Why overall revenue isn't a KPI for PagerDuty incident response.

KPIs that actually tell a story about incident response

Let’s imagine a morning where a critical service hiccups and your on-call rotation jolts awake. In the heat of incident response, it’s easy to chase numbers that sound impressive but don’t really reflect how well the team is handling the outage. The right KPIs cut through the noise, offering actionable insight. The question we’re unpacking here is a classic one: which KPI is NOT typically used to measure incident response effectiveness? A) MTTA, B) MTTR, C) User satisfaction surveys, D) Overall revenue generated. The correct answer is D, and here’s why it makes sense in plain language.

What MTTA and MTTR actually tell you

• MTTA, or Mean Time To Acknowledge, is the clock you start when an incident is reported and you log the first human acknowledgement. It’s a signal of responsiveness: how quickly the team wakes up and begins triage.

• MTTR, or Mean Time To Resolve, tracks how long it takes to bring the incident to a full fix or acceptable restoration after it’s been acknowledged. It’s about how efficiently you move from detection to restoration.

Together, MTTA and MTTR map the rhythm of your incident response: speed, handoffs, and the ability to apply a fix without letting the clock run wild. They are practical indicators of process health—how well the triage, escalation, and remediation steps are working in real time.

User sentiment: the good and the not-so-good about post-incident feedback

• User satisfaction surveys aren’t a direct measure of how fast you fixed something, but they matter. They reveal whether the incident handling met user expectations during a stressful moment. If users feel heard, informed, and supported, disappointment can soften even if the outage took longer than ideal. On the flip side, a survey can flag issues you didn’t surface during the incident itself—communication gaps, confusing status updates, or a feeling that the team left stakeholders in the dark.

• Think of it as a qualitative thermometer. It doesn’t replace timing metrics, but it complements them. It helps you connect the dots between technical performance and user experience. After all, the end goal isn’t just to fix the system; it’s to restore trust with customers and users.

Why overall revenue is not a typical KPI for incident response

Now, would revenue generated be nice to have? Sure. A happy customer who sticks around after a rough outage can contribute to revenue over time. But here’s the rub: revenue is influenced by a thousand variables beyond incident response—pricing, product-market fit, marketing, seasonality, competitive moves, and so on. It’s a lagging, broad business outcome, not a precise signal of how quickly or effectively your incident team detected, acknowledged, and remediated a fault.

Measuring revenue as a KPI for incident response is a bit like judging a chef’s skill by the restaurant’s holiday profit. It’s not wrong to note the connection, but the KPI won’t tell you if the kitchen ran smoothly, if the wait times were reasonable, or if customers felt cared for during the service outage. The numbers may move in the same direction, but they don’t provide the clean, actionable feedback you need to improve incident handling day to day.

A practical frame for incident-response KPIs

If you’re building a dashboard or preparing a set of metrics for a team, here’s a grounded, human-friendly way to frame it:

• Core speed indicators

• MTTA: How quickly does someone acknowledge the incident after it’s created?

• MTTR: How long until the incident is resolved or restored to normal service?

• Experience indicators

• User satisfaction: Short, targeted surveys after an incident to gauge perceived quality of service and communication.

• Confidence signals: How often post-incident reviews uncover clear learning points that are acted on.

• Quality and reliability indicators

• Reopen rate: How often a resolved incident reopens or requires a rollback? This flags incomplete fixes.

• Post-incident action closure: How many definitive improvements are tracked and closed after a major incident?

• Process health indicators

• Escalation paths used: Were the right on-call people alerted promptly? Were there avoidable escalations?

• Time in each phase: How much of MTTR is spent in triage, containment, remediation, verification? You want a healthy balance, not a bottleneck in one stage.

Let me explain with a simple analogy

Think of incident response like a medical emergency in a busy ER. MTTA is the moment the triage nurse first notes the patient and flags the doctor. MTTR is the entire window from “code blue” to the patient stable enough to be moved to recovery. User satisfaction is the patient’s or family’s sense of being cared for during the chaotic moment. Revenue—that’s more like the hospital’s overall financial health after many months, influenced by dozens of factors—yet not a direct marker of how well the ER handled a single emergency.

Putting these ideas into practice with real-world tools

If you’re dealing with a platform like PagerDuty, these KPIs aren’t abstract concepts; they’re data you can surface in dashboards and reports:

• Set SLOs (service level objectives) around MTTA and MTTR. For example, you might aim for MTTA under 5 minutes for critical services and MTTR under 30 minutes for priority incidents. SLOs give teams a tangible target and a clear signal when things go off track.

• Use incident timelines: PagerDuty’s incident timeline view helps you visualize who acknowledged, what actions were taken, and where delays crept in. That visibility makes MTTA and MTTR more than numbers; they become traceable narratives.

• Collect post-incident feedback: After a resolution, send a short survey to affected users or stakeholders. Tie feedback to the incident so you can correlate sentiment with specific incidents and response steps.

• Conduct blameless post-incident reviews: Gather the on-call engineers, the responders, and a product or operations rep. Focus on learning, not punishment. Document concrete changes—process tweaks, automation, or runbooks—and close them with a clear owner and deadline.

Keep the narrative tight and honest

• It’s tempting to chase a single headline metric like “lowest MTTR” and call it a victory. But a healthy incident program balances speed with accuracy. If you chase speed at the expense of correctness, you’ll end up with flurries of partial fixes, more incidents, and more contradictory status updates.

• Conversely, if you obsess only about perfect remediation without timely acknowledgement, you risk extended outages, frustrated users, and missed escalation windows. The sweet spot is a process that reduces MTTA and MTTR together while preserving high-quality outcomes and clear communication.

A few common traps to avoid

• Don’t treat revenue as a direct KPI for incident response. It’s a distant echo, not a precise signal.

• Don’t confuse user surveys with technical performance. They complement each other, but one doesn’t replace the other.

• Don’t measure everything. A lean set of KPIs tied to your SLOs keeps teams focused on what truly matters.

• Don’t ignore the human element. Tools and automations help, but culture—how teams communicate, how quickly they admit a mistake, how they learn from it—shapes outcomes just as much as any dashboard.

A small digression that still stays on track

While some teams live and die by dashboards, I’ve seen real breakthroughs come from something as simple as a weekly on-call huddle. No slides, just a quick review of the most recent incident, what worked, what didn’t, and one or two practical changes to try next time. It’s not glamorous, but it’s where consistency is built. The metrics inform the conversation, and the conversation drives improvements that actually show up in the numbers the next week.

Putting it all together: a mindset for learning, not chasing

If you’re studying what incident responders measure, you’re not chasing a trophy. You’re building a reliable system that keeps services available and users confident. MTTA and MTTR deserve their spots in the spotlight because they reflect how quickly your team moves from detection to recovery. User satisfaction surveys remind you that the human experience matters. And while revenue might ride the wave of many business currents, it shouldn’t be treated as a direct gauge of incident response effectiveness.

So, here’s the takeaway: when you’re evaluating incident response, lead with MTTA and MTTR as your core speed metrics, pair them with user feedback for a complete view, and keep revenue out of the daily calculus. Build a lean, meaningful KPI set that ties directly to service reliability, clear communication, and continuous learning. That’s the approach that not only measures success but actually makes it more attainable.

A final thought

Outages are, sadly, a part of complex systems. The real victory isn’t avoiding them altogether; it’s shortening the time they disrupt services and ensuring that users feel heard and confidence isn’t eroded. With the right KPIs in place, your incident response teamwork can grow steadier, faster, and wiser—one incident, one post-incident review, one small improvement at a time. And that steady cadence, frankly, is what keeps systems and people resilient in a world that never slows down.