Vera Alerts appears to provide two runnable actions “DeviceNotification” and “SendAlert”.
Do these do the same thing?
The auto-generated code for notifications uses DeviceNotification, while most sample Luup code uses SendAlert.
Are they different?
I found one difference… “Msg” vs “Message” as argument label. 
Very different … do not touch the DeviceNotification stuff … this is under the hood type of stuff.
If you find it in the luup code for a trigger you can move it around (i.e. put it in a conditional block to have a conditional notification) … but do not change any of the data from the beginning comment to the end comment and the code in the middle.