Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) is a DORA metric that represents the period it takes for a team to become aware of an anomaly or failure within their applications. A low MTTD is desirable, as it indicates that issues are being promptly identified, allowing for faster resolution and minimal impact on user experience.
For example, let's consider a web application that experiences a sudden spike in error rates. The MTTD would be the time it takes for the team to realize that the error rates have increased beyond the acceptable threshold. By having effective monitoring and alerting systems in place, the MTTD can be reduced, enabling the team to swiftly address the issue and prevent further disruption to the application's performance.
However, a large number of poorly calibrated alerts can result in a lot of false positives, leading to developers not taking alerts seriously enough. In those scenarios, you should consider SLOs.