NetIM provides a mechanism for highlighting important alerts by flagging them. When alerts have been flagged, they will be retained and displayed by the system even after the threshold violation that triggered the alert has gone away. When you flag or unflag an alert, an annotation message can be associated with the alert. Typical uses for the annotations include explanations or resolution strategies for the alert, ownership of the issue, or third-party ticketing system identifiers or URLs.

The flag and annotation columns show the current flagging state and annotation for the active alerts. These columns appear in Alerts Manager, and in the Alerts tab for objects and groups. The red colored icon indicates that the alert has been flagged and will not be removed from the system until it is explicitly marked as unflagged.