Last updated: 2026-07-19
What Is Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)?
Definition
Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) is the average time it takes to fix an incident after your team becomes aware of it. If your monitoring detects a failure at 2:01 AM and your team resolves it at 2:16 AM, your MTTR is 15 minutes. MTTR is a key reliability metric alongside MTTD and uptime percentage.
Why it matters
MTTR measures your team's incident response capability. A low MTTR means you have good runbooks, clear ownership, and effective tooling. A high MTTR suggests confusion during incidents: unclear escalation paths, missing documentation, or insufficient monitoring detail to diagnose the problem quickly. Reducing MTTR usually requires process improvements, not just better tools.
Example
A team reduced their MTTR from 45 minutes to 12 minutes by implementing three changes: alerting with PingWatchdog included a direct link to the affected monitor and incident timeline (no more "which server is this?" confusion), they documented runbooks for the top 5 failure modes, and they set up PagerDuty escalation so the right person got paged on the first alert.
How PingWatchdog helps
PingWatchdog includes incident timelines that show exactly when an incident started, when it was acknowledged, and when it was resolved. This data gives you accurate MTTR measurements. Incident auto-resolution eliminates delay between service recovery and incident closure. Use the incident history to identify your slowest-to-resolve failure modes and improve your runbooks.