By Denis Boisvert, Solutions Architect, Engineering
Why are you ignoring MTTR?
Picture this:
A critical incident hits. Team A takes the ticket, investigates for 30 minutes, and escalates. Team B spends another hour before passing it to Team C. Each team “resolves” or reassigns fast enough to protect their own metrics.
On paper, everyone looks efficient.
But your customer? They’ve been waiting hours for recovery.
This is the hidden trap of ignoring MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery)—especially when it’s measured in silos instead of through the eyes of the customer.
The Illusion of Good Metrics
Organizations often focus on metrics that look good internally but miss the bigger picture:
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Team resolution time gets reset with every handoff.
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Incident count shows volume, not impact.
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Uptime hides the real pain of outages.
The dashboards are green, but the customer experience is red.
MTTR: A Core DevOps Metric
MTTR isn’t just another KPI—it’s one of the four key DevOps metrics identified in the DevOps Handbook and the landmark Accelerate research:
Deployment frequency
Lead time for changes
Change failure rate
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
Together, these metrics predict not just IT performance but business success. Of the four, MTTR is the one that most directly reflects your customer’s reality.
When a system fails, customers don’t care how many teams touched the incident or how fast you reassigned it. They care about one thing: When will it be fixed?
Measuring MTTR Through the Customer’s Eyes
True MTTR isn’t the time one team spent—it’s the full duration from the start of impact until the service is restored.
Measuring MTTR this way forces organizations to:
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Break down silos and reduce “metric resets.”
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Focus on end-to-end recovery instead of team-level performance.
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Drive collaboration across IT, DevOps, and support.
Culture Shift: From Silos to Service
Technology can help, but reducing MTTR requires a mindset change:
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Stop resetting the clock at each escalation.
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Treat MTTR as a business KPI, not just an IT metric.
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Practice blameless post-incident reviews.
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Empower teams to act fast, together.
Final Thought
Incidents are inevitable. What defines a high-performing organization isn’t how rarely they occur, but how quickly you recover—and whether you’re measuring that recovery through the eyes of the customer.
So ask yourself:
Are we tracking MTTR as it really matters, or are we just protecting silos while our customers wait?
