CORE METRICS

Mean Time To Acknowledge

Q: Does auto-acknowledgement count?

No. MTTA measures *human* responsiveness. If a bot acknowledges it, you are gamifying the metric without solving the problem.

The average time from when an alert fires to when a human acknowledges it.

MTTA = Σ Acknowledgment Times / n

The average time from when an alert fires to when a human acknowledges it.

The "Waking Up" Metric

MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) measures how long it takes for a human to say "I am looking at this." It is purely a measure of responsiveness.

Why It Matters

If your system crashes at 3:00 AM and your engineer sleeps until 8:00 AM, your MTTA is 5 hours. That is 5 hours of downtime where no one was even trying to fix it. Reducing MTTA is the "quickest win" for improving overall Availability.

MTTA vs. MTTD vs. MTTR

MTTD: Time to detect the fire.
MTTA: Time to pick up the fire extinguisher.
MTTR: Time to put out the fire.

ExThe Sleeping Engineer

"An alert fired at 2 AM. The on-call engineer had their phone on "Do Not Disturb"."

Impact

The incident raged for 4 hours until customers started calling the CEO.

Resolution

The team configured PagerDuty to bypass "Do Not Disturb" on iOS/Android. MTTA dropped to <2 minutes.

Why MTTA Matters

MTTA measures your team's responsiveness. Fast acknowledgment means faster resolution and less customer impact.

Top performing teams acknowledge incidents within 5 minutes, regardless of time zone or day of week.

MTTA vs. Other Metrics

MTTA

Alert → Acknowledged

MTTR

Alert → Resolved

MTTD

Issue → Alert fires

Common Pitfalls

Alert Fatigue

If engineers get 100 alerts a day, they stop acknowledging them quickly. Reduce noise.

Email Alerts

Never use email for urgent alerts. Use SMS, Phone Call, or Push Notifications.

How to Use MTTA

📱

Push Notifications: Immediate alerts on mobile devices via PagerDuty/OpsGenie.

🔔

Escalation Policies: Auto-escalate if no response in 5 min (e.g., page the manager).

👥

On-Call Rotation: Ensure the on-call engineer knows they are on duty.

Industry Benchmarks

ExcellentTop 5%

< 1 min

GoodTop 15%

1-5 min

AverageTop 40%

5-15 min

StrugglingBelow Avg

> 15 min

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good MTTA?

Elite teams acknowledge in < 1 minute. Good teams in < 5 minutes. Anything over 15 minutes implies broken paging/on-call processes.

Does auto-acknowledgement count?