Dejal Systems (http://www.dejal.com/simon/) has updated Simon, a server monitoring tool for Mac OS X, to version 3.3. The upgrade includes Ping and Growl enhancements
Dejal Simon checks websites and other kinds of services for changes or failures, with notification and reporting options. You can receive notification of changes, failures, and/or recoveries via various Actions and more.
Services include Web (HTTP) to check web pages (including secure ones, and supporting POST and cookies), FTP files and directory listings, DNS, Ping servers, see Twitter updates, watch a local application, capture periodic screenshots, watch for System Log Errors, and more. Plus, you can add your own services via custom port connections, AppleScripts, shell scripts, or Perl, PHP, Python, etc.
You can use filters to avoid dynamic content and detect changes in the output of the service and other filters. With Simon, you can can look at multiple portions, or the 10th occurrence, find via simple text matching or regular expressions. You can also remove HTML tags or numbers from the text, result in a change or failure if some text is found or missing, only detect a change if a number changes by some threshold, or is out of range, and many more possibilities.
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.
Dejal Simon 3.3 is available starting at US$49; a demo is available for download. a This is a free update for licensed Simon 3 users, or a paid upgrade for licensed Simon 2 users, with upgrades starting at $19.