This agenda is part of the monitoring tool retirement guide. Use the archive context checklist afterward to keep the answers current, and the introduction email if the decision is yes.
Three things to set up before the invite
A short meeting fails when the wrong people come or the date is unknown. Fix these first.
- A real retirement event. Know the date and the document behind it: a vendor notice, a contract end or an internal decommissioning ticket. The date is whatever the client's own paperwork says, not a figure you supply.
- The right three people. The on-call platform owner, the incident lead, and for the final block the CTO, VP of engineering or owner.
- A plain invitation. "20 minutes on what incident history comes across when we retire [tool]. No need to bring data." Nothing about SourceX until the final block.
Who answers which block
| Person | What they know | Blocks |
|---|---|---|
| On-call platform owner | Routing, grouping rules, what the export includes | 1, 2 |
| Incident lead | How on-call engineers work, where notes and fixes live | 3, 4 |
| CTO, VP of engineering or owner | Ownership, customer data, authority to decide | 5 |
| You, the observability consultant | Keeps time and writes down answers only | All |
The run sheet: 20 minutes in five blocks
| Minutes | Question to ask | Who answers | A good answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-3 | What is retiring, on what documented date, and what replaces it? | Platform owner | "The tool goes at contract end; the date is in the renewal notice." |
| 3-7 | How are alerts bundled into incidents, and do on-call engineers merge or move alerts by hand? | Platform owner | "Grouping is automatic, and on-call engineers merge incidents most weeks." |
| 7-12 | Does one key, usually the incident ID, join acknowledgment, on-call notes and the fix ticket? | Incident lead | "Yes. The incident ID is a required field on change tickets since a set year." |
| 12-16 | Do incidents end in a written review with actions, and does it carry the incident ID? | Incident lead | "Major incidents do; the wiki page title starts with the ID." |
| 16-20 | Who owns this history, and may I introduce you to SourceX? | Executive | "We own it. Yes, introduce us," or "Ask again after cutover." |
What block two is really listening for
Whether people overrule the machine. In PagerDuty, for instance, related alerts can be grouped into one incident, and on-call staff can correct the grouping by hand. A platform owner who says "we fix the bundling most weeks" has just told you the tool records human judgment from the very first step. Write the phrase down as they said it.
PagerDutyWhy block three takes five minutes
Because the trail breaks between systems, not inside one. Bundled alerts and acknowledgments sit in the paging tool, notes may sit in a chat channel, fixes sit in a service desk, written reviews in a wiki. The question is whether one identifier travels through all of them. Ask for the year that identifier became required; that year is the real start of traceable history.
What block four confirms
Closure. Google's SRE guidance describes this kind of review as the written account of what happened, how much it hurt, what people did to stop it, why it happened and what follows. If those reviews exist and carry the incident ID, the history runs from machine signal to human decision to written conclusion.
When to cut a block short
| If you hear | Then |
|---|---|
| "We only keep 90 days of incidents." | Skip to block five. Ask whether anything older exists in exports or a data warehouse. |
| "Chat is where everything happens and we don't export it." | Mark on-call notes as a gap and move on; the rest of the trail may still hold. |
| "No incident ID on tickets." | Record it. Without a shared key the trail cannot be rebuilt, and the likely decision is stop. |
| "We're 40 people." | End the referral part politely; the company is below the 50 full-time employee threshold. |
| "Customer data sits in alert payloads." | Note it for block five as a rights question; do not ask for an example. |
The annual client advisory meeting agenda uses the same short-block approach in a different setting.
The decision and the note it leaves behind
Before anyone leaves, write one of three outcomes:
- Introduce. The trail is traceable for a stated span of years, the company owns it, and the executive agreed.
- Revisit on a date. Retention, export scope or ownership is unclear. Name who will check, and meet again before cutover.
- Stop. No shared key, nothing kept, or the owner declined. The retirement carries on unchanged.
Illustrative. After 20 minutes with a 260-person payments software company leaving its on-call platform, the consultant's note read:
| Block | What the room said |
|---|---|
| Retirement | Platform contract ends next spring; replacement chosen |
| Grouping | Automatic, with on-call staff correcting it weekly |
| Shared key | Incident number required on change requests since 2019 |
| Written closure | Reviews for severity 1 and 2, filed under the incident number |
| Owner and decision | VP of engineering owns the history and agreed; outcome, introduce |
In block five, ask permission and disclose together: "I am a SourceX referral partner, so I may receive a reward if a license completes. SourceX pays it separately, and it never reduces what you are paid." SourceX licenses approved business data directly from companies for AI training and evaluation, and manages agreement, rights review, data preparation, delivery and payout.
Then check fit before you write anything. The company 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. Sign the Channel Partner Agreement. The first valid introduction within the 90-day window is credited when the company submits a verified application, one partner per company. Illustrative only: a $400,000 qualifying payout to the company would mean a $70,000 default reward.
What stays unknown until SourceX reviews it: buyer need for incident trails, the rights review result, customer data handling and any offer. The PagerDuty incident export page and AI agents in ITSM give more background on the records themselves.
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.
If the meeting confirms a traceable alert-to-closure trail and the executive says introduce, register as a partner, check who qualifies, and read the program terms and the rewards page first.