MTTR vs MTTR: What's the Difference?

John Spacey, updated on February 20, 2016

Mean Time To Repair and Mean Time To Recovery are IT Service Management metrics that have remarkably similar definitions. Both are commonly abbreviated MTTR, making them difficult to differentiate.

Mean Time To Repair

Mean Time To Repair is the older of the two terms. It is defined as the average time to repair an incident. The average may be broken down by platform, service or application. In many cases, it is averaged for all incidents across an organization excluding low priority incidents that apply to a single device such as a phone.

Mean Time To Recovery

Mean Time to Recovery is a more recent term that accounts for the fact that modern robust services often recover themselves. For example, a machine that experiences problems may automatically be removed from the active servers of a cloud platform. Recovery is meant to be a more generic term that includes both manual repairs and automation that fixes incidents. It is defined as the average time to recover from an incident.

Overview: MTTR vs MTTR
Type	Information Technology Metrics
Mean Time To Repair Definition	The average time to repair an incident.
Mean Time To Recovery Definition	The average time to recover from an incident.
Related Concepts	Mean Time Between Failures Availability Management