Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available system for efficiently collecting, aggregating and moving large amounts of log data from many different sources to a centralized data store.

A Flume event is defined as a unit of data flow having a byte payload and an optional set of string attributes. A Flume agent is a (JVM) process that hosts the components through which events flow from an external source to the next destination (hop).

An agent is started using a shell script called flume-ng which is located in the bin directory of the Flume distribution. You need to specify the agent name, the config directory, and the config file on the command line:

$ bin/flume-ng agent -n $agent_name -c conf -f conf/flume-conf.properties.template

Here, we give an example configuration file, describing a single-node Flume deployment. This configuration lets a user generate events and subsequently logs them to the console.

# example.conf: A single-node Flume configuration

# Name the components on this agent

a1.sources = r1

a1.sinks = k1

a1.channels = c1

# Describe/configure the source

a1.sources.r1.type = netcat

a1.sources.r1.bind = localhost

a1.sources.r1.port = 44444

# Describe the sink

a1.sinks.k1.type = logger

# Use a channel which buffers events in memory

a1.channels.c1.type = memory

a1.channels.c1.capacity = 1000

a1.channels.c1.transactionCapacity = 100

# Bind the source and sink to the channel

a1.sources.r1.channels = c1

a1.sinks.k1.channel = c1