We run a pulse test every morning at 0600. We check every 5 minutes, but pause the test from 0605 to 0600. This past weekend the Simon computer lost power. When we restarted it on Tuesday (at ~08:00) we were getting Pulse Test notifications every 5 minutes. My fix was to manually pause the test for as many minutes until 0555 the next day. Ever since then the test has run but we haven't been reliably getting notifications. The logs indicate that no change has been detected.

Smart Change Detection is defined as shown in the attachment.

Is there a file somewhere that stores the last changed value that I might tweak?

Do I need to delete and recreate the Pulse test?

Thanks

Brad

I have tried every combination of email settings and I still do not get any notifications. Is there a log file stored somewhere that I can see what is happening when it tries to send an email?

Thanks

Greg

WhistleBlower by James Sentman used to have a very similar functionality as Simon.
http://www.sentman.com/sentman.com.html
Unfortunately it was written in Real Basic and had a performance issue when
run with a lot of objects and over a long duration and it's no longer supported.

Simon has other advantages over WhistleBlowers as well, like the
ability to use Shell- and AppleScripts to probe the services.

However, I've liked its built-in Web server of WhistleBlower very much,
which allowed me to access the service monitor from any computer on Internet.

Peter

I'm back to Simon after many years and have purchased a license.

I can get the email notifier to send me an email message but I also want an SMS message to my ATT iPhone. Setting up the SMS notifier as [10-digit-numer]@txt.att.net does not work from Simon, but it does from my email client. Similarly, using the Simon email notifier to send to [10-digit-numer]@txt.att.net also fails.

Is there something I'm overlooking? I'm actually trying to monitor my mail server, so notifying me via email is a bit pointless.

Thanks,
Gary

Every time I open "Edit Notifier xxx" it gets bigger until it's so large that that the "Cancel" and "Ok" buttons are off the bottom of the screen and I can't access them.

These windows can only be resized horizontally, not vertically.

Eventually when they get too big, after opening them 4-5 times. I have to delete the pref files to reset them.

Help! Thanks

Hey, I only started using the free version of Simon for 2 days now and I plan to use it to detect changes in a website (see wich person has posted something new). My knowledge about this is pretty restricted but I want to find out if it's usefull for me before the trial is expired.

So my question is, to perform a test, I put the website in Service --> Web Http --> Url
After that I go into Filter ---> select Any --> Change ---> Input response Text

Now from what I understand, this should give me the changes on the website when I go into Changes in the Monitor (after a couple of tests and after a change really has taken place)

Well I did see soms change in the code, wich is allready a nice thing , but is there a way to see really the text that has been changed? eg: no need to go check the site to see the difference?

Using a Test based on the standard Pulse service, no Change is being registered...
- there is no Filter specified
- there is a Change Notifier set up (2 in fact, Sax & Twitter)
- both Notifiers work fine on their own
- the Preview... button (when editting the test) shows the current date & time including seconds
- each test of Pulse succeeds, but no Change is registered
- the Activity View *does* show the changing time in the Details column:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/244842/pulse.png

What am I missing?

I have a notifier failing to send an SMS. This is the second time this has happened. The first time was immediately after upgrading from version 2 to 3. I fixed it by discarding the Simon preference file and Notifiers.simon. Then re-created all my notifiers. Now it has happened again. Odd thing is when the server recovered the same notifier succeeded in sending an SMS. When I attempt to edit the notifier I get a damaged screen. See my attached screen shot.

Hi folks!

After updating to the newest version 3.2.1 my Filemaker Server Test is failing. The funny thing is, that the preview of the service works and succeeds! But the regular service every 5 minutes fails.

What can I do to bring this to work again?

Thanks and best,

Jo-Chen

I have a server which is down - won't ping at the moment, and won't load the index page in a browser - yet the Simon test shows good. Seems like I'm overlooking something here - but don't know what. Get and post both show good. Suggestions for a more comprehensive test appreciated.

Just updated to 3.2.1 from 3.2 - I had had this mac mini off for a few weeks, and updated prior to putting my monitoring back online. Hit update for the reports, they showed working, for longer than I thought they should, then finished with no indication of any problem. I went to the web page, and it was the old info - and then I remembered I'd changed my FTP password a few weeks ago. I changed the password inside the reports setup, and the reports ran quickly, and the new info showed up.

* it seems to be a different layout than the last version - but that's not a big problem.

So - there was no indication that the FTP login had failed - hope this helps -

jg

Simon currently allows the user to specify multiple failures in the Notification prefs, and that's fine, but I also see a need for it a similar pref in the test itself.

For example, I have a Notifier that emails me when tests fail: it's one Notifier with my normal email address and SMS text email address. But I have one test that I don't want to hear from until it fails a few times in a row....so I have to duplicate the Notifier and change it to not notify until successive failures just for that one test. Then if my email or text sms email changes, I have to change it in multiple Notifiers, as many as I may need to create to get all the number of different successive failures that I might want.

So I also see a need for a similar parameter in the test itself, something like "Don't Trigger Notifications Until ____ Failures/Changes". It would be set to "1" by default, but users could raise that number to let the test fail or change that many times before Notifications would be triggered.

John

Now that the new IOS 5.0 is available, a real cheap way of notifying the admin is maybe using the iMessage framework. That would be perfect to have immediate splashes on the screen without any costs. I have no idea if Apple has this interface open to developers. But that would be great, right?!

I see this in the documentation:

Status: The next column in the table is the Status column. Lines display an icon indicating whether the test succeeded (e.g. the site was up) or failed (was down) when last checked, indicated by an upwards- or downwards-pointing triangle. The downward triangle is always bright red (). But for successful tests, the color of the triangle indicates additional information. If the triangle is a shade of green (), the site has changed recently - specifically more recently than it had an error. If it is a shade of orange (), the test recently failed, but has since recovered - again specifically more recently than any change. The shade hints at how recent the change or error occurred, with it starting off bright green or orange, and eventually fading to gray as time passes. While a test is being checked, the status displays a spinning progress indicator, or if you don't have an internet connection at the time of the check, it shows a flashing lightning bolt until the connection is restored. This column is included by default

But two of my monitored sites (which are up) are showing a black triangle. What does that mean?

Hello,

Yesterday, my Mac Mini Server running SL 10.6.8 rebooted because of a Kernel Panic. The same thing happened 2 weeks ago. In both cases, the .panic says that "Simon" was the BSD process name corresponding to the current thread. I'm not really pointing a finger at Simon since lots of things can go trigger a Kernel Panic, but running Simon is the only major modification I made to this server during the last month, which has been running quite well for months. The failures occurred on a Saturday and on a Sunday, at different times, so Simon may have been the only "active" process at this time. This server is lightly loaded.

My checks use the following services : Ping, Web (HTTP), IMAP and DNS. I know that Ping performs its check through another process, so the culprit maybe one of the other ones.

So, has anyone seen this kind of behavior before ? I could post the .panic files but I'm not sure that this would be really useful.

Now for some background: I am running Simon 3.1.1 since the version 3.2 generates lots of spurious failures every 30 minutes (see my other post) and I'm using a single non-Apple Kexts : com.google.filesystems.fusefs.

I'll now try to run Simon 3.2, with a lighter load (checks every 5 minutes instead of every minute).

Best Regards,
Kooorrg

This is the error I get after setting up a service and filter to check whois expiry for a test domain:

osascript[14546:707] Cannot find executable for CFBundle

I am looking to import a list of domains to check whois expiry, and set an ical reminder X days before actual expiration to renew at defined registry associated with that domain.

Hello,

I'm using Simon to monitor various ressources on my company's network. When I updated from Simon 3.1.1 to 3.2, my checks started to fail every 30 minutes.

Here are some details : I have about 20 checks running, set to run every minute. The network is rather new and served with a Gigabit switch. The checks use Ping, and are set to send 10 packets. A failure is triggered by an average ping latency greater than 100ms, a lost packet, or when the test takes longer than a minute.

Every 30 minutes, the check fails with a "check time" superior to 1 minute, then immediately recovers (the next check is only one minute away). Average check time is 10 secs.

Running ping in a console shows that average ping times for the services I'm checking are in the 10-20ms range, but I can see a couple of spikes, every couple of times when a single ping packet takes anywhere from 50 to 200ms. The server and the network is lightly loaded.

When I increase the acceptable average ping latency, failures get less frequent. However, since the problem went away when I reinstalled Simon 3.1.1, I think that this is really an issue with the 3.2 release.

Any help would be appreciated.

Best Regards,
Kooorrg

Hi
I'm a new costumer of Simon and i would like to know if it exists macros in Simon. I need to watch changes in a website which has got passwords and two submits buttons before entering to the webpage i'm interested.
Thanks a lot for answers

Hello

I have a test that checks the response of a website to see whether the webserver on that machine is running...any response is a good response. A few days ago, the owner switched that site to be private and Simon now gets the error code 403 as response. 403 is an error msg from a running webserver and therefore is a valid response for this test but Simon insists in sending out alarms telling everybody that the test was unsuccessful. I tried filters and checking of parameters but no success.

Is there a way to teach Simon that the test really was successful despite the error and if yes, how would I do that? I had to turn this test off completely because of all the false alarms we have gotten. The former sent out an alarm on every test and now we lack the info altogether. Neither is satisfactory.
cheers
eve