In our environment, we tend to rarely if ever acknowledge alerts, and instead unmanage the offending object until it is fixed. Unfortunately, this skews downtime reports (admittedly in our favor, but still).
On the flip side, if we acknowledge the alert the object still shows red on any area it can influence our maps, which can make our operations team raise the alarm on objects that we are already working on. The concern is that the ops team will begin to disregard alerts on the map, and figure we already know.
How do you handle alerts? If you use maps, how do you rectify acknowledged alerts versus people seeing the red icon on the map?