How do all of the EM monitoring features work together?

I have been reading through the documentation on monitoring with EM.  There are a lot of features and it is confusing how they all work together.
- events
- incidents
- incident rules
- incident manager
- problems
- monitoring templates
- template collections
- metric extensions
- groups
- dynamic groups
- administration groups
- notifications
- SNMP traps
- etc...

I haven't been able to find any document that explains how these all work together or if some features supersede or replace other features.  It would be nice to have step-by-step instructions on what you set up first, then next until, at the end, you know what is being monitored and you know what notifications to expect.