# What is Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)?

> The average time from when an issue is reported to when it's fixed.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/mttr · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

MTTR is the average elapsed time to fully resolve an issue. In support it's measured per ticket; in engineering, per incident. (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.

## Related terms

- [Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/mtta): The average time between an alert or ticket and someone taking ownership.
- [Resolution Time](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/resolution-time): Elapsed time from a ticket's creation to its final resolution.
- [Root Cause Analysis (RCA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/root-cause-analysis): Finding the underlying reason a problem happened, not just its symptoms.
- [Engineering Escalation](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/engineering-escalation): A ticket support hands to engineering because it needs code-level investigation.

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