Not sure exactly what you want to do, probably me and not enough coffee yet, but the response to alerts is either an operator or a job so it doesn't necessarily have to go through an operator. And a job could do a lot of different things. And the alert doesn't necessarily need to have a response. The firing of alerts, the last date and time, number of occurrences is in the sysalerts table in msdb. So it seems different things could be done outside of using an operator.

Sue