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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.

Common Use Cases

How content monitors help protect your business

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.

"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.

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.