Hi Jeff,
I have been through the exact scenario in my previous project and can relate to your frustration.
The issue is that Technical Monitoring only plays with numbers when it comes to Job monitoring. This is also because Jobs are considered more of a Business related function.
Therefore, the best option would be to go for BPMon for jobs monitoring. This is the way I went and got a lot of success with it.
Once you have setup the BPMon structure - basic setup etc, Solution etc.
Goto BPO Workcenter and configure the monitoring object of type Simple job.
Here you can specify wildcard within the jobs that you want to monitor. for eg, *ERP*SO* - this would monitor all Sales order jobs for all country etc.... you then have to (ofcourse) define all the other components like notifications etc settings.
A detailed document created in SCN - Job Monitoring using BPM
Now as the email notification that comes out of the alert is pretty standard and at least didn't meet my requirements, so I wrote a BADI and configured the same within the Monitoring object to call this BADI.
You can see a complete step by step implementation of my BADI in SCN Customize Email Subject in Solman 7.1 using BADI
Hope this helps
All the best
Regards
Deepak