ProfessorThe number of consecutive violations multiplied by the DS polling frequency will help map out firing an alert over X minutes in age. If you specify multiple severities in the dataPoint threshold, be advised- if the severities are "too close" to each other, then the calculation is reset if a polled value jumps into a new severity (this is true in both directions: warn->error->critical and critical->error->warn).
For myself, I'd love to see thresholds updated to have a more structured scripting language so I can eval last X values to determine when to fire the alert. Zabbix NMS has this (https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.4/manual/config/triggers/expression)
