Having worked within the SolarWinds environment for eleven years I've always struggled with Alert management. It seemed like every time there needed to be a format change to an alert email or the addition of a custom property field to the alert logic I was spending two to four days editing the hundreds of alerts I was managing. Due to the identification of a system limitation I was forced to change the way we leveraged the SolarWinds alerting engine.
This document outlines the configuration and design that we implemented to extend the SolarWinds NPM alerting engine to meet our needs. This implementation allowed us to reduce the number of enabled production alerts actively being managed by administrators from approximately 1000 alerts down to 27. The architecture outlined in this document and the document itself are under continued review and improvement.
It is my hope that this document will assist other administrators in leveraging the SolarWinds NPM alerting engine in addition to saving them time and effort.
Thank you.
12/22/2014: After several suggestions I have moved the actual document to the Content Exchange. I've left this post for those that have already bookmarked it. Thank you.