Understanding What Increases and Reduces MTTR
· 5 min read
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.