Reference · Glossary

RTO (recovery time objective)

The **maximum acceptable downtime** before service must be restored after an incident.

#When to use

DR planning, SLA negotiations, and prioritizing warm standby vs cold backup.

#When not to

Setting RTO without rehearsed runbooks — untested targets are fiction.

#Example

RTO 15 minutes for `/api/chat` — failover completes before executive SLA credits kick in.