When setting up spoken alerts, the volume slider will not retain my preference. It can keep the maxxed out loudest setting between edits, but any other position (softened to 3/4, 1/2, 1/3) always results in the volume slider moved to off (far left).

I don't think this is the behavior to be expected, and it makes for a VERY quiet alert :) or very LOUD (the volume control in Simon bypasses the system sound volume setting in Tiger 10.4.11 on a powerpc).

Thoughts?

Is there a way of setting up groups of notifiers? I have two sets of machines: some need to have a collection of six notifiers (email, sound, log for up or down states) and some only use 4 notifiers. As far as I can see, there is no way to create groupings of notifiers for easy addition to the individual tests. I guess if I had been smart about this, I could have simply created a template for each kind of test, then duplicated it.

But I wasn't that smart...

Is there any way to change User Agent globally or even better if it can be changed per Test basis?

How about JavaScript, cookies or Java?

Is there an easy way to test for the health of the Simon app, to ensure that it's not crashed, quit accidentally or hung?

Some apps (like Keep It Up) have HTTP interfaces that display a status or other information, some have other open ports that return certain text that can be checked for....is there something similar in Simon that I can use to be sure that the app is open, is working properly and is not hung?

Thanks!

I'm trying to monitor an all-Flash http:// site, and each check is lasting for 0 seconds! So I'm assuming that 0 seconds means that the checking isn't working. Is this because the site is all flash? If so, is there anything I can do about it? Thanks so much; I appreciate any help!

I think I found a bug in the Service Result/Custom Error section.

If you accidentally rename a line's Customer Error Description to "Success" and you already have one called "Success", you then can no longer change the Custom Error Description or even delete the line. You're stuck with two "Success" lines.

It looks like the code that disallows the deleting/changing of "Success" should allow it, as long as there will be at least one "Success" line remaining after the delete/change.

I'm looking for a way to be notified on the absence of a certain line in a log file, on a continuing basis.

A bit of background: we have a few VIPs with mobile devices that are supposed to sync with their calendars via SyncML, but sometimes the sync process on the device silently gets stuck and stop syncing (the developer can't track it down). Of course the phone and other apps continue to work fine, so the user is clueless until they miss an appointment or something, and then they're already angry.

I'd like to get more proactive on this by monitoring the sync server log to ensure that my VIP users are syncing properly. So if I have a user called "JohnD", Simon would check the log to ensure that JohnD has logged in at least once over the previous 2 or 3 hours (the sync is supposed to happen every hour).

I could just do a tail on the log for the number of lines that would normally approximate the last few hours and grep the login names, but that would break if anything increased the number of log lines (temporarily turning up the logging detail, adding more users that sync, etc). Similarly, if logging detail was decreased, we'd get a false negative because older login lines from many hours or days ago might show up. I wondered if there was a fancier way to actually check the log over the last few hours based on the current date and time and the timestamps in the log.

A login line in the log looks like this:

2008/02/27 09:52:47 [S fd60biag--cq--vfx156] User John DeMillion (johnd) logged in.

Any hints?

Is there a way to have Simon log to a file?

A daily log file per service would be perfect.

I'm using Simon 2.3.5 on Mac OS X 10.4.11.

Thanks,
Erik.

PS sorry about the double posts. the forum was dumping me to a reply window after posting the message, and I just assumed it was for a new message.

Sorry if this is not the right place, didn't see a support option in the Simon menu.

The licenses window has the checkboxes overlaid with the text, so that it is not usable.

Is there a way to set the precision of the duration displayed in the monitor?

I would like it down the 100ths of a second.

Durations are now showing as 0 secs, and I'm presuming that is because they are rounded down to the nearest second.

My Mac isn't turned on at night but I want Simon to automatically run when I boot my machine each morning. Since Simon has notification icons in the menu bar and dock, I don't want to see the main application window when my system boots, but checking the "hide" checkbox for the application in "Login items" has no effect.

I know there is an "Automatically Hide Monitor Window" but this isn't the behavior I'm looking for (I like to leave that option unchecked). Is there a way to hide the application when it is loaded at boot time? Thanks.

If anyone would like to create a custom service or notifier script for Simon, but don't have the unix shell scripting fu, you can contact me and I'll put you in touch with someone who could provide a quote for such work.

I have someone available, but if anyone else has the skills and would like to volunteer to help others, either for free or a fee, I'd appreciate hearing from you, too.

Just a quick note to let you guys know that a kind Simon customer, Joe Savelberg, has provided two very handy items for Simon:

• APC Masterswitch: A notifier script to restart an outlet on an APC Masterswitch with Network Management Card v2.6.1. This has been requested by many others, so I'm sure will be much appreciated.
• iPhone: A report template to display reports on an iPhone or iPod touch.

Visit the Simon Extras page to download these and other handy goodies.

We've got ~170 tests setup and we've experienced some flakiness which we could use some help figuring out.

This weekend Simon crashed. We submitted the crash report.

Currently right now, Simon is unresponsive for 5+ minutes at a time with 90%+ CPU usage. I was able to pause all tests and turn the time up between tests to the max to try and help with this as much as possible. It seems to be running better like this, but tests are getting backed up.

Is there anything we can do to fix this?

(Edit: Attached sample stuff)

For some reason, the {TestLastChangeTime} notifier variable is always sending a constant time, "19:00:00". It doesn't matter what time it actually is, that's always the time that appears in the notifier email.

Any ideas?

David,

When setting up auto-pause on tests, what is the proper way to pause a test for a whole day? 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 ? or does 00:00:00 to 00:00:00 work? Maybe if 24 is entered as the hour, set it to 23:59:59?

Also there seems to be a small GUI bug here. It's possible to tab between hour, minute, second but not from the "from" input to the "to" input box.

If I set a test to pause from 00:00:00 to 0:07:00, will the test immediately run at 7am?

I have a couple of machines checking each other (with Simon). When I need to install OS updates, etc. I have to use Apple Remote Desktop (or screen sharing or VNC) and go to each machine to pause all of the mutual tests using Simon's GUI.

I might be missing something obvious, but is there a way to remotely control Simon from the command line? It would be great to be able to run a shell script (for example) that used ssh to pause tests on a remote machine. I don't see Applescript support in Simon or anything else obvious to me.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

--greg

I'm a little confused. I've tried to create a local report on the 3 sites I'm monitoring (actually, 1 pop and 2 sites.)

Although it creates all of the subfolders correctly, there is no master index.html page at the top level. Am I missing something? Do I need to do a remote upload to my local server to get the index page?

TIA,
bob

David,

When setting up a script notifier, it's possible to set up a custom variable with name and value. However, it's not possible (afaik) to pass a value from a test into a Notifier.

We are integrating Simon and qPage together for TAP based paging. It works great but I've got to set up several separate notifiers which differ only in the recipients. It would be easier if I could set up one generic notifier and pass the recipients from test itself.

We've got over 200 tests planned for creation, it's getting tedious to edit the notifiers on each test. From what I can tell, we've got to have 2 notifiers (failure/recovery) for each notifier event we wish to use. Am I missing something?

Justin

Just a note on the default SMTP service.

I'm using EIMS as my mail server, and one of the common anti-spam practices is to automatically block any host that tries to connect using the same HELO name as the currently running server. Having this kind of setup meant that Simon connected fine on the first attempt, but then on all subsequent attempts it reported a failure as EIMS blocked the incoming connection, since the SMTP service defaults to using the name of the server being tested in the helo.

I've duplicated the SMTP service and changed the then send helo {TestURL} to be hardcoded to then send helo mydomain.tld and now it's running fine.