Mean time to acknowledge
Mean time to acknowledge
(also MTTA)
Mean time to acknowledge definition
A mean time to acknowledge (also known as MTTA) is the average time it takes for the team or individual to start working on an issue after an alert is triggered. It’s a metric used in incident response and service management to track and measure how quickly the organization acknowledges that there’s a problem that needs attention.
MTTA is calculated by adding up the time between the alert and the acknowledgment and dividing it by the number of incidents.
See also: tech support scam
How MTTA works
- An event or incident occurs, e.g., a system outage to a security breach. This event is detected through automated monitoring tools, user reports, or other means.
- Once the event is detected, it’s registered in an incident management system. A record is also created, initiating the countdown for calculating MTTA.
- The system responsible for handling the event sends a notification to the appropriate team, informing them that an event has occurred and requires attention.
- The notified team reviews the notification and acknowledges it using the formal process. This response indicates they’re aware of the event and will take appropriate action.
- The time between the event registration and the acknowledgment is measured and added to a collection of similar measurements.
- This process is repeated for multiple events over a specified period of time (e.g., a day, a week, a month).
- At the end of the measurement period, the total time taken to acknowledge all the events is divided by the total number of events. This calculation gives the average time taken to acknowledge events.
Why is MTTA important?
- Helps an organization improve incident response time.
- May improve customer satisfaction.
- Reduces business downtime.
- Increases operational efficiency.