I believe it would be beneficial to have the option to set a batch option for an alert. Possibly tell the alerting engine that if an alert triggers to wait n minutes for any similar alerts that match the criteria and then send them in a single alert. As an example - say you are monitoring BGP peers for a device that has a high number of peers. Rather than getting 10's or possibly 100's of alerts for all the peering on that node, you could get a single email:
"Node X had the following alerts in the last 3 minutes"
And then just put whatever the alert messages would be.
Yes, I realize there may be implications for what it looks like if there is a text message, but I would think it would just spill to subsequent messages.
