Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

What it is

MTTR is the average elapsed time to fully resolve an issue. In support it's measured per ticket; in engineering, per incidentIncidentAn unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response.. (The R can also mean repair, recovery, or respond, so define it for your team.)

Why it matters

MTTR is the metric customers feel most on technical issues. For escalated tickets it's dominated by investigation time, waiting on engineering, and the fix itself.

Best practices

1. Break it into stages – Acknowledge, diagnose, fix, verify. Find the slowest one.
2. Use medians too – A few month-long tickets can skew the mean.
3. Track escalated tickets separately – They behave differently from the rest.

How Decimal helps

Resilinc saw a 62% reduction in MTTR with Decimal, which takes on the diagnosis stage that usually waits for an engineer.