MTTR

MTTR (mean time to recover) measures how long it takes to resolve an incident after it has been created. It reflects your team’s ability to diagnose, mitigate, and fully restore service.

MTTR is one of the four core DORA metrics and a critical indicator of operational resilience.

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 MTTR field, you can still calculate MTTR 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.
      project = OPS
      AND issuetype IN (Incident, "Major Incident")
      AND resolved >= "{{timeframe.start}}"
      AND resolved <= "{{timeframe.end}}"
      AND "Time to resolution" IS NOT EMPTY
      ORDER BY resolved DESC

      Or, if you don’t have a Time to resolution field, you could instead use the following query and then compute MTTR as resolved - created using custom columns:
      project = OPS
      AND issuetype IN (Incident, "Major Incident")
      AND resolved >= "{{timeframe.start}}"
      AND resolved <= "{{timeframe.end}}"
      AND resolved IS NOT EMPTY
      ORDER BY resolved DESC
    2. Result type: Select List.
    3. Columns: Specify the fields related to MTTR. The available fields will depend on your environment and SLA configuration. For this example, this could include:
      • issue_key
      • time_to_resolution_minutes
      • created
      • resolved
    4. Click Apply to run the query.
  4. Group:
    1. Aggregation type: Select Average.
    2. Aggregation column: Select your SLA metric for measuring MTTR. For example, Time to Resolution Minutes.
    3. Click Done.
  5. Columns: Do one of the following depending on whether you have a MTTR column available or if you need to calculate it manually:
    • MTTR available: Click Edit
      and ensure your MTTR metric column and select a Type of Minutes.
    • To create MTTR: Click Add > Custom to create a new column and configure the following:
      1. Name: Enter MTTR.
      2. Type: Select Minutes.
      3. Value Expression: Enter a value expression to calculate MTTR. For example: {{ ($['resolved'] - $['created']) / 1000 / 60 }} to calculate the minutes.
  6. Visualization:
    1. Type: Select Scalar.
    2. Value: Select your MTTR metric column.
  7. Click Save.

Configuring monitoring

Monitoring helps surface when MTTR 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 for MTTR tiles:

  1. Monitoring: Enable the Monitoring toggle.
  2. Type: Select Threshold.
  3. Value: Select top.
  4. Column: Your MTTR metric column is automatically selected.
  5. Conditions:
    With a healthy baseline of 90 minutes, we use broader thresholds to reflect the natural variability in incident complexity. The monitor is designed to catch sustained increases rather than individual long-running incidents:
    1. Error: Enable the toggle, then configure as greater than and then supply an appropriate value. For our example we'll enter 180.
    2. Warning: Enable the toggle, then configure as greater than and then supply an appropriate value. For our example we'll enter 120.
  6. Click Save.

Publishing KPIs

To give even more value to this dashboard you can publish your MTTR 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:

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

Configure the tile KPI

Configure the following in the tile editor:

  1. KPI: Enable the toggle.
  2. Type: Select MTTR depending on the tile.
  3. Click Save.

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