Update:
Ok, I think I might have figured out my Event Class trigger issue. I realized I could setup a trigger to alert me of any critical errors. I ended up flagging a service as critical and setting the monitoring to "yes". When I stopped the service for a bit I did recieve an email notification that the service was in fact down. I believe I can use this method to monitor all of the services up-state I need in my production environment.
Antony