Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) measures the average time it takes to restore service after an incident begins. It is one of the four DORA metrics and a direct indicator of operational maturity.
Also known as: Mean Time To Repair, Mean Time To Restore
MTTR is calculated as the total downtime across all incidents in a period, divided by the number of incidents. It captures the full repair cycle: detection, triage, diagnosis, fix, and verification.
A related but distinct metric is MTTD (Mean Time To Detect), which only covers the gap between failure and the moment your monitoring catches it. Improving MTTR usually starts with improving MTTD — you cannot fix what you cannot see.
Lowering MTTR is the highest-leverage reliability investment. Cutting MTTR from 60 minutes to 15 minutes increases effective uptime from 99.9% to 99.97% with no infrastructure changes. Automated alerting, runbooks, and incident handoffs are the standard tools.
See it in the product: Incident management.