MTTR

Definition

MTTR (Mean Time to Recover, also Mean Time to Restore or Mean Time to Repair) is the average time it takes to restore a system to full operation after a failure or incident. It is a key SRE metric that reflects how quickly a team can detect, diagnose, and resolve outages.

In depth

MTTR has several components: MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) — how long until the team knows there is a problem; MTTI (Mean Time to Investigate) — time spent diagnosing the root cause; and the actual fix and recovery time. Reducing MTTR is a primary goal of observability: better telemetry means faster detection (lower MTTD) and faster root cause isolation (lower MTTI). High MTTR signals gaps in alerting coverage, poor runbook quality, or insufficient telemetry. Teams track MTTR over time as an indicator of improving operational maturity. obseria.io's AI-powered root cause analysis automatically correlates symptoms across logs, metrics, and traces to compress investigation time significantly.

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