Alerts should have an optional delay-field for the purpose of delaying the generation of notification when the alert condition matches. The current “Delay”-field only affects transports and should be named to “Transport delay” and an additional “Alert delay” field should be added to serve this new purpose. By default it’s value should be 0 on all rules.
The purpose of this is for example to delay showing up alerts on CPU-usage on some devices where the usage peak is only temporary and goes away during the next poll. This really should not trigger an alert to show up. Other userful scenario is the device down alert - sometimes and for some devices it might be good to allow some time for it to recover before actually alerting.