Some Vitals are a little unstable and inconsistent with their checks, sometimes returning failure during network hiccups or other stressful conditions. In these cases it's useful to allow them so many chances to recover before they actually become a problem. mod_soft keeps track of the number of times a Vital has changed from its active status and will only change its status if things stay changed, and don't recover immediately.

As an example, assume you have a vital FOO on some random machine. FOO is in the NORMAL status and gets updated to the WARNING status. FOO will remain NORMAL until one more WARNING update comes in, finally pushing FOO to WARNING. If, after that first update, a new one comes in for NORMAL, signifying some kind of hiccup or flapping situation, then FOO will remain NORMAL, just as if nothing had happened. Sometimes this behavior isn't desired, since such changes can mean there are significant problems around.