Apache Flume Interview Questions

Apache Flume Interview Questions

What is Flume?

Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data. It has a simple and flexible architecture based on streaming data flows. It is robust and fault tolerant with tunable reliability mechanisms and many fail over and recovery mechanisms. It uses a simple extensible data model that allows for online analytic application.

What is Apache Flume?

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 source. Review this Flume use case to learn how Mozilla collects and Analyse the Logs using Flume and Hive.

Flume is a framework for populating Hadoop with data. Agents are populated throughout ones IT infrastructure – inside web servers, application servers and mobile devices, for example – to collect data and integrate it into Hadoop.

Which is the reliable channel in Flume to ensure that there is no data loss?

FILE Channel is the most reliable channel among the 3 channels JDBC, FILE and MEMORY.

How can Flume be used with HBase?

Apache Flume can be used with HBase using one of the two HBase sinks –

HBaseSink (org.apache.flume.sink.hbase.HBaseSink) supports secure HBase clusters and also the novel HBase IPC that was introduced in the version HBase 0.96.

AsyncHBaseSink (org.apache.flume.sink.hbase.AsyncHBaseSink) has better performance than HBase sink as it can easily make non-blocking calls to HBase.

Working of the HBaseSink –

In HBaseSink, a Flume Event is converted into HBase Increments or Puts. Serializer implements the HBaseEventSerializer which is then instantiated when the sink starts. For every event, sink calls the initialize method in the serializer which then translates the Flume Event into HBase increments and puts to be sent to HBase cluster.

Working of the AsyncHBaseSink-

AsyncHBaseSink implements the AsyncHBaseEventSerializer. The initialize method is called only once by the sink when it starts. Sink invokes the setEvent method and then makes calls to the getIncrements and getActions methods just similar to HBase sink. When the sink stops, the cleanUp method is called by the serializer.

What is an Agent?

A process that hosts flume components such as sources, channels and sinks, and thus has the ability to receive, store and forward events to their destination.

Is it possible to leverage real time analysis on the big data collected by Flume directly? If yes, then explain how?

Data from Flume can be extracted, transformed and loaded in real-time into Apache Solr servers usingMorphlineSolrSink.

What is a channel?

It stores events,events are delivered to the channel via sources operating within the agent.An event stays in the channel until a sink removes it for further transport.

Explain about the different channel types in Flume. Which channel type is faster?

The 3 different built in channel types available in Flume are-

MEMORY Channel – Events are read from the source into memory and passed to the sink.

JDBC Channel – JDBC Channel stores the events in an embedded Derby database.

FILE Channel –File Channel writes the contents to a file on the file system after reading the event from a source. The file is deleted only after the contents are successfully delivered to the sink.

MEMORY Channel is the fastest channel among the three however has the risk of data loss. The channel that you choose completely depends on the nature of the big data application and the value of each event.

Explain about the replication and multiplexing selectors in Flume.

Channel Selectors are used to handle multiple channels. Based on the Flume header value, an event can be written just to a single channel or to multiple channels. If a channel selector is not specified to the source then by default it is the Replicating selector. Using the replicating selector, the same event is written to all the channels in the source’s channels list. Multiplexing channel selector is used when the application has to send different events to different channels.

Does Apache Flume provide support for third party plug-ins?

Most of the data analysts use Apache Flume has plug-in based architecture as it can load data from external sources and transfer it to external destinations.

Does Apache Flume support third-party plugins ?

Yes, Flume has 100% plugin-based architecture, it can load and ships data from external sources to external destination which separately from Flume. SO that most of the bigdata analysis use this tool for screaming data.

Differentiate between FileSink and FileRollSink

The major difference between HDFS FileSink and FileRollSink is that HDFS File Sink writes the events into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) whereas File Roll Sink stores the events into the local file system.

Why we are using Flume?

Most often Hadoop developer use this too to get data from social media sites. Its developed by Cloudera for aggregating and moving very large amount if data. The primary use is to gather log files from different sources and asynchronously persist in the hadoop cluster.

What is FlumeNG ?

A real time loader for streaming your data into Hadoop. It stores data in HDFS and HBase. You’ll want to get started with FlumeNG, which improves on the original flume.

Explain what are the tools used in Big Data?

Tools used in Big Data includes

Hadoop

Hive

Pig

Flume

Mahout

Sqoop

Does Apache Flume provide support for third party plug-ins?

Most of the data analysts use Apache Flume has plug-in based architecture as it can load data from external sources and transfer it to external destinations.

What are the complicated steps in Flume configurations?

Flume can processing streaming data. so if started once, there is no stop/end to the process. asynchronously it can flows data from source to HDFS via agent. First of all agent should know individual components how they are connected to load data. so configuration is trigger to load streaming data. for example consumerkey, consumersecret accessToken and accessTokenSecret are key factor to download data from twitter.

What are Flume core components ?

Cource, Channels and sink are core components in Apache Flume. When Flume source receives event from externalsource, it stores the event in one or multiple channels. Flume channel is temporarily store and keep the event until’s consumed by the Flume sink. It act as Flume repository. Flume Sink removes the event from channel and put into an external repository like HDFS or Move to the next flume.

What are the Data extraction tools in Hadoop?

Sqoop can be used to transfer data between RDBMS and HDFS. Flume can be used to extract the streaming data from social media, web log etc and store it on HDFS.

Does Flume provide 100% reliability to the data flow?

Yes, Apache Flume provides end to end reliability because of its transactional approach in data flow.

Tell any two features of Flume?

Fume collects data efficiently, aggregate and moves large amount of log data from many different sources to centralized data store.

Flume is not restricted to log data aggregation and it can transport massive quantity of event data including but not limited to network traffic data, social-media generated data , email message na pretty much any data storage.