MTTA

Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) measures how quickly incidents are recognized and actively picked up once they are created or triggered, and is calculated as the time from incident creation to acknowledgment.

Where MTTR reflects recovery speed, MTTA reflects responsiveness.

In this example we use Jira Service Management as the data source as this gives us access to dedicated SLA fields.

Note: If you don’t use JSM or have access to a dedicated MTTA field, you can still calculate MTTA using timestamps that already exist in tools like Jira and ServiceNow.

To fetch our data, we'll provide JQL queries in the data stream parameters. We'll also use parameter expressions to reference the dashboard timeframe, ensuring that whenever we change the time range of our dashboard, our tile data also updates!

Tile configuration

Configure the following in the tile editor:

1. Data source: Select Jira Service Management.
2. Data stream: Select JQL Query.
3. Parameters:
   1. JQL query: Provide a query that returns resolved incident issues. The exact query and available fields will vary depending on how your JSM project is configured. Use the following as an example only.
      
      Copy

      project = OPS
      AND issuetype IN (Incident, "Major Incident")
      AND resolved >= "{{timeframe.start}}"
      AND resolved <= "{{timeframe.end}}"
      AND "Time to first response" IS NOT EMPTY
      ORDER BY resolved DESC

   2. Result type: Select List.
   3. Columns: Specify the fields required to calculate MTTA. The available fields will depend on your environment and SLA configuration. For this example, we’ll use:
      • issue_key
      • created
      • time_to_first_response_minutes
   4. Click Apply to run the query.
4. Group:
   1. Aggregation type: Select Average.
   2. Aggregation column: Select your SLA metric for measuring MTTA. Time to First Response Minutes.
   3. Click Done.
5. Columns: Ensure your MTTA metric column has a Type of Minutes.
6. Visualization:
   1. Type: Select Scalar.
   2. Value: Select your MTTA metric column.
7. Click Save.

Configuring monitoring

Monitoring helps surface when MTTA begins to degrade. In turn this allows you to detect overload, alert fatigue, or process breakdowns early, before they evolve into prolonged incidents or burnout.

Configuration

Configure the following in the tile editor:

1. Monitoring: Enable the Monitoring toggle.
2. Type: Select Threshold.
3. Value: Select top.
4. Column: Your MTTA metric column is automatically selected.
5. Conditions:
   With a healthy baseline of 10 minutes, we trigger a Warning when acknowledgement time increases by roughly 2x-3x, and an error when it increases further. This keeps the monitor sensitive to real responsiveness issues without reacting to occasional delays.
   1. Error: Enable the toggle, then configure as greater than and then supply an appropriate value. For our example we'll enter 30.
   2. Warning: Enable the toggle, then configure as greater than and then supply an appropriate value. For our example we'll enter 20.
6. Click Save.

Publishing KPIs

To give even more value to this dashboard you can publish your MTTA metric as a KPI.

Once published, these KPIs can be selected as a data stream when configuring a tile, making it both easier to track on-call performance over time and to reuse this data across your other dashboards.

Configure the KPI types

Configure the following for both your MTTA and MTTR KPIs:

1. Navigate to Settings > KPI > KPI Types.
2. Click Add KPI type. The Add KPI type window opens.
3. Name: Enter MTTA.
4. Click Save.

Configure the tile KPI

Configure the following in the tile editor:

1. KPI: Enable the toggle.
2. Type: Select MTTA.
3. Click Save.

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