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MTBF & Availability Calculator

Bookkeeping for outages: MTBF (mean time between failures) is the average uptime between incidents, MTTR is the average recovery time, and inherent availability is MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR). Enter incidents to get all four, or start from an availability SLO and see how much downtime it buys you across common windows. Everything runs locally.

Incidents
MTBF
MTTR
Availability

Nines reference

NinesAvailabilityDowntime / year
190 %36.5 d
299 %3.65 d
2.599.5 %1.83 d
399.9 %8h 45m
3.599.95 %4h 22m
499.99 %52m 34s
4.599.995 %26m 17s
599.999 %5m 15s
699.9999 %31.5s

Definitions

MTBF — Mean time between failures. Only applies to repairable systems. Two conventions exist: uptime-only, or the full cycle including repair.

MTTF — Mean time to failure, for non-repairable components (a disk that dies). MTBF ≈ MTTF + MTTR.

MTTR — Mean time to repair. Usually measured wall-clock from detection to full recovery. Some teams distinguish MTTD (detect), MTTA (acknowledge), MTTR (respond / restore) and MTTF (fix root cause).

Inherent availabilityA = MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR). Ignores planned maintenance and logistics delay; use operational availability if you need to include those.