Understanding the Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) Chart

Last updated: December 19, 2025

The Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) chart measures the time from when an incident actually started impacting your system until it was resolved. This represents the true recovery interval for incidents.

How MTTR is Calculated

The MTTR chart uses the following timestamps:

Start time: started_at - when the actual incident impact began
End time: resolved_at - when the incident was resolved

This calculation gives you the actual time your system was impacted, which is the standard definition of Mean Time to Recover.

Important Distinction

It's important to understand the difference between these timestamps:

Incident created: When someone filed the incident ticket
Incident started: When the actual impact or outage began (this could be earlier than when the ticket was created)

The MTTR chart correctly uses the incident start time, not the creation time, to provide an accurate measure of system recovery time.

Note: There may be a discrepancy in the chart description that mentions "incident creation." The actual calculation uses incident start time, which is the correct approach for measuring true recovery time.