Regex not matching

[Michael Wedderburn]

I'm trying to use regex in my monit config but it doesn't appear to be matching. Monit config is as follows (I suspect it may be trying to match it as string?). This is on Cent OS 7, monit version 5.14

check file ha with path /var/log/ha.log
    if match ".*?(api).*?(204)[\s]" then alert

log line looks like ..

[20/Apr/2017:17:07:04.982] nginx~ api/web1 172/0/1/43/217 204 291 - - ---- 443/321/0/0/0 0/0 "POST /ep/test HTTP/1.1"

[Tildeslash]

Monit uses system's posix regex library, for example the following string matches your input:

check file ha with path /tmp/ha.log
    if match "api.*204" then alert