Dejal Simon is the essential site monitoring tool for Mac OS X. It checks servers for changes or failures, and notifies you via e-mail, 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. Developed in Cocoa, it is a native Mac OS X 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 table 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 tables listing recent checks (including the check duration and a bar chart), changes (including the text that changed), failures (including the error description), and notifications (that can occur for changes, failures, and recoveries).
[Status menu]
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 help tag, 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.
So how do you tell Simon what to monitor? That’s where the New/Edit Test window comes in. This window has lots of options to help you configure each test, but like Get Info in the Finder, you can collapse sections you’re not interested in. The window allows you to specify how often to check the test (when the previous check was successful or failed), choose which service to use and enter the URL or whatever other information it needs, and specify any needed username and password. You can also indicate which notifiers to use for changes, failures, and recoveries of this test.
The Web (HTTP) service is one of the most popular, for monitoring normal web pages (as opposed to other things like MySQL databases, network volumes, or local Applications). The Setup Assistant makes it easy to mass import bookmarks from web browsers, picking and choosing which to import. Also, you can simply drag a URL from a browser or other application to the Monitor window to add it as a new test.
