Let me understand your situation. You have one host, IE:
1.2.3.4 <http://1.2.3.4> mybroken.host.com <http://mybroken.host.com>
# ssh dns pop3 smtp http://mybrokenhost.com <http://mybrokenhost.com>
Now after some time you have ssh and dns going down, but the box is
still green on conn/ping? Logically, there are two problems - bad
bind and bad opensshd, so two alerts is a wise choice.
If you are saying with the example above that every test goes down
because it is offline, in my case at least, it only gives me one alert
- bad conn, the rest are tagged with "depend" essentially and don't
alert you. Is this not the case for you?