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Content Monitors

Content monitors verify that specific text appears (or doesn't appear) on your pages. They're perfect for ensuring critical content like phone numbers, prices, or legal text remains visible.

Contact Information

Ensure phone numbers, email addresses, and addresses are always visible.

Pricing & Products

Detect when product prices or availability text changes unexpectedly.

Legal Disclaimers

Verify required legal text, privacy notices, or compliance statements are present.

Error Detection

Alert when error messages like "Service Unavailable" or "Database Error" appear.

Configuration Options

Customize how content is monitored and validated

Keyword

The text to search for on the page. This can be a word, phrase, or longer text string. You can also use the Visual Content Picker to select an element and auto-populate the CSS selector and check type fields.

"1-800-555-0123"
"Add to Cart"
"Terms and Conditions apply"

Match Type

Presence

Alert when the keyword is NOT found on the page. Use this for content that should always be present.

Absence

Alert when the keyword IS found on the page. Use this for error messages or unwanted content.

Regex

Match using a regular expression pattern. Alert when the pattern is not found.

Advanced Check Types

Element Count

Count elements matching a CSS selector and alert if the count falls outside an expected range. Useful for product grids, navigation menus, and search results.

Attribute Check

Verify an element's HTML attribute (src, href, content, etc.) exists and optionally contains an expected value. Great for CDN integrity, canonical URLs, and OpenGraph tags.

Numeric Range

Extract a numeric value from page content and alert if it falls outside min/max bounds. Perfect for monitoring prices, stock counts, ratings, and other metrics.

Change Detection

Capture a baseline of content on first check, then alert whenever it changes. Ideal for legal pages, terms of service, copyright notices, and brand text.

Page Path

Optionally specify a specific path on the parent monitor's domain to check. If left blank, the parent monitor's URL is used.

/products/featured
/contact
/api/v1/status

Case Sensitivity

Choose whether the keyword match should be case-sensitive.

  • Case-insensitive (default): "error" matches "Error", "ERROR", "error"
  • Case-sensitive: "Error" only matches "Error" exactly

Severity Level

How content failures affect your monitor status:

Critical: Creates a DOWN incident immediately
Degraded: Shows as DEGRADED status, less urgent
Notify Only: Sends notification but doesn't affect status

Regex Pattern Matching

Use regular expressions for advanced content matching

When you select Regex as the match type, you can use regular expression patterns for more flexible content matching:

Example Patterns

\$[0-9]+\.[0-9]{2} - Match prices like $19.99

\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4} - Match phone numbers like 555-123-4567

v[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+ - Match version numbers like v2.1.0

Copyright \d{4} - Match copyright with year

Note: Regex patterns use Go's RE2 syntax. The pattern is matched against the entire page content. Case sensitivity applies to regex patterns too.

Performance Optimization

Smart techniques to reduce bandwidth and improve check speed

Content monitors use smart optimization techniques to reduce bandwidth and improve check speed:

  • ETag Support: When available, uses ETags to skip unchanged pages
  • Hash Comparison: Falls back to content hashing when ETags aren't available
  • HEAD Requests: Uses lightweight HEAD requests when possible

Check Interval Restrictions

Content monitors have their own check interval, independent of the parent uptime monitor. However, if the target server doesn't support ETag or Last-Modified headers, the minimum check interval is 5 minutes to avoid excessive bandwidth usage. FlareWarden automatically detects optimization support on the first check.

Agency Tip: Grant Content Manager Access

Share monitor visibility with clients and content teams

You can invite clients or content managers to view only their content monitors. This is perfect for agencies who want to give clients visibility into their content checks without exposing other monitoring data.

Learn about monitor-specific access

Example Configurations

Real-world content monitoring scenarios

Phone Number Visibility

Keyword: 1-800-555-0123

Match Type: Presence

Severity: Critical

Alerts immediately if the phone number disappears from the page.

Error Page Detection

Keyword: Service Unavailable

Match Type: Absence

Severity: Critical

Alerts when an error message appears on the page.

Version Number Check

Pattern: v[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+

Match Type: Regex

Severity: Degraded

Alerts if a version number format disappears from the page (useful for API documentation pages).

Promotion Banner Check

Keyword: Free Shipping

Match Type: Presence

Severity: Notify Only

Notifies when promotional content is removed, without affecting status.

Advanced Check Type Examples

Product Grid Count

Selector: .product-card

Match Type: Element Count

Minimum: 12

Severity: Degraded

Alerts if the product grid shows fewer than 12 items, which may indicate a data feed issue.

Image CDN Integrity

Selector: img.hero

Match Type: Attribute Check

Attribute: src   Contains: cdn.example.com

Severity: Critical

Alerts if the hero image source no longer points to the expected CDN, indicating a broken deployment or asset misconfiguration.

Price Range Validation

Selector: .product-price

Match Type: Numeric Range

Range: 0.01 – 9,999.99

Severity: Critical

Alerts if a product price drops to zero, goes negative, or spikes to an unreasonable value.

Terms of Service Change

Selector: .tos-content

Match Type: Change Detection

Severity: Notify Only

Captures a baseline of the Terms of Service on first check. Notifies if the content changes, helping track legal updates.