MTBF & System Availability Calculator
Calculate Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), system availability percentage, and expected annual downtime.
Results
What is it?
For informational/educational purposes only. MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) measures the average time a system operates before a failure occurs. System availability is the percentage of time the system is operational, calculated from MTBF and MTTR.
How to use
Enter the total hours the system has operated, the number of failures during that period, and the average time to repair each failure. The calculator outputs MTBF, availability %, and expected annual downtime.
Example scenario
A server runs 8,760 hours/year with 3 failures and 4-hour average repair time. MTBF = 2,920 hrs. Availability = 2920 / (2920 + 4) � 100 = 99.863%. Expected annual downtime = 12 hours.
Pro tip
To achieve four nines (99.99%) availability, you need MTBF/MTTR > 9,999. Redundancy (active-active clusters) improves system MTBF multiplicatively. Focus MTTR improvements on runbooks, automation, and on-call response processes.