The volume of information in the 21st century is growing at a rapid pace. Big data technologies are used to process modern information. This article discusses the use of big data technologies to implement monitoring of social processes. Big data has its characteristics and principles, which reflect here. In addition, we also discussed big data applications in some areas. Particular attention in this article pays to the interactions of big data and sociology. For this, there consider digital sociology and computational social sciences. One of the main objects of study in sociology is social processes. The article shows the types of social processes and their monitoring. As an example, there is implemented monitoring of social processes at the university. There are used following technologies for the realization of social processes monitoring: products 1010data (1010edge, 1010connect, 1010reveal, 1010equities), products of Apache Software Foundation (Apache Hive, Apache Chukwa, Apache Hadoop, Apache Pig), MapReduce framework, language R, library Pandas, NoSQL, etc. Despite this, this article examines the use of the MapReduce model for social processes monitoring at the university.