Glossary / MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution / Repair)
MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution / Repair)
The average time between when an incident or ticket is opened and when it's fully resolved — a core operational metric for measuring how fast an IT team or MSP actually fixes things.
MTTR is calculated by averaging resolution time across a set of tickets or incidents over a period, but the acronym itself is used inconsistently — "Mean Time To Resolution" (fully fixed and closed), "Mean Time To Repair" (the fix is in place, verification may still follow), and occasionally "Mean Time To Respond" all get shortened the same way, so it's worth confirming which definition a given report or SLA is actually measuring.
MTTR is a lagging indicator — it describes how the team performed on incidents that already happened, not how many are coming next. It's most useful segmented by priority rather than blended: a single average across critical and low-priority tickets together tends to bury the number that matters most, which is how fast the critical ones actually get fixed.
A rising MTTR is usually a symptom of something specific and fixable — more complex incidents than usual, a staffing gap, a broken escalation path, or tooling friction (a technician switching between four separate systems to diagnose one issue) — which is why it's worth trending MTTR over time and by category rather than reading it as a single snapshot number.
How Nexus handles this
Nexus calculates resolution time against the same ticket and alert record the SLA timers already run against, so MTTR reporting reads real first-touch and close timestamps instead of reconciling two systems' clocks after the fact.
More terms
MSP (Managed Service Provider)
A company that remotely manages a client's IT infrastructure and end-user systems on an ongoing, proactive basis — usually a flat-fee contract, not break-fix billing.
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)
Software that lets an MSP monitor device health and perform remote management tasks — patching, scripting, remote control — across every client site from one console.
PSA (Professional Services Automation)
Software that runs the business side of MSP operations — ticketing, SLAs, billing, contracts, and client records — the system of record most MSP work flows through.
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