Releasemonitor is a Site Administrator Module that assists with keeping contributed modules up to date and summarizing their upgrade availability. The Release Monitor reads the current version information of enabled contributed modules from the module.info file if they are available, from CVS/Tag and the CVS $Id$ string. Using cron, it gets the current version information to determine if there are minor or major upgrades available. The Monitor displays this information on a single page and creates watchdog events when an upgrade is available. To make downloading easier, it gives links to the Drupal project page, and the CVS repositories (if appropriate).
Given that update_status is in 6.x core, the cvs_deploy has been release, and I am overwhelmed with other work, I am discontinuing all support for releasemonitor. I do believe that releasemonitor has the potential to offer something a little better and different than update status, but I simply don't have the time to do it. Please do not create any issues for this module, they will be ignored and not appreciated.
The monitor currently gets version information from cvs.drupal.org, but future versions whould get this information from the drupal.org project.module. The monitor pulls module information once per day, although this is a configurable option.