• It stores events; events are delivered to the channel by means of sources operating within the agent.
• An event remains in the channel until a sink removes it for further transport.

• MEMORY Channel – Events are study from the source into memory and passed to the sink.
• JDBC Channel – It stores the events in an embedded Derby database.
• FILE Channel – It writes the contents to a file on the file system after reading the event from a source. The file is erased only after the contents are successfully delivered to the sink.

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