OT MSSP Metrics: 3 Performance KPI Types for Industrial Security

3 Types of MSSP Performance Metrics for OT Security Providers

Managed security service providers (MSSPs) working in industrial and OT environments operate under constant pressure. Customers expect 24×7 coverage, tight service level agreements (SLAs), and clear proof that cybersecurity spend is reducing risk. Internally, MSSPs must control costs, avoid analyst burnout, and differentiate in a crowded market.

To do that, metrics matter. But not all metrics serve the same purpose. In practice, OT MSSPs work with three broad groups of performance metrics:

• External (customer-owned) metrics – how customers, boards, and auditors evaluate the MSSP.
• Internal (provider-owned) metrics – how the MSSP runs and optimizes its own operations.
• Customer-facing metrics – what the MSSP deliberately sends to clients weekly, monthly, and quarterly.

This article organizes those three types, gives concrete examples, and then shows how quantified vulnerability management and cyber risk quantification can strengthen the metrics story for both MSSPs and their industrial customers.

External MSSP Metrics: How Customers Measure Performance

External metrics are the numbers customers expect to see in contracts, dashboards, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs). They are the primary scorecard for judging whether an MSSP is doing its job.

Time-Based Incident Metrics and SLAs

Almost every security operation center (SOC), managed detection & response (MDR), MSSP metrics framework starts with timebased KPIs such as:

• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) – average time from the start of malicious activity to detection.
• Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) – time from alert creation to an analyst picking it up.
• Mean Time to Contain (MTTC) – time from detection to effective containment (e.g., host isolated, account disabled).
• Mean Time to Respond/Recover (MTTR) – time to full remediation and safe return to operations.

Industry SOC metrics guides from vendors such as Splunk treat MTTD and MTTR as core indicators for incident response effectiveness, and these same metrics show up in MSSP contracts and scorecards. (Splunk)

For OT MSSPs, these metrics are often framed around preventing or minimizing operational disruption in industrial control systems, not just IT systems.

Incident Handling Depth and Business Impact

Customers also care about how incidents are handled end-to-end:

• Number of incidents closed within one shift or within SLA.
• Average downtime or business outage per incident.
• Time to discover all impacted assets and users.
• Thoroughness of eradication and recurrence rate (whether similar compromises reappear).
• Monetary cost per incident and losses prevented.

SANS SOC surveys explicitly list “downtime per incident,” “time to discover all impacted assets,” “thoroughness of eradication,” and “losses accrued vs. losses prevented” as KPIs that customers ask MSSPs to report. (AI Security Automation)

These metrics answer the question: “Are you doing meaningful work for us, or just closing tickets?”

Coverage and Visibility

Boards and CISOs increasingly focus on coverage: what portion of the estate is actually monitored. Typical external coverage metrics include:

• OT/ICS asset visibility and coverage (% of known assets monitored).
• Number of sites/plants under continuous monitoring.
• Log source coverage (e.g., firewalls, OT sensors, EDR, AD, cloud).

Channel-focused sources and SOC metric guides recommend “estate coverage across identity, endpoints, network, infrastructure, and SaaS” as a headline KPI for security services, which OT MSSPs adapt to industrial assets and networks. (DeNexus)

Detection Quality and Customer Experience

Detection quality is another external lens:

• False positive rate, as perceived by the customer.
• Number of material security incidents (e.g., actual breaches or OT impacting events).
• SLA compliance at the case level (% of tickets/incidents resolved within SLA).
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) after major incidents.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) and churn/renewal rates.

MSSP KPI guidance from vendors such as Heimdal highlights SLA compliance, NPS, and churn as critical custome rowned metrics that providers must track closely. (Scribd)

These external metrics define how industrial customers score their OT MSSP—tactically (daytoday service quality) and strategically (renewal and expansion decisions).

Internal MSSP Metrics: How You Run and Optimize the Business

Internal metrics are the provider’s own view of performance. They are often more detailed than what customers see and are used to manage the SOC, platform, and overall MSSP business.

Operational Workload and Efficiency

To avoid analyst burnout and missed alerts, MSSPs track operational workload:

• Alerts per analyst per shift or per hour.
• Tickets per analyst per day and average handling time.
• Percentage of alerts autotriaged or autoresolved.
• Queue length/backlog and SLA breach rate.

SOC metrics guidance and SANS SOC surveys both emphasize using these metrics to balance human effort and automated tooling within a SOC. (Splunk)

OT MSSPs also watch:

• Average time to complete OT asset discovery, vulnerability reporting, and baselining per site, while ensuring it doesn’t affect reliability of the operating facility.
• Logistics and time required to onboard new OT facilities, network zones, and cyber assets. Ensuring the process is efficient will effective.

Platform and Coverage Health

Beyond analyst workload, internal metrics track platform health:

• Log ingestion volume vs. useful detections (to manage SIEM and data costs).
• Percentage of OT sensors online and forwarding data.
• Percentage of remote access sessions going through approved gateways, to ensure external access is well monitored..

These inform decisions about tuning, architecture changes, and vendor/tool consolidation.

Commercial and Security Outcome Metrics

At the business level, MSSPs monitor:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) / Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) from security services and gross margin per service.
• Cost per incident or ticket.
• Churn and expansion rates across the OT customer base.

And they aggregate security outcomes internally:

• Trend in MTTD/MTTR across customers.
• Vulnerability remediation rates vs. internal targets or SLAs.
• Reduction in critical incidents and unplanned OT downtime over time.

Internal metrics like these determine whether the MSSP can scale OT security services profitably while maintaining or improving outcomes.

Customer-Facing MSSP Metrics: The Story You Report

Customer-facing metrics are the curated subset of external and internal metrics that an MSSP deliberately packages and sends to clients. They provide the narrative in:

• Weekly or monthly operational reports.
• Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) or Annual Business Reviews (ABRs).
• Executive/board-level briefings.

These metrics aim to answer three questions for the customer:

1. What happened?
2. How did the MSSP perform?
3. Are we safer, and where should we invest next?

Weekly / Operational Reporting

Weekly or operational reporting typically focuses on what is happening right now:

• Detections and incidents in the period, by severity and type.
• Open incidents by severity, age, and site.
• Short horizon SLA performance (MTTA, MTTD, MTTC) for critical events.

For OT MSSPs, this is often broken down by plant or OT network segment so OT teams can directly see what is happening in their environments.

Monthly Service Reports

Monthly reports are where most MSSPs tell their value story:

• Incident and detection trends over the last few months.
• SLA and performance metrics (MTTD, MTTR, MTTC, SLA attainment, falsepositive rates).
• Coverage and posture updates (OT asset coverage, new sites onboarded, unknown devices discovered).
• Vulnerability and hygiene status (vulnerabilities discovered vs. remediated, remediation time, compensating controls for EoL systems).
• Compliance posture vs. agreed upon frameworks.

This reporting is often accompanied by a short executive summary highlighting major incidents handled, key improvements, and recommended next steps.

Quarterly and Annual QBR/ABR Metrics

Quarterly and annual reviews zoom out to strategy. Here, customer-facing metrics typically include:

• Multi-quarter trends for MTTD, MTTR, incident volume, false positives, and coverage.
• Trend in high-severity incidents and any material breaches or OT impacting events.
• Vulnerability exposure trends (e.g., critical vulns open vs. closed) and OT coverage by control type.
• Maturity heat maps vs. frameworks such as NIST CSF or IEC 62443.
• Roadmap and budget recommendations tied back to metric gaps (“expand OT coverage,” “address specific vulnerability clusters,” etc.).

SANS SOC and MSSP surveys note that customers increasingly ask for financial indicators such as “monetary cost per incident” and “losses prevented” alongside these technical metrics, especially in QBRs. (AI Security Automation)

Where Quantified Vulnerability Management and Cyber Risk Quantification Fit

The content above describes metrics that are already common in MSSP practice, where many OT MSSPs struggle is linking these metrics to financial impact and prioritizing vulnerabilities by business risk rather than purely technical severity.

The research behind this article highlights how customers are asking for:

• Monetary cost per incident and losses prevented as part of MSSP KPIs.
• Better ways to evaluate vulnerability management efforts than “number of critical CVEs closed.”

This is where quantified vulnerability management and cyber risk quantification can complement your metrics strategy.

For vulnerability-focused metrics in OT environments, quantified vulnerability management platforms such as DeRISK QVM help MSSPs go beyond CVSS and exploitability to rank OT vulnerabilities by their contribution to financial risk, not just technical severity. DeRISK QVM translates vulnerabilities and controls into financial risk metrics, including dollars at risk, which can be embedded directly into customer-facing reports and QBRs. (DeNexus)

For broader, portfolio-level metrics, cyber risk quantification platforms such as DeRISK CRQ can translate OT cyber exposure into risk quantified in monetary terms, using both inside-out telemetry and outside-in threat data. This provides OT stakeholders, CISOs, and CFOs with board-level cyber risk metrics—such as value-at-risk (VaR) and risk trends over time—that complement traditional MSSP performance metrics. (DeNexus)

By integrating quantified vulnerability management and cyber risk quantification into external, internal, and customer-facing metrics, OT MSSPs can:

• Make their services easier to evaluate and justify in financial terms.
• Prioritize remediation where it has the largest riskreduction impact.
• Strengthen renewal and upsell conversations with evidence-based cybersecurity metrics that resonate with both technical and business stakeholders.

Book a 15-min demo today to learn more about DeRISK CRQ and DeRISK QVM