Simon
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This app and +200 others are available as one suite through a monthly or annual Setapp subscription. No extra fees, no ads.
Flexible server monitoring
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.
In Edit mode, the Info pane has lots of options to help you configure each test, conveniently arranged on multiple pages:
- The Name page contains fields to name the test and write a description of it.
- The Options page enables you to specify how often to check the test (when the previous check was successful or failed), and other useful options.
- The Service page is where you choose what to check and enter the URL or whatever other information it needs. Read about services below.
- The Filters page is one of the key areas of Simon. You can easily tell the test to ignore parts of the service output, concentrate on just the area that interests you, detect changes from the previous check, and much more. Read about filters below.
- The Notifiers page can be used to indicate how to alert you when a change is detected, if the service goes down, recovers from a failure, or if a filter detects a problem. Read about notifiers below.
- The Reports page specifies whether the test should appear on some or all reports. Read about reports below.
- The Auto Pause page enables you to tell Simon not to check on specified days or time intervals. For example if you know that a server will be unavailable, perhaps during a periodic reboot or regular maintenance, or you simply don't want to know about changes at certain times, like of a blog when you should be working.
Yes, of course Simon supports dark mode.
At Your Service
Several services come built-in. Services tell Simon how to check a test. They include, among others:
- Application: Make sure an application is present, and optionally running — can re-launch if not via Launch notifier.
- DNS: Query a domain name server to ensure the domain is visible.
- Drive Status: Checks the drive capacity threshold, S.M.A.R.T. status, and RAID health.
- FTP: Look at a file on an FTP server, to detect its availability or changes.
- Incoming Mail (IMAP): Communicate with an IMAP mail server, to make sure it is available, and/or look for new messages.
- Incoming Mail (POP): Another kind of mail server (plus a SSL-enabled edition is also available).
- Network Time (NTP): Checks that a network time server is responding.
- Outgoing Mail (SMTP): Outgoing mail usually goes via a SMTP server; make sure it is available (plus a SSL variation).
- Ping: Ping any server to check responsiveness; you can specify timeout and packet loss limits.
- Port Available: Like the Port services, but simply checks if a port is open, without actually communicating on it.
- Samba SMB: Checks that a Samba SMB client is online and responding.
- Screenshot: Takes a screenshot whenever the test is checked. Useful to track activity on the machine.
- S.M.A.R.T. Status: Checks the S.M.A.R.T. status for all volumes.
- SNMP Status: Checks the status of a SNMP-connected device; it's a failure if it is not up.
- System Error Log: Results in a failure if a specified error message occurs in today's system.log.
- SSH: Converse with a remote secure shell session.
- TCP Port Scanner: Checks the status of all TCP ports on a server.
- Web Page: Check a website for changes or failures.
Usually the built-in services are ample, but what if you want to delve deeper? Sometimes you have a special requirement and want to check some other kind of server. Not a problem! You can customize the services to edit the defaults for the built-in ones, or even add new ones. Similar to the Test Info pane, the Service Info pane enables you to change the services — and lets you auto-pause a service, affecting all tests that use that service.
This app and +200 others are available as one suite through a monthly or annual Setapp subscription. No extra fees, no ads.