I thought this was going to be as easy as 'if you can't reach /monitors.txt, then the site is down'

but seriously, does nobody else see a problem with your monitoring configuration being hosted on the site being monitored? It is a bit like asking a hospital patient to keep an eye on his own charts and to let you know if anything goes wrong ..

do people really switch monitoring companies often enough to justify having a standard configuration format?

ps. cucumber syntax is horrible because it perpetuates a 'everybody speaks english' view of the world