[Nagiosplug-help] process list from nagios-statd?

[warthog1970 at netzero.net]

Hi all,
    I have a question concerning the nagios-stat & nagios-statd plugins.

We've got the 2 pieces up and running on our Nagios server (FreeBSD) and

a remote host (Solaris 2.6). I want to use the "proc" option of
nagios-stat to check for various processes running on the remote host
(specificallly, Oracle processes & the Oracle listener). My question,
briefly: is the process list "pruned" somehow by nagios-statd before
it's returned to nagios-stat?
    Details: I'm having trouble understanding why the output of "ps -e
-o \"pid tty s time comm\" " is different as received by nagios-stat,
than it is when I run the ps command on the command line on the remote
host. I don't know Python, and I know next to nothing about sockets &
daemons, but I've been able to figure out enough of what the 2 scripts
are doing to make test copies of each which (I believe) show me the
complete list of processes that's being generated. A list of over 250
processes on the remote host shrinks to about 30 when nagios-stat
receives & displays the information. If anyone could help me understand
why this is happening, I'd be very grateful. If I can't figure out why
the process list is (apparently) incomplete, this plugin will be useless

for my purposes.
Thanks!
Edgar M.