it can pretty much read/sense any input/output functioning thru the ECU. i havnt done any individual cylinder testing with livelink however, so i cannot comment on that.
if you open live link and click on the button that is a graph right under "File" it will bring up a box if you are not connected to the car. You can click "no" and enter your strategy code and it will bring up all the PIDs you can view. If your laptop is plugged into the car this will automatically pop up if i remember correctly. Then you just select the PIDs you want to monitor. I like to set up the datalog configuration file before hand instead of doing that while sitting in the car. And there is no min time for it to gather data should start showing up instantly.
I like to save a few different configuration files so all I have to do is open them up instead of creating a new one each time I datalog. It's a very handy feature!