RTO and MTTR are related, but they’re not the same thing.
🔎 RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
- Definition: A business requirement.
- The maximum downtime allowed before services must be restored.
- Set by the business based on customer expectations, compliance, or SLAs.
- Example: “Our e-commerce app must be back online within 30 minutes of an outage.”
🔧 MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery / Repair / Restore)
- Definition: An operational metric.
- The average time it actually takes your team to restore service after an incident.
- Calculated from real incident data.
- Example: “On average, it takes us 20 minutes to bring the app back after a failure.”
✅ Key Differences
| Term | What it is | Who defines it | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTO | Target / requirement (how much downtime is acceptable) | Business / management | “≤ 30 minutes downtime” |
| MTTR | Actual performance (how long recovery takes on average) | Measured from operations | “We usually recover in 20 minutes” |
📌 Relationship
- MTTR should be less than or equal to RTO to meet business requirements.
-
Example:
- RTO = 30 minutes
- MTTR = 20 minutes → ✅ good
- MTTR = 45 minutes → ❌ violates the RTO
👉 So:
- RTO = goal (business expectation).
- MTTR = result (operational measurement).
Top comments (0)