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Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop
Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop

Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop: If your role includes moving datasets into Hadoop, this book will help you do it more efficiently using Apache Flume. From installation to customization, it's a complete step-by-step guide on making the service work for you.

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Product Details

Publication date : Jul 16, 2013
Length 108 pages
Edition : 1st Edition
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782167914
Vendor :
Apache
Category :
Data
Languages :
Java (Intermediate)
Concepts :
Data Processing
Tools :
Apache Flume (Beginner) , Hadoop (Intermediate)
Table of content icon View table of contents Preview book icon Preview Book

Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop

Chapter 1. Overview and Architecture

If you are reading this book, chances are you are swimming in mountains of data. Creating mountains of data has become very easy, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, digital cameras and camera phones, YouTube, Google, and just about anything else you can think of connected to the Internet. As a provider of a website, 10 years ago, your application logs were only used to help you troubleshoot your website. Today, that same data can provide valuable insight into your business and customers if you know how to pan gold out of your river of data.

Furthermore, since you are reading this book, you are also aware that Hadoop was created to solve (partially) the problem of sifting through mountains of data. Of course, this only works if you can reliably load your Hadoop cluster with data for your data scientists to pick apart.

Getting data in and out of Hadoop (in this case, the Hadoop File System (HDFS)) isn't hard—it is just a simple command as follows:

% hadoop fs --put data.csv .

This works great when you have all your data neatly packaged and ready to upload.

But your website is creating data all the time. How often should you batch load data to HDFS? Daily? Hourly? Whatever processing period you choose, eventually somebody always asks, "can you get me the data sooner?" What you really need is a solution that can deal with streaming logs/data.

Turns out you aren't alone in this need. Cloudera, a provider of professional services for Hadoop as well as their own distribution of Hadoop, saw this need over and over while working with their customers. Flume was created to meet this need and create a standard, simple, robust, flexible, and extensible tool for data ingestion into Hadoop.

Flume 0.9

Flume was first introduced in Cloudera's CDH3 Distribution in 2011. It consisted of a federation of worker daemons (agents) configured from a centralized master (or masters) via Zookeeper (a federated configuration and coordination system). From the master you could check agent status in a Web UI, as well as push out configuration centrally from the UI or via a command line shell (both really communicating via Zookeeper to the worker agents).

Data could be sent in one of the three modes, namely, best effort (BE), disk failover (DFO), and end-to-end (E2E). The masters were used for the end-to-end (E2E) mode acknowledgements and multi-master configuration never really matured so usually you had only one master making it a central point of failure for E2E data flows. Best effort is just what it sounds like—the agent would try and send the data, but if it couldn't, the data would be discarded. This mode is good for things like metrics where gaps can easily be tolerated, as new data is just a second away. Disk failover mode stores undeliverable data to the local disk (or sometimes a local database) and keeps retrying until the data can be delivered to the next recipient in your data flow. This is handy for those planned (or unplanned) outages as long as you have sufficient local disk space to buffer the load.

In June of 2011, Cloudera moved control of the Flume project to the Apache foundation. It came out of incubator status a year later in 2012. During that incubation year, work had already begun to refactor Flume under the Star Trek Themed tag, Flume-NG (Flume the Next Generation).

Flume 1.X (Flume-NG)

There were many reasons to why Flume was refactored. If you are interested in the details you can read about it at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLUME-728. What started as a refactoring branch eventually became the main line of development as Flume 1.X.

The most obvious change in Flume 1.X is that the centralized configuration master/masters and Zookeeper are gone. The configuration in Flume 0.9 was overly verbose and mistakes were easy to make. Furthermore, centralized configuration was really outside the scope of Flume's goals. Centralized configuration was replaced with a simple on-disk configuration file (although the configuration provider is pluggable so that it can be replaced). These configuration files are easily distributed using tools such as cf-engine, chef, and puppet. If you are using a Cloudera Distribution, take a look at Cloudera Manager to manage your configurations—their licensing was recently changed to lift the node limit so it may be an attractive option for you. Be sure you don't manage these configurations manually or you'll be editing those files manually forever.

Another major difference in Flume 1.X is that the reading of input data and the writing of output data are now handled by different worker threads (called Runners). In Flume 0.9, the input thread also did the writing to the output (except for failover retries). If the output writer was slow (rather than just failing outright), it would block Flume's ability to ingest data. This new asynchronous design leaves the input thread blissfully unaware of any downstream problem.

The version of Flume covered in this book is 1.3.1 (current at the time of this book's writing).

The problem with HDFS and streaming data/logs

HDFS isn't a real filesystem, at least not in the traditional sense, and many of the things we take for granted with normal filesystems don't apply here, for example being able to mount it. This makes getting your streaming data into Hadoop a little more complicated.

In a regular Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) style filesystem, if you open a file and write data, it still exists on disk before the file is closed. That is, if another program opens the same file and starts reading, it will get the data already flushed by the writer to disk. Furthermore, if that writing process is interrupted, any portion that made it to disk is usable (it may be incomplete, but it exists).

In HDFS the file exists only as a directory entry, it shows as having zero length until the file is closed. This means if data is written to a file for an extended period without closing it, a network disconnect with the client will leave you with nothing but an empty file for all your efforts. This may lead you to the conclusion that it would be wise to write small files so you can close them as soon as possible.

The problem is Hadoop doesn't like lots of tiny files. Since the HDFS metadata is kept in memory on the NameNode, the more files you create, the more RAM you'll need to use. From a MapReduce prospective, tiny files lead to poor efficiency. Usually, each mapper is assigned a single block of a file as input (unless you have used certain compression codecs). If you have lots of tiny files, the cost of starting the worker processes can be disproportionally high compared to the data it is processing. This kind of block fragmentation also results in more mapper tasks increasing the overall job run times.

These factors need to be weighed when determining the rotation period to use when writing to HDFS. If the plan is to keep the data around for a short time, then you can lean towards the smaller file size. However, if you plan on keeping the data for very long time, you can either target larger files or do some periodic cleanup to compact smaller files into fewer larger files to make them more MapReduce friendly. After all, you only ingest the data once, but you might run a MapReduce job on that data hundreds or thousands of times.

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.

Flume events

The basic payload of data transported by Flume is called an event. An event is composed of zero or more headers and a body.

The headers are key/value pairs that can be used to make routing decisions or carry other structured information (such as the timestamp of the event or hostname of the server where the event originated). You can think of it as serving the same function as HTTP headers—a way to pass additional information that is distinct from the body.

The body is an array of bytes that contains the actual payload. If your input is comprised of tailed logfiles, the array is most likely a UTF-8 encoded String containing a line of text.

Flume may add additional headers automatically (for example, when a source adds the hostname where the data is sourced or creating an event's timestamp), but the body is mostly untouched unless you edit it en-route using interceptors.

Interceptors, channel selectors, and sink processors

An interceptor is a point in your data flow where you can inspect and alter Flume events. You can chain zero or more interceptors after a source creates an event or before a sink sends the event wherever it is destined. If you are familiar with the AOP Spring Framework, it is similar to a MethodInterceptor. In Java Servlets it is similar to a ServletFilter. Here's an example of what using four chained interceptors on a source might look like:

Channel selectors are responsible for how data moves from a source to one or more channels. Flume comes packaged with two channel selectors, which cover most use cases you might have, although you can write your own if needed. A replicating channel selector (the default) simply puts a copy of the event into each channel assuming you have configured more than one. In contrast, a multiplexing channel selector can write to different channels depending on certain header information. Combined with Interceptor logic, this duo forms the foundation for routing input to different channels.

Finally, a sink processor is the mechanism by which you can create failover paths for your sinks or load balance events across multiple sinks from a channel.

Tiered data collection (multiple flows and/or agents)

You can chain your Flume agents depending on your particular use case. For example, you may want to insert an agent in a tiered fashion to limit the number of clients trying to connect directly to your Hadoop cluster. More likely your source machines don't have sufficient disk space to deal with a prolonged outage or maintenance window, so you create a tier with lots of disk space between your sources and your Hadoop cluster.

In the following diagram you can see there are two places data is created (on the left) and two final destinations for the data (the HDFS and ElasticSearch cloud bubbles on the right). To make things more interesting, let's say one of the machines generates two kinds of data (let's call them square and triangle data). You can see in the lower-left agent we use a multiplexing channel selector to split the two kinds of data into different channels. The rectangle channel is then routed to the agent in the upper-right corner (along with the data coming from the upper-left agent). The combined volume of events is written together in HDFS in datacenter 1. Meanwhile the triangle data is sent to the agent that writes to ElasticSearch in datacenter 2. Keep in mind that the data transformations can occur after any source or before any sink. How all of these components can be used to build complicated data workflows will become clear as the book proceeds.

Summary

In this chapter we discussed the problem that Flume is attempting to solve; getting data into your Hadoop cluster for data processing in an easily configured and reliable way. We also discussed the Flume agent and its logical components including: events, sources, channel selectors, channels, sink processors, and sinks.

The next chapter will cover these in more detail, specifically the most commonly used implementations of each. Like all good open source projects, almost all of these components are extensible if the bundled ones don't do what you need them to do.

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Page 1 of 7

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Key benefits

  • Integrate Flume with your data sources
  • Transcode your data en-route in Flume
  • Route and separate your data using regular expression matching
  • Configure failover paths and load-balancing to remove single points of failure
  • Utilize Gzip Compression for files written to HDFS

Description

Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data. Its main goal is to deliver data from applications to Apache Hadoop's HDFS. It has a simple and flexible architecture based on streaming data flows. It is robust and fault tolerant with many failover and recovery mechanisms. Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop covers problems with HDFS and streaming data/logs, and how Flume can resolve these problems. This book explains the generalized architecture of Flume, which includes moving data to/from databases, NO-SQL-ish data stores, as well as optimizing performance. This book includes real-world scenarios on Flume implementation. Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop starts with an architectural overview of Flume and then discusses each component in detail. It guides you through the complete installation process and compilation of Flume. It will give you a heads-up on how to use channels and channel selectors. For each architectural component (Sources, Channels, Sinks, Channel Processors, Sink Groups, and so on) the various implementations will be covered in detail along with configuration options. You can use it to customize Flume to your specific needs. There are pointers given on writing custom implementations as well that would help you learn and implement them. By the end, you should be able to construct a series of Flume agents to transport your streaming data and logs from your systems into Hadoop in near real time.

What you will learn

Understand the Flume architecture Download and install open source Flume from Apache Discover when to use a memory or file-backed channel Understand and configure the Hadoop File System (HDFS) sink Learn how to use sink groups to create redundant data flows Configure and use various sources for ingesting data Inspect data records and route to different or multiple destinations based on payload content Transform data en-route to Hadoop Monitor your data flows

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Product Details

Publication date : Jul 16, 2013
Length 108 pages
Edition : 1st Edition
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782167914
Vendor :
Apache
Category :
Data
Languages :
Java (Intermediate)
Concepts :
Data Processing
Tools :
Apache Flume (Beginner) , Hadoop (Intermediate)

Table of Contents

15 Chapters
Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop
Credits Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Credits
About the Author Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
About the Author
About the Reviewers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
www.PacktPub.com
Preface Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Preface
Overview and Architecture Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Overview and Architecture
Flume 0.9
Flume 1.X (Flume-NG)
The problem with HDFS and streaming data/logs
Sources, channels, and sinks
Flume events
Summary
Flume Quick Start Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Flume Quick Start
Downloading Flume
Flume configuration file overview
Starting up with "Hello World"
Summary
Channels Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Channels
Memory channel
File channel
Summary
Sinks and Sink Processors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Sinks and Sink Processors
HDFS sink
Compression codecs
Event serializers
Sink groups
Summary
Sources and Channel Selectors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Sources and Channel Selectors
The problem with using tail
The exec source
The spooling directory source
Syslog sources
Channel selectors
Summary
Interceptors, ETL, and Routing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Interceptors, ETL, and Routing
Interceptors
Tiering data flows
Routing
Summary
Monitoring Flume Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Monitoring Flume
Monitoring the agent process
Monitoring performance metrics
Summary
There Is No Spoon – The Realities of Real-time Distributed Data Collection Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
There Is No Spoon – The Realities of Real-time Distributed Data Collection
Transport time versus log time
Time zones are evil
Capacity planning
Considerations for multiple data centers
Compliance and data expiry
Summary
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index

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Authors (2)

Profile icon Kevin A. McGrail
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Profile icon Steven Hoffman
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Steve Hoffman has 32 years of experience in software development, ranging from embedded software development to the design and implementation of large-scale, service-oriented, object-oriented systems. For the last 5 years, he has focused on infrastructure as code, including automated Hadoop and HBase implementations and data ingestion using Apache Flume. Steve holds a BS in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS in computer science from DePaul University. He is currently a senior principal engineer at Orbitz Worldwide (http://orbitz.com/). More information on Steve can be found at http://bit.ly/bacoboy and on Twitter at @bacoboy. This is the first update to Steve's first book, Apache Flume: Distributed Log Collection for Hadoop, Packt Publishing.
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  3. You will have a choice of replacement or refund of the problem items.(damaged, defective or incorrect)
  4. Once Customer Care Team confirms that you will be refunded, you should receive the refund within 10 to 12 working days.
  5. If you are only requesting a refund of one book from a multiple order, then we will refund you the appropriate single item.
  6. Where the items were shipped under a free shipping offer, there will be no shipping costs to refund.

On the off chance your printed book arrives damaged, with book material defect, contact our Customer Relation Team on customercare@packt.com within 14 days of receipt of the book with appropriate evidence of damage and we will work with you to secure a replacement copy, if necessary. Please note that each printed book you order from us is individually made by Packt's professional book-printing partner which is on a print-on-demand basis.

What tax is charged? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Currently, no tax is charged on the purchase of any print book (subject to change based on the laws and regulations). A localized VAT fee is charged only to our European and UK customers on eBooks, Video and subscriptions that they buy. GST is charged to Indian customers for eBooks and video purchases.

What payment methods can I use? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

You can pay with the following card types:

  1. Visa Debit
  2. Visa Credit
  3. MasterCard
  4. PayPal
What is the delivery time and cost of print books? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Shipping Details

USA:

'

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the US within 10-15 business days

Premium: Trackable Delivery to most addresses in the US within 3-8 business days

UK:

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 7-9 business days.
Shipments are not trackable

Premium: Trackable delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 3-4 business days!
Add one extra business day for deliveries to Northern Ireland and Scottish Highlands and islands

EU:

Premium: Trackable delivery to most EU destinations within 4-9 business days.

Australia:

Economy: Can deliver to P. O. Boxes and private residences.
Trackable service with delivery to addresses in Australia only.
Delivery time ranges from 7-9 business days for VIC and 8-10 business days for Interstate metro
Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

India:

Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela