This document discusses real-time analysis of big data and provides an example use case of flow activity monitoring. It describes trends in big data including increasing volumes, velocities, and varieties of data. The emergence of real-time analytics on big data enables faster decision making. The document then demonstrates a real-time system for monitoring application activity and flows using the open-source Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana stack to collect, transform, analyze and visualize data without modifying the existing systems.