At the RTC level there is a common event capturing mechanism. Each event has a Severity, Priority and summary text.
Severity being Information, Warning and Error
Priority being Lowest, Low, Medium, High and Highest.
These events are generated by the updates to the Workitems, Source code and Builds.

Now in the Notification preferences you can choose for different types of events you can configure some of the conditions based on which the way we want to see the events differs.
There are different types of events listed on the left. For each event type you can specify want Notifications to see and How you want to see the Notification.
For each Event Notification you can select

1. Conditions: This is to filter by the summary text.
2. Priority: Events of what priority needs to be shown
3. Severity: Events of what Severity to be shown
4. Notifier: When ever the RTC client get the notification All the notifications will be logged in the Team Dash board view. There are 4 additional options for the events that are filtered by all the above 3 conditions.
a. Alert: This will be visible in the bottom right corner.
b. Beep: There will be beep  sound.
c. Red Marker: The event will be logged in the Team Dashboard view with Red Highlight
d. Yellow Marker: The event will be logged in the Team Dashboard view with Red Highlight

What event will have what Priority and Severity:
For work items this is picked from the work item fields.
For Build its based on Build failure or successful,
For Source code changes I do not know how the priority and severity is set.

Currently all the high priority defect are shown in Red in the team dashboard.
If customer has some naming convention for the work items then they can specify the name in condition and select the notifier as Alert to see the notification similar to the @me messages.