The trouble with real-time analytics is that they are like a vortex of awesomeness, pulling you in deeper and deeper, until you pick your head up at the end of the day and realize you haven't done any work at all.
ChartBeat is the latest real-time website analytics provider I've come across and just by the feature set alone I believe it to be a solution to consider deploying on your Web property. ChartBeats offers traffic alerts (notifying users when traffic exceeds or falls below a monthly average, maximum or minimum), uptime alerts and load time notifications (sent via SMS and/or e-mail), a real-time dashboard that shows how many people are on the site (widgets are available to publicize that too), what pages they are on and where they came from and even some social metrics to inform you what those users are actually doing (reading, writing, sitting idle). ChartBeat also provides historical trends, to show users how the site was performing at a specific date in time and how the site's responsiveness and popularity changes over time.
One of my main concerns with real-time solutions of this nature is that they tend to be bulky and interfere with the user-experience. Using Chartbeat however won't slow down your site as the javascript that must be placed is small and hosted on Amazon's Cloudfront CDN (content delivery network). Post-install, users will begin pinging chartbeat every ten seconds asynchronously (in the background). Unlike other similar programs the number of pageviews is not capped, but the amount of concurrent users is kept to 5,000.
Current pricing for Chartbeat is $9.95/mo (free for thirty days) and enables you to install Chartbeat on five websites.
