I can't get into the specifics of when SAM 6.1 might be released, other than to say that it will be released in 2014. I can also tell you that beta 3 should be available sometime next week. Currently there is no known workaround that would allow you to use WPM to monitor web services such as JSON or SOAP. Perhaps there is an online HTML form that can be used to validate web services using WPM, but I'm not aware of one offhand. There is a SAM application template available in the Content Exchange at the link below that demonstrates using PowerShell to query a web service API.