It seems that we may be doing something bad with substrings or menu values.
I can't create an alert condition for metrics with names that start with
the name of another metric.

Recreate:

1) Import RHQ Agent resource

2) Navigate the the Agent Measurement Subsystem resource 
  (child of the RHQ Agent)

3) Nav to Alert tab and start a New Alert Def

4) try adding an metric baseline condition on 'Failed Collections Per Minute'

Note that the condition actually shows up using 'Failed Collections' as
opposed to 'Failed Collections Per Minute'.

This is wrong.

For fun, try saving the new alert def. It will fail because
'Failed Collections' is trendsup and you can't create a threshold baseline
condition on a trendsup, because it will never get a baseline.

Note that this is dangerous because, unlike the baseline condition, other conditions would have been saved just fine and this would probably get missed.