> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.use.observer/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Incident SLO impact

> How the auto-impact panel computes burn rate and time to budget exhaustion.

When an incident lists affected services, every SLO bound to those
services contributes to the auto-impact panel. The panel updates
every 30 seconds while an incident is open and freezes on resolve.

## What gets computed

For each affected SLO:

* **Burn during incident**: the seconds the SLO counted as bad
  during the incident, exactly as its error budget counts them:
  unhealthy time, plus (under the default `down` unknown-data policy)
  no-data time and silent gaps. Excluded maintenance is left out.
  The incident runs from its actual start (else when it was
  published) to its actual end (else when it was resolved, else now).
  A canceled incident shows no duration.
* **Percent of budget consumed**: burn seconds divided by the SLO's
  total budget seconds. Total budget = window seconds × (1 − target%).
* **Total budget remaining**: the last-computed budget percentage
  from the periodic evaluator, not recomputed in the panel. It may
  be a few minutes stale.
* **Time to exhaust**: at the current burn rate (burn seconds /
  incident duration seconds), how long until the remaining budget
  reaches zero. Reported in minutes; null when the burn rate is
  zero.

## Caching

Repeated panel polls within 30 seconds reuse the same computation
(in-memory cache keyed by incident id). This keeps an open dashboard
that polls every 30s from triggering redundant recomputation.

## Sources of error

* Recorded metric history is the source of truth for burn. Missed
  pushes count only as the SLO's unknown-data policy says, and only
  for agents on version 1.4.0 or later.
* The remaining-budget % comes from the most recent run of the
  periodic evaluator. If evaluation fell behind, the value can be
  stale by a few minutes. The burn-during-incident value is always
  fresh.
* Time-to-exhaust extrapolates a linear burn rate. Real systems
  rarely sustain a linear rate; treat the number as a rough budget
  rather than a precise countdown.

## Public visibility

The auto-impact panel is console-only by default. A per-incident
toggle exposes a slimmed view (burn % only, no time-to-exhaust) on
the public incident page. Some operators choose to surface it for
transparency; others view it as internal-only. The default is off.


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