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Conor Bronsdon for LinearB

Posted on • Originally published at devinterrupted.com

The Problem with MTTR: Learning from Incident Reports

Tracking Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) is standard industry practice for incident response and analysis, but should it be?

Courtney Nash, an Internet Incident Librarian, argues that MTTR is not a reliable metric - and we think she's got a point.

We caught up with Courtney at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas, where she was making her case against MTTR in favor of alternative metrics (SLOs and cost of coordination data), practices (Near Miss analysis), and mindsets (humans are the solution, not the problem) to help organization better learn from their incidents.

Episode Highlights:

  • (1:54) The end of MTTR?
  • (4:50) Library of incidents
  • (13:20) What is an incident?
  • (19:41) Cost of coordination
  • (22:13) Near misses
  • (24:21) Mental models
  • (28:16) Role of language in shaping public discourse
  • (29:33) Learnings from The Void

While you’re here, check out this video from our YouTube channel, and be sure to like and subscribe when you do!

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