Improving Beyond MTTR with PagerDuty Analytics

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is a commonly used metric in incident management, but its limitations become apparent in complex environments where incidents vary greatly in nature and context. While MTTR provides a starting point for teams new to incident response, it often fails to capture the full picture of service reliability, particularly when incidents have no clear upper bound on duration or when the nature of incidents is diverse. The reliance on MTTR can obscure the real issues affecting reliability, as it averages out details that could indicate systemic problems. PagerDuty's Analytics and Insights tools offer alternative approaches by allowing teams to assign and track priorities, providing a more nuanced view of incidents and helping focus on those with the most impact on users. By using a combination of MTTR and other metrics like incident priority and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), teams can gain a better understanding of their service reliability and make informed decisions to improve it.