# Consumers

Consumers provide an abstraction of various `Mainflux consumers`.
Mainflux consumer is a generic service that can handle received messages - consume them.
The message is not necessarily a Mainflux message - before consuming, Mainflux message can
be transformed into any valid format that specific consumer can understand. For example,
writers are consumers that can take a SenML or JSON message and store it.

Consumers are optional services and are treated as plugins. In order to
run consumer services, core services must be up and running.

For an in-depth explanation of the usage of `consumers`, as well as thorough
understanding of Mainflux, please check out the [official documentation][doc].

For more information about service capabilities and its usage, please check out
the [API documentation](https://api.mainflux.io/?urls.primaryName=consumers-notifiers-openapi.yml).

[doc]: https://docs.mainflux.io