CS0-003 Reporting and Communication Practice Question
An analyst is evaluating the performance of the security operations center (SOC). Which metric best indicates the team's ability to contain an active threat?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Mean time to respond (MTTR)
Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) measures the average time taken to contain and remediate an incident, directly reflecting containment speed.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Mean time to detect (MTTD)
Why it's wrong here
Mean time to detect (MTTD) quantifies the average duration between the occurrence of a security incident and its initial identification by security tools or analysts. While critical for assessing monitoring and visibility capabilities, it does not measure the subsequent containment, mitigation, or eradication phases of the incident response lifecycle.
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Patch SLA compliance %
Why it's wrong here
Patch SLA compliance percentage tracks how effectively an organization meets established deadlines for deploying software updates and security fixes. This is a proactive vulnerability management metric used to reduce the attack surface, rather than an operational metric that evaluates active incident response or containment performance.
- ✓
Mean time to respond (MTTR)
Why this is correct
Mean time to respond (MTTR) is the definitive metric for evaluating the speed of incident containment and mitigation. It measures the average time elapsed from the moment an alert is detected to when the threat is successfully isolated or neutralized, directly reflecting SOC operational efficiency during active incidents.
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Open vulnerability counts by severity
Why it's wrong here
Open vulnerability counts categorized by severity provide a snapshot of an organization's outstanding security weaknesses and exposure level. While useful for prioritizing remediation efforts and assessing overall risk posture, this metric does not measure the real-time operational performance or containment speed of a security operations team during an active security incident.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
SOC Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 Analyst Roles
Key term
Metric
A metric is a quantifiable measurement used to assess the performance, health, or status of IT systems, networks, or applications.
Key term
SOC
A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a centralized team that monitors, detects, analyzes, and responds to cybersecurity incidents to protect an organization's information systems.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CS0-004 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CS0-004 exam.