Ace the ITIL 4 Foundation Exam 2026 – Level Up Your IT Skills with Confidence!

The mean time to restore service (MTRS) is a critical metric used to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of incident management processes. It specifically measures the duration taken to recover a service after a failure has occurred. This includes the identification of the incident, the implementation of a workaround or fix, and the final restoration of service to normal operations.

This measure is particularly important within IT service management, as it directly impacts service availability and customer satisfaction. A lower MTRS indicates that the organization can respond and recover from incidents more swiftly, minimizing disruption to users and business processes. Therefore, understanding and optimizing MTRS is vital for organizations striving to improve their service resilience and response strategies, aligning with the service management practices defined in ITIL 4.

In contrast, the other options focus on different aspects of service management and do not accurately define MTRS. For example, measuring the average time taken to deliver new services, the speed of incident response, or the average duration of planned maintenance pertains to service delivery and maintenance rather than the reactive aspect of restoring services post-failure.