Sources, channels, and sinks
The Flume agent's architecture can be viewed in this simple diagram. An input is called a source and an output is called a sink. A channel provides the glue between a source and a sink. All of these run inside a daemon called an agent.
Note
One should keep in mind the following things:
A source writes events to one or more channels.
A channel is the holding area as events are passed from a source to a sink.
A sink receives events from one channel only.
An agent can have many sources, channels, and sinks.
