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MTTD measures how quickly you spot problems. MTTR measures how quickly you fix them. Together they define your incident response effectiveness.

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Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

The average time between when an incident starts and when your team becomes aware of it.

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What affects MTTD

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Improving MTTD

  • Increase check frequency for critical services
  • Monitor all user-facing endpoints (not just the main one)
  • Use aggressive alerting for revenue-critical paths
  • Track third-party dependencies so upstream failures are detected automatically

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Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

The average time between when an incident is detected and when the service is fully restored.
MTTR includes triage, investigation, mitigation, and verification.

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What affects MTTR

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Improving MTTR

  • Write playbooks for common failure modes
  • Invest in fast rollback mechanisms
  • Reduce mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) with clear escalation
  • Provide context in alerts (which monitor, which region, recent changes)

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MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge)

Time from alert to human acknowledgement. Tracks on-call responsiveness.

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MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)

Time between incidents. Higher is better — indicates system stability.

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Failure rate

Percentage of checks that fail over a time period. Tracks overall reliability trend.

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Tracking these metrics

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Benchmarks

These vary widely by industry and team maturity: The goal isn’t perfection — it’s continuous improvement. Track trends over months, not individual incidents.

DORA metrics

Broader software delivery performance metrics.

SLA/SLO/SLI

Service level objectives and indicators.