When working with any monitoring system, it's impractical for most people to constantly watch the console for new alerts or to keep an eye on a dashboard day and night waiting for it to change state. For these reasons, alert notifications have become the de facto standard for giving IT teams a heads up on what's happening within their infrastructures and applications.
OpsMgr has a number of different methods available to ensure alerts are forwarded to you and the process of delivering them involves three high-level steps – configuring notification channels, creating subscribers and scheduling subscriptions. The notification channels specify the transport medium, the subscriber is the person (or people) that alerts are sent to and the subscription defines criteria for the type of alerts that will be sent.