By default, cimaa doesn't try to parse nagios plugin output for metrics, because, theoretically, there could be nagios plugins that have '|'s in their output that don't signal metrics.
It doesn't make sense to have thresholds and not parse output (for plugins that don't generate cimaa output). If thresholds are specified, we should expect to parse nagios output.
It may be that parsing should be on by default with an option it disable it in the likely rare cases we need to.