In DevOps, every second counts. System failures mean your engineers lose valuable time improving software and developing new features. So how do you effectively detect and manage these issues? Mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) can provide insight into how effectively your DevOps team responds to incidents and how reliable your software is. It’s difficult to know how your team can improve or determine a performance baseline if you don’t have data to analyze your incident management workflows. In this article, you will learn about this valuable metric, interpret it and leverage this information to minimize downtime.
Why MTTR Matters
Whether you’re a legacy organization striving to modernize, a startup looking to gain an edge or somewhere in between, MTTR is a vital metric for your organization. It can indicate whether your processes are standardized and can highlight crucial areas for optimization. Most importantly, mean-time-to-resolve provides insight into how stable your software is and how responsive your team is over time.
Mean-Time-to-Resolve and How to Interpret it
MTTR can stand for many different things: Mean-time-to-repair, mean-time-to-recovery, mean-time-to-restore or mean-time-to-resolution are just a few interpretations of this versatile acronym. Each of these metrics examines a different aspect of addressing an incident. For example, mean-time-to-repair is the average time it takes engineers to fix a problem, calculated from the moment they begin to the moment a change is pushed to production. But this metric does not account for the amount of time between when an alert comes in and when work begins.
Mean-time-to-resolution is the most high-level of these metrics—it considers the average time from when an alert comes in until the incident has been resolved, including postmortems and implementing process changes to avoid the same issue in the future. While the standards for this metric can vary by industry, the highest-performing DevOps teams see an MTTR of less than one day.
Because it is such a comprehensive metric, a high mean-time-to-resolve measurement might indicate problems with alerting or that your engineers are spending a lot of time on repairs. Therefore, it’s essential to look at MTTR over time and analyze each component of your incident management workflow: Time to alert engineers, diagnose the issue, test fixes, ship to production, conduct reviews and learn from the incident.
It may also be helpful to examine mean-time-to-resolve in conjunction with other metrics. To determine if your DevOps team is facing production challenges, evaluate your change failure rate (CFR) to see how many releases result in a downgraded service. Other DORA metrics, like deployment frequency and lead-time-to-changes, are perfect companions for mean-time-to-resolve.
To establish the reliability of your software, you can look at mean-time-to-resolve beside mean-time-between-failures (MTBF), which calculates the average amount of time between incidents. If you’re updating your software often, compare mean-time-to-resolve with mean-time-to-failure (MTTF), which measures its duration before a program needs to be redesigned for functionality. To gain insight into your alerting processes, examine mean-time-to-detect (MTTD), which evaluates the time it takes your team to recognize that an issue exists.
How to Improve Mean-Time-to-Resolve
Alerting is the first stage of responding to an incident and should be one of the first areas to target when working to reduce mean-time-to-resolve. Ensure alerts are actionable and that DevOps team members have the tools they need to respond immediately. A straightforward escalation process is essential: Define responsibilities for each member and train the team in one another’s roles so that the process never grinds to a halt if someone is unavailable.
Preemptive monitoring can help you get ahead of problems before they arise—by proactively checking for potential incidents, you can avoid unexpected downtime.
The best way to improve MTTR is to standardize your operating procedures with runbooks. Without runbooks, DevOps teams have to respond without a clear direction and spend time messaging one another for information—they can’t act immediately. With runbooks, however, your organization’s knowledge base is centralized and accessible to all team members, enabling them to respond as soon as an issue comes up.
If you’re already using runbooks, consider automating responses. Automation not only improves your mean-time-to-resolve but will give your DevOps team more time to devote to implementing long-term changes that improve the stability of your service.
When implemented correctly, mean-time-to-resolve is a proven metric that can indicate how effective your DevOps team responds to challenges and how reliable your software is. But be careful not to incentivize the wrong behavior in a quest to minimize this metric. You could, for example, quickly reduce MTTR by eliminating all alerting protocols, but that would also mean poor service for your end users and likely result in poor team morale. Examine this metric over time and aim for slow and steady growth rather than a quick fix.
