Dejal Simon is a powerful and flexible website & server monitoring tool. One of the reasons it is so flexible is that in addition to the many built-in services, filters, notifiers & reports, you can extend it by using or writing custom scripts (or port sessions).

Simon comes bundled with many examples of such scripts; check out the Services, Filters & Notifiers lists and look for the items with a “Script” subtitle. You can inspect and edit those to customize them to suit your needs, or use them as inspiration for your own.

As an additional resource, the Simon site has an Extras page, which lists several more scripts that customers have contributed over the years. Some of which have later been bundled with the app, but some are only available there.

If you create or modify a script that others might find useful, please share it! Send me an email with the script attached, along with a description, and I’ll be happy to add it to the Simon Extras page.

The Simon Extras page is organized by feature kind: Service Scripts, Filter Scripts, Notifier Scripts, Report Templates, and Other Goodies (including a way to add multiple tests, an extended siren sound, and a script to monitor a FTP site). There’s also info for developers on writing custom plugins.

Installing scripts is easy:

1. Decompress the downloaded archive, if you browser didn’t do it for you;
2. Launch Simon if not already running;
3. Go to the Services or Notifiers list, as appropriate;
4. Click the New toolbar button (or via the File menu);
5. Choose the Service Kind (or Notifier Kind) button to show the service (or notifier) page.
6. Choose the Script service/notifier kind, if not selected by default.
7. Click the Open Script… button and choose the script file.

The script is copied into Simon, so there’s no need to keep the downloaded file around after loading it.

The Simon app has pages for filters, notifiers, reports and auto pause times while editing a test. These can be reordered very easily, by dragging them to the desired order.

The order really only matters for filters, since subsequent filters can refer to the output of previous ones, though others might look better in a custom order.

Simply click and drag anywhere outside a control to move a filter etc to a new position.

Here’s a looping video example:

I’ve had a couple of queries about checking if a notifier is working, so that seemed like a good blog topic.

Simon is a powerful app. One of its many features is the ability to create custom notifiers, the mechanism for informing you of changes or failures on the tests. Naturally, when you configure a new notifier, or edit an existing one, you want to make sure that it is set up correctly.

This can be done very easily. When showing the Notifiers list, you can simply select the notifier you want to check (as you probably already have if you’re editing one), and click the Reload button in the toolbar, or choose the File ▸ Notify Now menu command.

The selected notifier will then be used, just like when used with a test, except that placeholder values will be used for any variables (since there isn’t a test in this case).

For example, here’s a Notification Center notification, showing placeholder values:

One feature request that I received many times for Simon was the ability to organize tests into folders or groups — especially useful for people with lots of tests, or simply want to collect all tests relating to a particular server or client together.

Tests can be grouped together however you wish. It’s easy to create a group: simply choose the New Group command in the File menu or the + pop-up menu, then drag the tests into the new group. Even easier, you can just select some tests and choose the New Group with Selection command to make a group and move those tests into it in one step.

Groups appear with disclosure triangles, enabling them to be collapsed. The group row shows a summary of the contents, with any common values displayed for easy reference. And similarly, the info pane shows a summary of the contained tests.

Groups can even be nested, if desired — you can have an unlimited number of groups within other groups, if that helps organize them.

But wait, there’s more! While grouping tests is perhaps one of the most-requested features, I didn’t stop there: you can also group services, filters, notifiers and reports in the same way!

When these items are grouped, they appear indented in the Kind pop-up menu in the test editor, so you can keep related items together:

I hope you enjoy this feature.

Simon has a feature that many people have asked for over the years: the ability to hide the app from the Dock.

By default, the Dock icon is shown, but there is an option in the General Settings to hide it.

Why might you want to hide it? Maybe you want to keep your Dock as sparse as possible. Simon’s Dock icon can display the most interesting status, but maybe you don’t need to see that all the time, or you’re satisfied with seeing that only in the status menu. Since you’d probably want to keep Simon running all the time, treating it as a background-only app can make a lot of sense. Now you can!

If you turn off the Show the Simon icon in the Dock checkbox, the app icon vanishes from the Dock, and also from the Cmd-Tab app switcher. Note that if you have chosen the Keep in Dock option in the Dock menu, the icon will linger, in an inactive state; you can disable that or drag the icon out of the Dock to remove it.

When Simon is hidden from the Dock, you can still activate the app via the status menu, if you have that enabled — and the app will automatically turn it on when you turn off the Dock icon, as a convenience. If you don’t want the status menu, you can turn it off again… in which case the only way to activate the app will be to click on one of its windows, if any are visible, or open it from the Finder.

One thing to note is that as a necessary side-effect of hiding the Dock icon, Simon will no longer have a menubar. It’ll truly be a background-only app. When you display the Simon Monitor window, the menus won’t change from whatever other app you were using. This isn’t a problem for most functions, as the toolbar buttons and sort drop-down menu options cover most menu commands. But for app functions like checking for updates, accessing preferences, etc, when the Dock icon is disabled a special action menu is added to the toolbar. For power users, the keyboard equivalents still work, too — so you can press Ctrl-Cmd-1 to switch to Preview mode, for example.

I know that this is an exciting feature for many customers. For anyone who wants Simon to “disappear” into the background, try turning off the Dock icon. You can always turn it back on again. No restart required.

Simon includes a password feature, that can be used to require a password when Simon is launched or activated. This provides some level of security to prevent unauthorized people from accessing the app. It doesn’t encrypt data or any other changes, it’s just a simple access control.

By default, a password is not required. If you want to require one, open up the General Settings. Notice the Choose Password… button and the text to the left indicating that a password hasn’t been set:

Click the button to display the password sheet. If a password hasn’t already been set, the first field will be disabled (and display “None”). If one has been set, enter the existing password there. The next two fields are for the new password; enter the same one in both, or leave them both blank to disable the password feature. If entering a password, you should also enter a hint that will remind you of the password (without being too obvious):

After setting a password, the text in the Settings window will change to indicate so:

When a password has been set, whenever you activate Simon it will display an unlock sheet, asking for the password. It includes a Quit button to quickly stop Simon, and a Cancel to deactivate Simon. After two failed attempts, it will display the password hint (if any); after two more failed attempts, it’ll disallow further attempts until after you quit or cancel:

I expect that most people won’t need this feature, but for those who do, it should prove quite useful.