Honestly, I like the cucumber format, but what you ought to do is publish an API of phrases so that monitoring providers can target a standard set of monitoring operations. Right know, I don't see how they can execute a generic spec as described.
Cucumber devs might not like this, but at the moment I'm taking cues for the API phrases from cucumber-rails-training-wheels (web_steps.rb for capybara) - I see why the devs wanted it removed, but it works great for something like this that needs wide support.
