Well the more tables that are drawn from, the longer the report takes to generate. Since i cannot create indexes on linked servers, there is not much I can do to optimize the query. But since time is the driving factor, presorting on "Trigger Time Stamp" makes the most since.
I fully agree that the EOC is lagging behind the other products. I previously had 4 nice reports that were separated out in nodes, Volumes, Application and hardware alerts, but because SAM custom properties are still unavailable in the EOC database, i had to come up with something else. hence the rewriting of the alert page.