An improved technique of identifying particular events for alerting within an ENMS involves tagging each incoming event notification as having high priority or normal priority according to a set of rules. Those event notifications tagged as having a normal priority are sent directly to a reporting database, while those tagged as having a high priority are sent directly to an alert evaluation module which is configured to generate an alert as a result of an alert evaluation operation performed on an event notification. In order to comply with reporting requirements, however, the improved technique further involves generating a copy of the event notifications tagged as high priority and sending the copies to the reporting database.