ReadWriteWeb

While most of us know the results of yesterday's Big Game, the results of the online ad campaigns from the dozens of companies spending multiple millions are less clear. Fortunately, monitoring firm Yottaa is here to lead the way and let us know who scored and who missed serving up online content to complement their TV spots.

Two years ago, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security firmly decided (again) that a policy of responding to vulnerabilities in the nation's cybersecurity when they happen, is insufficient. The National Institute of Standards and Technology set about on a plan to model a 21st century perpetual vulnerability mitigation scheme - a continuous monitoring (CM) framework that attempts to model security procedures not in terms of crisis and response, but instead as a perpetual cycle of monitoring and engagement that stays basically the same whether or not there's a crisis.

In other words, if you "keep doing this all the time," then whatever happens won't destroy the network. Late last week, NIST produced its first series of drafts for how government information services could look, perhaps later this decade. It's so radically different from anything seen thus far, that NIST acknowledges that no one in the commercial sector has even come up with the language to describe it.

The latest entry into calculating cloud computing costs of the public providers is from Cloudsizer, with more than a dozen different cloud providers covered. It is simple and easy to use, and you can start out with a free trial of its "express" service immediately, and upgrade to a paid "pro" account for AU$300 for three months.

How exactly should you gain visibility into the performance levels your customers are seeing when they use your Web applications? One method that's still in wide use is compelling users to install plug-ins and background processes. But for many users, that's not just performance monitoring, that's behavior monitoring. You don't want your analytics tool straying too far into the realm of potential privacy violations.

Until HTML5 can fully implement its standard methodology for capturing browser performance specs, Web developers need alternatives. One candidate, provided by a company RWW spoke with called New Relic, is to have Web apps servers supply performance measurement agents to clients while the apps themselves are being served. These agents communicate not with your server, but with New Relic instead, and the results are made visible as analytics charts through your browser.

If you run a website, you want to add content that will result in actual money being collected from the most popular areas on your pages. Wouldn't it be nice to know what the dollar implications of your content decisions are so your editorial team can best use your screen real estate? That is genesis of JumpTime's latest analytics service called Traffic Valuator, available now.

Information workers aren't the only ones affected by information technologies. For example, computers aren't the only piece of equipment being remotely monitored by employers anymore. The Wall Street Journal reports that employers are increasingly using tools like GPS and wireless communications technologies to keep tabs on heavy construction equipment, long-haul trucks, delivery vans, buses and police cars.

"Now, they can see who is wasting fuel by idling too much, operating outside their assigned area, working machines too hard or driving too fast." the paper says. The data received from this equipment can be mined for insights into how to increase efficiency. Also, Equipment dealers sometimes arrange to receive the data from machines to help with scheduling routine maintenance.

IT services company Virtela announced today a new IT infrastructure management service based on predictive analytics. VirtelaPredict will monitor system logs and event data for both on-premise and cloud based infrastructure and look for patterns that signal trouble. The company will then correct issues, hopefully before an outage ever occurs.

Cloud hosting provider Joyent re-launched its Node.js hosting service no.de this week. Joyent, the sponsor company of Node.js, is now offering versions 0.4.0 and 0.4.1 to no.de users. It also announced Cloud Analytics, a new service for finding problems with Node.js applications.

This week New Relic announced that its Bronze accounts are available to all Rackspace Cloud customers at no additional cost. New Relic offers a software-as-a-service for managing, monitoring and troubleshooting cloud-hosted applications. We covered the service previously here.

New Relic Bronze accounts normally sell for $75 a month. The Bronze accounts feature unlimited users, online support and one week of data retention. Higher level accounts offer more data retention and more analysis, monitoring and alerting tools.

Yesterday server monitoring company Boxed Ice announced its new MongoDB monitoring dashboard for its Server Density service. The dashboard will enable you to monitor data sizes, RAM, index stats, uptime delay and heartbeat information of your entire MongoDB cluster. It can also trigger alerts. The service is free for the time being, but the company plans to start charging a monthly fee.