Concept / Term · Established
Mean Time to Recovery / Repair
The average time taken to restore a service after an incident, used to track how quickly operations recover from failures.
Field note
MTTR measures the average time needed to restore an acceptable service after a failure. Teams must define the starting and finishing events consistently or comparisons become misleading.
The initials have several expansions—most commonly Mean Time to Recovery or Repair. In digital services, “recovery” is often clearer because restoring users may happen before the underlying defect is permanently repaired.
Incident reviews track detection, diagnosis, mitigation and full restoration to identify where recovery time is being lost.
Failures cannot always be prevented; the speed and quality of recovery are therefore central measures of operational resilience.
In a sentence“Automated rollback reduced our MTTR from 48 minutes to nine.”