Just had a similar situation with both 3.0.3 and 3.2.0 today, but for an error. Not only was the error not counted in the totals, it did not cause the check config to exit with error. The contact group was only mentioned as a contact group member, was not mentioned anywhere else in the configs as it had been removed from everywhere else except for the contact group. Same output (minus the verbose file output of 3.2.0) for 3.2.0. Nagios 3.0.3 Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Ethan Galstad (<a href="http://www.nagios.org">http://www.nagios.org</a>) Last Modified: 06-25-2008 License: GPL Reading configuration data... Error: Could not find member group 'nnnn-group' specified in contactgroup (config file '/usr/local/nagios/etc/clients/clientA/contacts.cfg', starting on line 1) Running pre-flight check on configuration data... Checking services... Checked 43936 services. Checking hosts... Checked 2199 hosts. Checking host groups... Checked 337 host groups. Checking service groups... Checked 52 service groups. Checking contacts... Checked 78 contacts. Checking contact groups... Checked 43 contact groups. Checking service escalations... Checked 43732 service escalations. Checking service dependencies... Checked 77624 service dependencies. Checking host escalations... Checked 2077 host escalations. Checking host dependencies... Checked 0 host dependencies. Checking commands... Checked 168 commands. Checking time periods... Checked 6 time periods. Checking global event handlers... Checking obsessive compulsive processor commands... Checking misc settings... Total Warnings: 0 Total Errors: 0 Things look okay - No serious problems were detected during the pre-flight check # echo $? 0