Soft state notification?

Nagios Nagios Configuration support
1

I am relatively new to Nagios. I have just implemented an event handler that will restart Apache Tomcat on the 3rd Soft State and if it hits a Hard State then it will notify. The problem I am trying to figure out is that I want to send an email when it hits that Soft State, then if it hit a Hard State, I want it to notify a pager.

Any ideas or help would be great. Thank you in advance!

2

use escalations, and reduce the number of checks to trigger the first notification (i.e. get the HARD state earlier and notify)