Understanding incident metrics

Tech teams use a variety of metrics to measure incident frequency and recovery speed. The most common ones are: MTBF (mean time between failures), which tracks how often incidents happen; MTTR (mean time to recovery, repair, respond, or resolve), which measures how long it takes to bounce back from an incident; MTTF (mean time to failure), indicating the average time a system operates before failing; and MTTA (mean time to acknowledge), which shows how quickly a team responds to an incident. These metrics help teams understand their system's reliability and their own operational efficiency.