Simon

Dejal Simon is the essential site monitoring tool for macOS. It checks servers for changes or failures, and notifies you via email, sound, speech, Twitter, or other means. You can use it to track updated sites, and to alert you when an important server goes down or recovers. It is a native macOS application with an intuitive and attractive interface.

 

Simon is very versatile. It can be used to monitor your own website and servers, track posts and new comments on your or friends' blogs, check for web mail, get notifications of updates to favorite news and entertainment websites, keep an eye on auctions, and many other uses.

 

Monitor Your Sites and Servers

 

Central to Simon is the Monitor window. It enables you to see at a glance the current status of all of your monitored websites, servers, and applications. In addition to a colorful status icon and up-time percentage, the tests list displays how long ago the last change and failure occurred, and when the next check will occur. But that's not all. This window also displays further statistics about the tests, and a log showing recent activity, including when tests start checking, and the various steps during the check (starting, stopping, service result, each filter, notifications, etc), plus other actions on tests, e.g. editing, pausing, etc. It also has logs of checks (including the check duration), changes (including the text that changed), and failures (including the error description).

 

Tests (and other lists) are organized into groups, and you can add your own groups and move them around as desired. This enables you to arrange tests by server, type, client, or whatever else makes sense to you.

 

Because sometimes you don't want to have another window cluttering up your screen, you can hide the Monitor window if you wish, and/or use the handy Dock or Status menus. The Dock menu includes quick access to Simon's windows, and some global functions. The Status menu includes all that plus displays all of your tests, complete with status icons, details via tooltip, and the option to perform a favorite action or display a sub-menu of quick-access operations for each test, so you can visit the site or other tasks without even having Simon visible.

 

If you prefer, Simon can be hidden from the Dock, so it is only accessed via the Status menu. Access to Simon can also be restricted, requiring a password, if you wish.

 

Put it to the Test

 

So how do you tell Simon what to monitor? That's where the Test Info pane comes in. It is accessed when the Tests list is active. It shows a summary of the test; click the heading for each line of the summary to jump right to that page. It includes an Edit button to enable modifying the test, which toggles to Done when editing to switch back to the summary.

 

At Your Service

 

Several services come built-in. Services tell Simon how to check a test.

 

Put a Detective on the Job

 

But what about websites that have banners or other irrelevant content? Won't that confuse Simon into thinking the page has changed? Nope! Simon has a very useful feature called Filters, where you can tell it what part of the page to look for, e.g. a comment count on a blog, or the lead headline area on a news site. Filters can also optionally detect if the output is different than the previous time they checked.

 

Multiple filters can be chained to perform operations on the text output by the service. They can also look at the output of any previous filters, and other values, specified as the input for each filter.

 

Like services, filters can be customized as desired via the Filter Info pane and used in any number of tests. Many filters define default behavior that can be customized for each test, for maximum flexibility.

 

Communication is the Best Policy

 

Okay, so Simon monitors your tests, detecting changes, failures, and recoveries. And it displays this information in the Monitor window, Dock icon, and Status menu. But you're a busy person, and sometimes want important events to really catch your attention. You're in luck: Simon also has a notifiers feature, with several ways of telling you about things you want to know. Each test can use any number of notifiers, with separate notifiers for each type of event. So, for example, you could play a sound and go to the web page when your favorite blog changes, but email a text message to your cellphone when it goes down.

 

Further, you can share notifiers between multiple tests: set up a notifier once, and use it for as many tests as you like. For additional flexibility, variables enable customizing the notifier with test names, URLs, times, etc.