This is the escalating property of a 32-bit threshold value object, the live runtime state of one 32-bit threshold as UCS Manager evaluates it against an actual stats counter, including how many times it has crossed up (escalating) or dropped back down (deescalating), a running count of how many consecutive samples have shown the monitored counter outside its configured threshold bound. An admin, or UCS Manager's alarm logic, uses this counter to avoid raising an alarm on a single noisy sample, only escalating once enough consecutive breaches have accumulated. For example, if a 32-bit threshold value requires three consecutive out-of-range samples before alarming, watching escalating climb from one to three shows the admin an alarm is about to fire.