Observabilitymedium

How do you measure and improve MTTR?

Tags

#mttr#incident-response#reliability

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Answer

MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery) measures how fast you restore service after an incident. Improve it with clear runbooks, faster detection, better rollback tooling, and well-practiced incident response.

Advanced answer

Deep dive

Break MTTR into phases and optimize each:

Detect: alerting tied to SLOs.
Triage: clear ownership and incident roles.
Mitigate: rollback, feature flags, traffic shifting.
Learn: postmortems with action items.

Examples

MTTR breakdown:

MTTR = time_to_detect + time_to_triage + time_to_mitigate

Common pitfalls

Measuring only total MTTR without phase breakdowns.
No rehearsal, so responders improvise under pressure.
Slow rollbacks due to manual steps.

Interview follow-ups

How do you define "recovered" in MTTR?
What does a good postmortem action item look like?
How do you measure improvements over time?

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