function or similar for alert "applies to"

I have frequently run into cases due to many nearly-the-same-but-not-exactly-the-same datasources where alerting should be handled the same and preferably in one rule, but you have to create many rules to achieve that.  Multiply that by many different clients and it is very annoying.  A good example is reboot alerting and corresponding SNMP failure alerting (via missing data alerts). There are several different datasources that produce that information and I would prefer to have the equivalent of an applies-to function in which the DS/DP could be encapsulated once, then the rule could just say "match for reboot, whatever that means".  I would still want to have the device group/device reference separate since those are generally different for each client but those could also be handled by a different applies-to like function, again to be able to manage alert rules much more elegantly and without introducing errors or leaving important cases out by accident.