More than ever, DevOps teams are constantly tasked with improving collaboration, accelerating software development, and ensuring smooth operations. However, traditional monitoring and alerting methods, often called a “black box approach,” offer limited insight into system performance. As a result, teams rely on reactive approaches, only responding to incidents after they occur without prior planning or strategy.

Mean time to repair (MTTR), sometimes referred to as mean time to resolution, is a popular DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) team metric. MTTR identifies the overall availability and disaster recovery aspects of your IT assets or application workloads. The acronym MTTR can cause some confusion since it has different meanings across different industries. Sometimes, MTTR refers to mean time to respond: the amount of time needed to react to a problem.

Observability refers to the ability of the DevOps team to track, monitor, and measure the state of their pipeline and operations. Without observability, you are working in the dark, unaware of what is working. With the growing complexity of modern IT systems, DevOps observability is no longer optional. Gartner estimates that by 2026, 50% of enterprises implementing distributed data architectures will have adopted data observability tools, up from less than 20% in 2024.