MTTR Calculator
Calculate Mean Time To Recovery from total incident downtime and incident count, and project the annualized downtime impact.
Inputs
Sum of downtime across all incidents in the measurement period.
Total incident count in the measurement period.
The window over which incidents and downtime were measured, used to annualize impact.
Mean Time To Recovery
30.00minutes
Mean Time To Recovery
0.500hours
Annualized Downtime
730.0minutes/year
Annualized Downtime
12.17hours/year
Annualized Incident Count
24.3incidents/year
Step by step
MTTR: total downtime ÷ incident count
180 ÷ 6
= 30.00 min
Incident rate
6 ÷ 90 days
= 0.067 incidents/day
Annualized incidents
0.067 × 365
= 24.3
Annualized downtime: incidents/yr × MTTR
24.3 × 30.00 min
= 730.0 min
How it works
MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery/Repair) is the average time it takes to restore service after an incident begins: MTTR = total_downtime ÷ number_of_incidents. Projecting the observed incident rate forward to a full year gives a sense of the total annualized downtime impact if current reliability trends continue unchanged — useful for prioritizing incident response investments against their expected payoff.
Formula
MTTR = totalDowntime / numberOfIncidents
- D
- Total downtime in minutes across all incidents
- I
- Number of incidents in the measurement period
- \text{MTTR}
- Mean Time To Recovery in minutes
Frequently Asked Questions
Is MTTR the same as MTTA or MTBF?
No — MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) measures detection-to-acknowledgment, MTTR measures acknowledgment (or detection) to full resolution, and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) measures the gap between incidents, not their resolution speed.
What's a good MTTR target?
It varies heavily by system criticality — high-availability services often target MTTR under 30-60 minutes, while less critical internal tools may tolerate several hours.
How can I reduce MTTR?
Faster detection (better alerting), clearer runbooks, automated rollback/remediation, and practiced incident response (game days, postmortems) are the highest-leverage levers.
Does one long outage skew MTTR unfairly?
Yes — MTTR is an average, so a single multi-hour outage can dominate the metric. Many teams also track median recovery time or a 90th-percentile MTTR alongside the mean to catch this.