Nagios escalation definition configuration

I am inherited Nagios from a former employee. I want to use the
Service Escalation Definition, but am unable to get it to work. I
have followed the documentation, and added the definition to the
escalations.cfg, but it doesn't seem to get called. Our systems are
self-healing, so I want to disable paging for x amount of service
checks. Do I have to go into each of the cfg files, and specify this?

Thanks.
Jim