MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution)

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Glossary
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MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution)

MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) is the average time it takes to fully resolve a production incident — from initial detection through investigation, remediation, and verification that the issue has been corrected. It is the headline metric for incident response programs.

MTTR is the single most-cited reliability metric in industry benchmarks, executive reporting, and vendor evaluations. The reason is straightforward: it directly translates to customer impact and business cost. The 2024 Splunk Hidden Costs of Downtime Report estimates that Global 2000 companies lose roughly $400 billion annually to downtime. A reliability program that reduces MTTR by 40-85% has a directly defensible ROI claim that maps to revenue protected, customer trust preserved, and engineering hours returned to product work.

MTTR is also the metric most distorted by averaging. A small number of very long incidents (multi-hour Sev1s with cross-team escalation) can dominate the average and obscure the underlying distribution. Mature reliability programs segment MTTR by severity (Sev1 vs Sev2 vs Sev3), by incident type (single-service vs multi-hop), and by recovery mechanism (automatic vs manual). They also track median and 95th-percentile MTTR alongside the mean, the long tail of bad incidents matters more for customer experience than the average suggests.

Traversal customers have measured MTTR reductions ranging from 40% to 85% across evaluated incidents, with the largest gains on multi-hop failures that traditionally require multi-team escalation.

Related

MTTD (Mean Time to Detect)

MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) is the average time between when a production issue actually begins and when monitoring or alerting systems first detect it — one of the foundational metrics for measuring reliability program effectiveness.

Incident Response

Incident response is the structured process of detecting, diagnosing, and resolving production issues that affect users, encompassing alert triage, investigation, remediation, and post-incident learning.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Root cause analysis (RCA) is the practice of identifying the underlying cause of a production issue, not just the surface symptom or the proximate trigger, but the deeper conditions that allowed the failure to occur and would allow it to recur if not addressed.

Multi-hop Incident

A multi-hop incident is a production failure in which the root cause sits several service boundaries away from where the symptom appears, typically requiring investigation across multiple teams, dependency chains, and observability tools to diagnose.