Simon extras

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:

Decompress the downloaded archive, if you browser didn’t do it for you;

Launch Simon if not already running;

Go to the Services or Notifiers list, as appropriate;

Click the New toolbar button (or via the File menu);

Choose the Service Kind (or Notifier Kind) button to show the service (or notifier) page.

Choose the Script service/notifier kind, if not selected by default.

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.