Nagios Support Forum

In Nagios, active checks involve spawning a child process (worker) and would leave behind zombie processes until they're reaped by the parent process (nagios).
Usually this happens very quickly but if nagios is blocking signals, say while in a handler for another signal, they'll stick around for a short while.
Also, if a script is being run by the Nagios process and it never exits, that could be another cause of the Defunct processes.

You may want to upgrade to the latest version of Nagios to see if that helps in the defunct processes.

I was able to make the current attempt to 1 . when we delete the retention.dat and restart nagios,then the current attempt is reset ti 1 irrespective of plugin output.

Thanks for the help. you can close this thread.