Engineering Incident Metrics Operational

Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)

Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA): Time from detection (the alert firing) to a person acknowledging the incident.

Also known as: MTTA

Formula

MTTA = Average of (Acknowledgment time - Alert time)

Computable definition

The canonical formula in the GASP formula grammar. The MCP server compiles it to SQL over the datasets listed below.

(avg(field.acknowledged_at - field.detected_at)) * 1440

Unit: minutes

Notes: Acknowledgment time minus alert time.

Data requirements

Grain: Per event · Frequency: Per incident · Aggregation: event · Staged: no · Main source: Incident Management.

Field	Dataset	Type
`acknowledged_at`	incident	timestamp
`detected_at`	incident	timestamp
`started_at`	incident	timestamp

Example SQL (Postgres)

SELECT ((SELECT AVG((EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (acknowledged_at - detected_at)) / 86400.0)) FROM incident WHERE started_at >= :period_start AND started_at < (:period_end + INTERVAL '1 day')) * 1440) AS mean_time_to_acknowledge_mtta

From an agent: with the GASP MCP server, call lookup_metric({ "name": "Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)" }) or generate_query({ "metric": "Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)", "adapter": "<your adapter JSON>" }).

What It Tells You

On-call responsiveness.

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