This template belongs to the alert deduplication decisions guide. Copy the blank brief, fill it in with the operations center director, then read the completed example below to check the level of detail.
How to fill in the brief
Fill the brief in one conversation, from memory and the migration plan, without opening any tool. Three rules keep it useful and safe:
- Metadata only. What exists, how much, how long, which system, who owns it. No alert text, hostnames, customer names, employee names or screenshots.
- Ranges are fine. "About 2,000 to 3,000 incidents a year" is enough. Mark anything you are unsure of as "not known".
- Two names, two roles. The person who explains the records and the person who can authorize a discussion are often different people. The who-can-license decision tree helps tell them apart.
The blank brief
| Field | What to write | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Company and size | Sector, country, full-time headcount at peak (contractors excluded) | Company website, the director |
| Monitoring and incident tools | Plain-text names of the monitoring platform, event router, incident tracker and chat | The director |
| Years of history | First year each tool holds alerts, groups, incidents and notes | The director, the platform lead |
| Rough volumes | Incidents a year; alerts a day, as a range | The director |
| Decision quality | Share of merges or splits with a written reason; do rule changes cite incidents? | The director |
| Records owner | The executive who owns production data | The director, then confirmed with that executive |
| Authorized contact | The person who agreed to take an introduction | That person |
| Deadline | Date the old monitoring tool's contract ends or its server is switched off | Migration plan |
| Customer or privacy factors | Monitors customer environments? Notes name employees? | The director, counsel later |
| Open question | One thing the records might show that nobody has checked | Your conversation |
Ten rows fit on one page. If a row needs more than two lines, it probably contains detail that belongs in SourceX's review, not the introduction.
A completed brief (Illustrative)
Invented for this page. The company, figures and dates are fictional.
| Field | Completed entry |
|---|---|
| Company and size | Managed service provider, United States, 520 full-time employees |
| Monitoring and incident tools | Legacy monitoring platform, an event router, an incident tracker and a team chat tool |
| Years of history | Alerts and groups since 2019; incidents since 2018; chat since 2021 |
| Rough volumes | About 2,400 incidents a year; 30,000 to 50,000 alerts a day across customers |
| Decision quality | Director estimates a third of merges carry a written reason; rule commits cite tickets since 2022 |
| Records owner | Chief technology officer |
| Authorized contact | Chief operating officer, who agreed to a short call |
| Deadline | Legacy monitoring contract ends next June |
| Customer or privacy factors | Monitors about 140 customer environments; notes name engineers; counsel not yet consulted |
| Open question | When one customer's outage set off alerts across shared infrastructure, does the record show who tied them together and why? |
Why this example works. Every entry is a fact about the records, not a copy of one. The volumes are ranges. The customer factor is stated plainly instead of hidden, which saves time in review, because customer contracts will decide what an MSP can license. The open question links to a documented tool behavior: PagerDuty's Intelligent Alert Grouping compares alert summaries for textual similarity by default, and its Events API only joins events that share a dedup_key, so cross-customer storms are exactly where a human merge leaves the most useful trace. Alertmanager-style inhibition rules, which suppress some alerts while others fire, are the policy that often follows.
PagerDutyThe client opportunity brief generator can turn these answers into a short note, and the warm introduction brief for a business owner shows the covering message.
What to leave out
- Alert payloads, hostnames, IP addresses or customer names
- Incident numbers, note text or chat excerpts
- Dashboards, screenshots or tool exports
- Logins, API keys or invitations to the monitoring tools
- Any estimate of what the records are worth
If the director offers any of these, thank them and decline. SourceX's review asks for what it needs, under the company's own controls. The system map for alert deduplication records explains which joins the review will test.
Three checks before you send it
- Does the company qualify? It needs 50+ full-time employees at peak (contractors excluded), a documented operating history, rights to license the records and an authorized contact. Companies in the U.S., Canada and the EU qualify, as do companies in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, South Africa, Latin America, the UAE and Saudi Arabia when at least 70% of the data is in English.
- Is the authorized contact real? A named person who agreed to the introduction, not a guess at a title.
- Have you signed the partner agreement? Partners sign the Channel Partner Agreement before submitting introductions. Credit goes to the first valid introduction within the 90-day window, recorded when the company submits a verified application.
What stays unknown until SourceX reviews it: the rights position, what would need removing, buyer interest and any terms. For finding more operations centers with this kind of history, see the incident and on-call records field guide and software consolidations.
Next step
Refer a company. No cap on rewards. Default reward on a company's first qualifying transaction: the greater of $50,000 plus 5% and 15% of Actual Supplier Payout, with no cap; further qualifying transactions first agreed within 12 months of the first Closing pay 15%. Eligibility and payment conditions apply, including the USD 100,000 Minimum Transaction, and a signed Schedule A or addendum can differ. A lead, meeting or signature alone does not trigger payment.
When the brief is complete and the authorized contact has agreed, register as a partner, confirm the company against who qualifies and read the program terms before you submit it.