Waiting longer than one polling failure to alert

 My apologies if this is covered in the docs or in past discussions,

my google-fu hasn't come through for me on this one. We're running 4.1.2p1, and we have several troublesome hosts that, for whatever reason, are constantly experiencing periodic disconnects with the hobbit server. I'm not too concerned about the disconnects (we have some new firewalls that are probably to blame, and by all other indications, the hosts and services are fine), but we're constantly getting alerts. Is there any way to make hobbit alert on a host or service, only after it's failed two or three times in a row?

Thanks in advance,

Mark