Polling and Alerting are two different concepts.
Polling happens based on what polling interval you have set for your Node/Device (BGP neighbors are anyways enabled through your List resources).
Alerts directly check the data/metrics stored on your SolarWinds Database.
If your ask is to fire a new email alert or send some notification if BGP Neighbor is still down then definitely yes, use second level of escalation on your trigger action where you can ask your alert to send new email alerts or notification if BGP Neighbor is still down after few mins or hours of wait period.
As i said polling is happening continuously and in case all consecutive polls for next 1 hour say BGP neighbor is still down then your 2nd escalation will fire an alert. In case the BGP neighbor issue is resolved in one of the polls within that 1 hour your alert would reset to normal.
2nd escalation will only fire if the issue is not resolved yet and status has never changed.
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