Questions[analytics](server)

First and foremost, please forgive me if this is in the wrong section. I always seem to pick the wrong site when it comes to computer questions.

In the air of recent, wildly viral internet events, my buddy and I have formulated an idea to run an experiment to see how the phenomenon works. However, I am unsure of how the back-end would work.

We would host a single image file (.jpg/.png/.gif) on our server. The image is not intended to be hosted on a single web page - it is assumed this image will be cross posted, shared, etc. The fact that the image file itself is hosted on our server will remain constant (we're not taking into account situations where the image is saved/archived and hosted elsewhere, and then viewed).

We would like to be able to view a log of hits that the image gets, along with the IPs of viewing PCs (to figure out the progressive geographical spread of the image).

First, is this possible? I have seen many images that say 'your IP is blah blah blah, using Safari...', and I have also seen many instances where an image will "know" when its being hosted on a site other than its home (to prevent hotlinking).

Second, how would this be accomplished? Can an analytics program track such specific hits on a simple image file?

Working on medium sized websites we've always built our own real-time traffic graphing solutions and displayed those on a big screen mission control style so that if traffic starts to climb, load start to climb, latency increases, etc we can start watching it pro-actively before the monitoring system goes off.

Now I'm starting at a new company and we need the same thing, are there companies that have mission control style real-time website monitoring software products? Not web analytics, but real-time graphing of things like simultaneous users, page views, hits, avg HTML render time, etc. It would require installing some kind of agent on each web server (or the load balancer) since Javascript tracking is insufficient to detect for example when a spam-bot starts pummeling the site. I've googled and can't find anything.

how do I configure IIS to post logs to sql server?

How want to save ANY log to my site. the site has a lot of views and the data can be big in a very small time. In addition, I want to show analytics of the use, in real time, and for all the time.

• Is it make sense to save all the logs in sql-server?

• What is the pros and cons taking this approach have?

• what other solution can I have?

Can I download the raw logs of my Google Analytics data? I want to do some processing on the data.

In our NOC, we maintain situational awareness of all physical security zones (reactive video feeds), some basic information about the physical characteristics of the data centers, the weather and a national news feed. Are there other things you recommend a NOC monitor, or is this considered good enough.