3 posts tagged with "mttr"

Incidents are inevitable. What separates resilient organizations from the rest is not whether they experience incidents, but how effectively they respond when problems arise. A well-structured war room process can mean the difference between a minor disruption and a major crisis.

After managing hundreds of critical incidents across my career, I've distilled my key learnings into this guide. These battle-tested practices have repeatedly proven their value in high-pressure situations.

What makes recovery slower — and what disciplined, observable teams do differently.

In reliability engineering, MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) is one of the clearest indicators of how mature a system — and a team — really is. It measures not just how quickly you fix things, but how well your organization detects, communicates, and learns from failure.

Every production incident is a test of the system's design, the team's reflexes, and the clarity of their shared context. MTTR rises when friction builds up in those connections — between tools, roles, or data. It falls when context flows freely and decisions move faster than confusion.

Last month, I watched a senior engineer spend three hours debugging what should have been a fifteen-minute problem. The issue wasn't complexity—it was context switching between four different monitoring tools, correlating timestamps manually, and losing their train of thought every time they had to log into yet another dashboard. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. This is the hidden tax most engineering teams pay without realizing there's a better way.