I 'm using Hadoop 2.2 as a sink in Flume 1.4 If you try to use HDFS then you might get below exception:- [ERROR] HDFSEventSink. process failed Exception in thread "SinkRunner-PollingRunner-DefaultSinkProcessor" java.lang.VerifyError: class org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.protocol.proto.ClientNamenodeProtocolProtos$RecoverLeaseRequestProto overrides final method getUnknownFields.()Lcom/google/protobuf/UnknownFieldSet; at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:791) at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142) at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:449) Above Exception is due to incompatiblity of protobuf libraries. So, a possible solution that, I followed is to rename 2 Jar files in /opt/ds/app/flume-1.4.0/lib >protobuf-java-2.4.1.jar-1 >guava-10.0.1.jar-1 Renaming this 2 Jars will cause Flume not to load it and