevant data around a specific incident,” shared Steve Liegl, director of infrastructure and operations at WEC Energy Group. “This has significantly reduced our MTTR.”
• “We can now route [alerts] to the appropriate teams. We get them to that team faster and reduce MTTR, which makes the customers really happy,” said Jon Moss, head of edge software engineering at Zayo.