Incident MTTR Impact Calculator
Quantify what your mean time to resolve costs the business, and how much money faster recovery would save each month and year.
How it works
Downtime cost = incidents × MTTR × cost/hour · Saving = incidents × (current MTTR − target MTTR) × cost/hour
Mean time to resolve turns directly into money because every hour a service is degraded carries a cost — lost revenue, SLA credits and the labour of everyone firefighting. Since the cost scales linearly with MTTR, halving recovery time halves the incident bill without touching how often incidents happen. That is why investing in observability, runbooks and automated rollback often pays back faster than chasing a lower incident count.
Worked example
Four incidents a month at a 3-hour MTTR and $5,000/hour is 4 × 3 × 5,000 = $60,000/month. Cutting MTTR to 1 hour drops that to $20,000, a $40,000 monthly saving — about $480,000 a year.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between MTTR, MTTD and MTBF?
MTTR is mean time to resolve (or repair) once an incident starts; MTTD is mean time to detect it; MTBF is mean time between failures. Lowering MTTR shrinks the impact of each incident, while raising MTBF reduces how often they occur.
How do I actually reduce MTTR?
Faster detection (good alerting and SLO-based monitoring), clear runbooks, one-click rollbacks and feature flags to disable a bad release, and blameless postmortems that remove the recurring causes.
What cost-per-hour should I use?
For revenue-generating services, start with average hourly revenue affected, then add SLA penalty credits and the loaded cost of the responders pulled in. Even a rough figure makes the reliability trade-off concrete.
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This calculator is for educational purposes. Double-check important results before acting on them.