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CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Time to first insight

Definition

Time to First Insight (TTFI) is the elapsed time from an alert firing to the first grounded, evidence-backed explanation appearing in the on-call coordination channel. Distinct from time-to-acknowledge (human action) and time-to-resolve (fix deployed) — TTFI measures the diagnostic gap: how long until the team has shared understanding of what is happening.

Instacart's Blueberry achieves TTFI of ~3 minutes on average across ~17,000 auto-triages per month by: normalizing heterogeneous alert inputs, enriching with team context, and gathering evidence in parallel (historical + live + changes) before synthesizing a grounded explanation.

Why it matters

"The hardest minutes of that race aren't the ones spent fixing the bug — they're the ones spent figuring out what the bug even is, while everyone in the thread is asking the same question from a slightly different angle." (Source: sources/2026-07-14-instacart-blueberry-on-call-reasoning-harness)

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