help with the layout of the appmanger database

I have a custom application that interfaces with several monitoring programs, including appmanger but was having a little difficulty. I was pulling information from the alert table to get the current status of all the monitors. That was working until i added a couple of different monitors and realized that i was getting my information from the wrong table. My question is, if that is the wrong table, what is the right table to pull my information from? I tried looking at the databaseschema.conf file to analyze the layout but I couldn't find any other tables that made sense.

Where can I get more information on how the database is constructed?

Also, if anyone has had success with this before, can you give me an example query that would pull the current status' of all the monitors currently monitoring?

Thanks in advance.