What is mean time to repair (MTTR)?

Measuring the Impact of IT Incidents with MTTR   When an IT incident occurs – a customer facing application is down, an application bug impacts productivity, a hardware system is not responding, etc. – time is wasted, business operations are endangered, and in some cases, revenue is negatively impacted.  In fact, according to Forrester Research, a company can lose up to $1,686/user/month due to high impact outages and $337/user/month due to moderate impact outages. Another study by Ponemon Institute, found that the average cost of unplanned downtime is $7,900/minute.   Every minute counts when resolving IT incidents and while assessing the business impact, it is important to consider several key performance indicators (KPIs) that contribute to an incident’s duration and impact.  One such KPI is the Mean Time to Repair or MTTR.   According to BusinessDictionary.com, MTTR represents the average time required to repair a failed component or device. The lower the MTTR, the less business impact an IT incident will have. MTTR can be broken into 4 separate KPIs that can attribute to the average incident resolution time:  

• Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) an incident occurred
• Mean Time to Know (MTTK) and quickly connect the right people with the right information regarding an incident
• Mean Time to Fix (MTTF) an incident
• Mean Time to Verify (MTTV) the incident was resolved

  Many companies focus their attention and efforts primarily on monitoring and reducing the MTTI, MTTF and MTTV components of MTTR. However, what they may not realize is that reducing MTTR is most productively accomplished by reducing what Forrester Research calls MTTK. When the clock is ticking, an IT team needs to identify who is best qualified to fix the issue, ensure those folks are available to help, and then communicate with these team members in a timely manner in order to minimize the impact of IT issues on the business.   This is where Everbridge IT Alerting comes in.  IT Alerting connects the right on-call personnel with the right information, so they can hop on a conference bridge quickly and fully focus on restoring service and limiting the negative impact of incidents on end-user satisfaction and even revenue.   To learn more about reducing your MTTR with Everbridge IT Alerting solution for critical IT communication and escalation, visit our website.   Also, be sure to check out our white paper, IT Operations Playbook: 8 Communication Improvements to Reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Repair).