External Alerting - Script - Medium for self-heal/actions?

In terms of timing between steps in an escalation, we're using blank steps to create time gaps in the escalation.  For instance, AOS services (Dynamics AX) often come up slowly.  We'd like our team to be notified of it if it hasn't com back in 5 minutes, then if it's been a half an hour, we need to either notify the customer or generate a ticket.  We set 5 minutes between steps, then set them up thusly:

1. 1. 
2. 2. email internal support
3. 3. 
4. .
5. .
6. 6. email customer
7. 7. generate a ticket
8. 8.

We leave the last bit blank after generating a ticket to prevent the system from sending more tickets through our system (ours is currently driven via email as the escalation chain repeats the last step if left unresolved and unacknowledged.