Incident Management Metrics That Matter

Businesses run on metrics. They use them to judge success, identify areas for investment, and reward employees. Unfortunately, naive metrics can do more harm than good, especially in the context of low-frequency events like incidents. Management teams often reach for MTTR (mean time to recovery) or raw incident counts to judge the success of reliability and resilience programs, but these metrics generate spurious insights and perverse incentives. As SREs we can't simply tell the business not to measure them -- we need to offer alternatives. This talk explores a starting list of things to measure instead (and how to build your own list), as well as a framework to educate less technical people on what the actual value proposition of incident management is.