Dejal Simon

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on October 05, 2009

Simon (from Dejal Systems) is a reasonably priced, feature-rich site-monitoring tool, especially useful to administrators who need to keep track of multiple sites, servers, and applications. The app's primary interface is a straightforward Monitor window, which displays everything that you're tracking with stats on uptime, time until the next check, and time since the last change and failure--along with graphs, lists, and more details when you drill down. You can drag and drop URLs onto the Monitor window, or import from bookmarks, and Simon's services let you define what you want to test, from SMART status to mounting drives, communicating with mail servers, checking and relaunching apps, and more.

Simon is even more useful outside of its main interface: you can access many functions through the Dock or a Status menu in the menu bar, and you can receive notification a variety of ways, including via Growl, speech, Twitter, or e-mail. Simon can even send a text message to your phone when a site goes down, or just log the event in a database. You can modify all these notification options with plug-ins or scripts (including AppleScript and shell scripts), and Simon also lets you customize its services, allowing you to create new ones or simply edit the defaults.

Advanced users will appreciate all this customizability (along with extras like session capturing and multipage reports), but even less experienced users can quickly get up to speed with this flexible, reliable utility.

Publisher's Description

From Dejal:

Dejal Simon is the essential site monitoring tool for Mac OS X. It checks web pages, FTP and DNS servers, local or remote ports, and other services for changes or failures, and notifies you via e-mail, sound, speech, Twitter, HTML reports, and other means. Add tests to Simon to track updated sites, to alert you when an important server goes down or recovers, check on Samba SMB, take periodic screenshots of the system, track posts and new comments on your or friends' blogs, check for web mail, make sure a key application is running, get notifications of updates to favorite news and entertainment websites, keep an eye on auctions, and many other uses. You can easily add your own services via custom port connections, AppleScripts, shell scripts, or Perl, PHP, Python, etc. Receive notification of changes, failures, and/or recoveries via various Actions, auto-generated E-mail messages (including to your pager or cellphone), Growl notifications, Twitter updates or direct messages, iCal or Google Calendar events, an audible Sound, or customizable Speech, HTML reports allow remote viewing of a summary and/or details of Simon monitoring. Reports can be saved to a local web server, or uploaded remotely. Customizable templates (with several examples provided) allow embedding in a web page, using a compact format suitable for viewing on PDAs and cellphones, creating a RSS feed, and more.

What's new in this version:

New tests now use the Change filter by default, to avoid confusion over new tests not detecting changes. (You can of course alter that to a more specific filter, or disable it.)
Replaced the Email notifier's Automatic transport with a new one, now called Apple Mail, that sends the message via Apple's Mail app. (Standard edition only)
The From field is now replaced by a pop-up menu of mail accounts for the new Apple Mail transport. (Standard edition only)
... See all new features