Keyword monitor

The keyword monitor fetches a URL like the HTTP monitor, then asserts on a substring in the response body. Use it for soft-failure detection — the server returns 200 OK but the page actually shows “Something went wrong”.

Configuration

Field	Type	Default	Notes
URL	URL	—	Full URL including scheme. Required.
Keyword	string	—	Substring to look for in the response body. Required.
Should contain	bool	true	true = body must contain the keyword for up. false = body must not contain it (alert on the presence of a sentinel error message).
Case sensitive	bool	false	Whether the substring match respects case.
Timeout	seconds	30	5–60.
Degraded threshold	ms	—	Optional. Slow responses return degraded.

Status mapping

Outcome	Status
Request succeeds and keyword presence matches should_contain	up
Request succeeds but slower than degraded_threshold_ms	degraded
Request succeeds but keyword presence doesn’t match should_contain	down
Request fails (HTTP error, timeout, DNS failure)	down

Common patterns

Catch soft failures — point at a public page and set Keyword to something always present on a healthy render ("Welcome back", "version", your site name). should_contain: true.

Catch error pages — point at the same URL with Keyword set to something only an error page shows ("Something went wrong", "500", "undefined"). should_contain: false.

JSON APIs — pair with the HTTP monitor’s expected-status field for protocol-level checks, then use this monitor against the same URL with Keyword set to a known string in the success response ("\"ok\":true").