What would it take to extend the alerting system to allow for an external program to run in response to the alert condition? This way, alerts can be anything: SNMP traps, alarms in an operations and administration management system, etc.
Email is a good notification mechanism but it is a pretty narrow use case in more elaborate management systems.
Maybe there is a way to harvest the "event queue" on disk by an external application?
Regards,
/Sergey