In order to create alarms and notifications from scratch following steps need to be performed.
- Create one or more severity levels
- Define the message template
- Define an alarm rule
- Attach an alarm to a metric
- Publish an alarm to a device
All of the steps above are inherited in the group hierarchy so that for example severity levels are needed to be defined only on the customer top level and they are then usable on all of the levels below.
Best practice is to define all required items at the highest level that makes sense in your use case. All relevant details can be overridden on lower levels.