Increased MTTR is Good?

In Episode 167 of The Cloudcast - “Bringing Advanced Analytics to DevOps”, Dave Hayes brings up an interesting point about Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). At about 8:30 in, he states:

In a counter-intuitive sense, you actually want this to be going up…If you’re removing false alerts, and you’re getting better about the quantity of alerts, you’re going to be solving far fewer, more difficult problems, so you should see a slight trend upwards in Mean Time to Resolution

This is a really interesting way of looking at things. Obviously you don’t want to set your goal as “Increase our MTTR,” but this could be a positive side-effect of improved processes.

I recommend listening to the whole episode. PagerDuty is a very cool product in itself, but this is a broader discussion about operations, analytics, and best practices.

Subscribe to the podcast while you’re there too. Lots of interesting technology discussed there.