Apache Flume Component Guide
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Chapter 3. Using Apache Flume for Streaming

Kafka Sink and Hive Sink are integrated with Flume to provide streaming capabilitles for Hive tables and Kafka topics. For more information about Flume, see the Apache Flume 1.5.2 documentation.

Kafka Sink

This is a Flume Sink implementation that can publish data to a Kafka topic. One of the objectives is to integrate Flume with Kafka so that pull-based processing systems can process the data coming through various Flume sources. This currently supports Kafka 0.8.x series of releases.

Property Name

Default

Description

type-Must be set to org.apache.flume.sink.kafka.KafkaSink.
brokerList-List of brokers Kafka-Sink will connect to, to get the list of topic partitions. This can be a partial list of brokers, but we recommend at least two for HA. The format is a comma separated list of hostname:port.
topicdefault-flume-topicThe topic in Kafka to which the messages will be published. If this parameter is configured, messages will be published to this topic. If the event header contains a “topic” field, the event will be published to that topic overriding the topic configured here.
batchSize100How many messages to process in one batch. Larger batches improve throughput while adding latency.
requiredAcks1How many replicas must acknowledge a message before it is considered successfully written. Accepted values are 0 (Never wait for acknowledgement), 1 (wait for leader only), -1 (wait for all replicas) Set this to -1 to avoid data loss in some cases of leader failure.
Other Kafka Producer Properties-These properties are used to configure the Kafka Producer. Any producer property supported by Kafka can be used. The only requirement is to prepend the property name with the prefix "Kafka.". Fr exampleafka.producer.type.

Kafka Sink uses the topic and key properties from the FlumeEvent headers to send events to Kafka. If the topic exists in the headers, the event is sent to that specific topic, overriding the topic configured for the Sink. If key exists in the headers, the key is used by Kafka to partition the data between the topic partitions. Events with the same key are sent to the same partition. If the key is null, events are sent to random partitions.

An example configuration of a Kafka sink is given below. Properties starting with the prefix Kafka (the last 3 properties) are used when instantiating the Kafka producer. The properties that are passed when creating the Kafka producer are not limited to the properties given in this example. It is also possible include your custom properties here and access them inside the preprocessor through the Flume Context object passed in as a method argument.

a1.sinks.k1.type = org.apache.flume.sink.kafka.KafkaSink a1.sinks.k1.topic = mytopic
a1.sinks.k1.brokerList = localhost:9092
a1.sinks.k1.requiredAcks = 1
a1.sinks.k1.batchSize = 20
a1.sinks.k1.channel = c1

Hive Sink

This sink streams events containing delimited text or JSON data directly into a Hive table or partition. Events are written using Hive transactions. As soon as a set of events are committed to Hive, they become immediately visible to Hive queries. Partitions to which flume will stream to can either be pre-created or, optionally, Flume can create them if they are missing. Fields from incoming event data are mapped to corresponding columns in the Hive table.

Property Name

Default

Description

channel  
type The component type name, needs to be hive.
hive.metastore Hive metastore URI (e.g. thrift://a.b.com:9083).
hive.database Hive database name
.
hive.table Hive table name.
hive.partitionComma separated list of partition values identifying the partition to write to. May contain escape sequences. E.g.: If the table is partitioned by (continent: string, country :string, time : string) then ‘Asia,India,2014-02-26-01-21’ will indicate continent=Asia,country=India,time=2014-02-26-01-21.
hive.txnsPerBatchAsk 100Hive grants a batch of transactions instead of single transactions to streaming clients like Flume. This setting configures the number of desired transactions per Transaction Batch. Data from all transactions in a single batch end up in a single file. Flume will write a maximum of batchSize events in each transaction in the batch. This setting in conjunction with batchSize provides control over the size of each file. Note that eventually Hive will transparently compact these files into larger files.
heartBeatInterval 240(In seconds) Interval between consecutive heartbeats sent to Hive to keep unused transactions from expiring. Set this value to 0 to disable heartbeats.
autoCreatePartitions trueFlume will automatically create the necessary Hive partitions to stream to.
batchSize 15000 Max number of events written to Hive in a single Hive transaction.
maxOpenConnections 500 Allow only this number of open connections. If this number is exceeded, the least recently used connection is closed.
callTimeout 10000 (In milliseconds) Timeout for Hive & HDFS I/O operations, such as openTxn, write, commit, abort.

serializer Serializer is responsible for parsing out field from the event and mapping them to columns in the hive table. Choice of serializer depends upon the format of the data in the event. Supported serializers: DELIMITED and JSON.
roundUnit minute The unit of the round down value - second, minute or hour.

roundValue 1Rounded down to the highest multiple of this (in the unit configured using hive.roundUnit), less than current time.
timeZone LocalName of the timezone that should be used for resolving the escape sequences in partition, e.g. Time America/Los_Angeles.
useLocalTimeStampfalseUse the local time (instead of the timestamp from the event header) while replacing the escape sequences.

The following serializers are provided for Hive sink:

  • JSON: Handles UTF8 encoded Json (strict syntax) events and requires no configuration. Object names in the JSON are mapped directly to columns with the same name in the Hive table. Internally uses org.apache.hive.hcatalog.data.JsonSerDe but is independent of the Serde of the Hive table. This serializer requires HCatalog to be installed.

  • DELIMITED: Handles simple delimited textual events. Internally uses LazySimpleSerde but is independent of the Serde of the Hive table.

Property Name

Default

Description

serializer.delimiter ,(Type: string) The field delimiter in the incoming data. To use special characters, surround them with double quotes like “\t”.
serializer.fieldnames The mapping from input fields to columns in hive table. Specified as a comma separated list (no spaces) of hive table columns names, identifying the input fields in order of their occurrence. To skip fields leave the column name unspecified. E.g.. ‘time,,IP,message’ indicates the 1st, 3rd and 4th fields in input map to time, IP and message columns in the hive table.
serializer.serdeSeparator Ctrl-A (Type: character) Customizes the separator used by underlying serde. There can be a gain in efficiency if the fields in serializer.fieldnames are in same order as table columns, the serializer.delimiter is same as the serializer.serdeSeparator and number of fields in serializer.fieldnames is less than or equal to number of table columns, as the fields in incoming event body do not need to be reordered to match order of table columns. Use single quotes for special characters like ‘\t’. Ensure input fields do not contain this character. Note: If serializer.delimiter is a single character, preferably set this to the same character.

The following are the escape sequences supported:

Alias

Description

%{host} Substitute value of event header named “host”. Arbitrary header names are supported.
%t Unix time in milliseconds
.
%a Locale’s short weekday name (Mon, Tue, ...)

%A Locale’s full weekday name (Monday, Tuesday, ...)
%b Locale’s short month name (Jan, Feb, ...)
%B Locale’s long month name (January, February, ...)
%c Locale’s date and time (Thu Mar 3 23:05:25 2005)
%d Day of month (01)

%D Date; same as %m/%d/%y
%H Hour (00..23) 

%I Hour (01..12) 

%j Day of year (001..366) 

%k Hour ( 0..23) 

%m Month (01..12)

%M Minute (00..59)

%p Locale’s equivalent of am or pm

%s Seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
%S Second (00..59)
%y last two digits of year (00..99)

%Y Year (2015)
%z +hhmm numeric timezone (for example, -0400)

Example Hive table:

create table weblogs ( id int , msg string )

partitioned by (continent string, country string, time string)
clustered by (id) into 5 buckets
stored as orc;

Example for agent named a1:

a1.channels = c1

a1.channels.c1.type = memory

a1.sinks = k1

a1.sinks.k1.type = hive

a1.sinks.k1.channel = c1

a1.sinks.k1.hive.metastore = thrift://127.0.0.1:9083
a1.sinks.k1.hive.database = logsdb

a1.sinks.k1.hive.table = weblogs
a1.sinks.k1.hive.partition = asia,%{country},%y-%m-%d-%H-%M
a1.sinks.k1.useLocalTimeStamp = false

a1.sinks.k1.round = true

a1.sinks.k1.roundValue = 10

a1.sinks.k1.roundUnit = minute

a1.sinks.k1.serializer = DELIMITED
a1.sinks.k1.serializer.delimiter = "\t"
a1.sinks.k1.serializer.serdeSeparator = '\t'
a1.sinks.k1.serializer.fieldnames =id,,msg
[Tip]Tip

For all of the time related escape sequences, a header with the key “timestamp” must exist among the headers of the event (unless useLocalTimeStampis set to true). One way to add this automatically is to use the TimestampInterceptor.

The above configuration will round down the timestamp to the last 10th minute. For example, an event with timestamp header set to 11:54:34 AM, June 12, 2012 and ‘country’ header set to ‘india’ will evaluate to the partition (continent=’asia’,country=’india’,time=‘2012-06-12-11-50’. The serializer is configured to accept tab separated input containing three fields and to skip the second field.