[monit] monit & nginx

[A S]

I'm having trouble getting monit to work properly with nginx (an alternative web server to Apache). Whenever I start monit, it e-mails me the following error and restarts nginx even though nginx is running and is accepting connections:

Subject [of e-mail]: Connection failed nginx
Description: 'nginx' failed protocol test [HTTP] at INET[123.45.67.89:80] via TCP

The relevant stanza in my monit.conf file is:

check process nginx with pidfile /var/run/nginx.pid
start program = "/etc/init.d/nginx start"
stop program = "/etc/init.d/nginx stop"
if failed host 123.45.67.89 port 80 protocol HTTP request /monit/token then restart
if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout

I have tried the "if failed" line every which way (with and without "and" between the HTTP and request, with and without quotation marks around the path, with a different path altogether, etc.), but no luck. And FYI, I can load the exact same URL from the server command line with:

wget http://123.45.67.89:80/monit/token

I have seen a number of similar reports from other users. Any ideas re what's wrong here? Has anyone gotten monit to work with nginx?

Many thanks,
Andrew