Typically I don't recommend commercial Blogs, but I'll make an exception this time, and cite Mark Palmer's post, since I like the metaphor he made, reflected in this picture. According to Mark, analytics that refers to the past is like driving by only looking at the rear-view mirror, which of course can show the road you have already passed. Since typically we drive forward and not backward it should be more useful to look ahead than to look back. In many cases the road is fixed, in the sense that the road forward looks exactly like the road backward, and then it might make sense to do it, however, in other cases, like driving in real traffic and not in a bubble, the road ahead may contain surprises that are not evident from the previous parts of the road.
The interesting thing is that even law latency event processing system are, in fact, looking at the past, where the past is almost the present, looking to the future is not a standard event processing feature.
