Thank you for the quick response.
Ultimately, NPM will handle up/down alerting. SAM will really be for monitoring some server health attributes and then some services and application health attributes.
But, I added a SQL server node and applied the generic SQL server template and got so muhh data back my head nearly exploded - as did the SQL server in question. It was at this point that it was realized that the developers really needed to tell systems WHAT they needed to monitor.
In the meantime, I need to learn how to get SAM to begin monitoring things in baby steps. If I can add one server, then see if it's up or down and then figure out how to set it up to tell me if it's down, that's a win for one day. The next day would be to then look at adding another sensor or two from the systems side and from there I should be off to the races (including I suppose figuring out how often is too often for polling rates but how long is too long, etc...)
Pj