Am I right in thinking you want a different Subject / Body depending on the device type?
If that is what you're after, create a Custom Property called something like "Device Type" and populate that on all your servers with "Server" all your switches with "Switches", etc. You can then grab that Custom Property's contents when you create your alert by inserting a variable.
Well we just want the Networking folks to be alerted about the Routers, Switches, etc and the Server guys for the servers. At the moment, both are classed as 'Nodes' so everyone is alerted about everything!!
Custom properties are certainly one way but a simpler method might be to leverage the vendor in the alert trigger so they only apply to the nodes that are applicable based on vendor. Below is an example for Windows and Linux servers.
We've found that it works better for us to use Custom Properties instead of Custom Alerts. We were originally going with custom alerts, but as more different things got added we found that there were just too many places where changes needed to be made.
With Custom Properties we were able to get it down to a handful of alerts. We have a few Custom Properties that we use for triage/routing:
AdminGroup (Used by triage team for escalating to the proper group)
AdminEmail (Email addresses for Node,Volume,Interface Alerts - Alerts delivered directly to addresses listed)
AppAdminEmail (Email addresses for Applications - Alerts delivered directly to addresses listed)
Going with Custom Properties overall lets us have a bit more control over the alert structure by allowing us to set the Warning and Critical thresholds for various elements without the need for creating a bunch of custom alerts or alerts with insane boolean logic.
