# Open-telemetry (otel) Collector

Brief history:

- Firstly, there is an open-telemetry specification.
- Secondly, there is an open-telemetry collector which implements the data processing part of the specification.
- Thirdly, there are some third-party companies(like AWS) who modify the official open-telemetry collector and announce their own distro of open-telemetry collector.
- Our pipeline is based on AWS distro and official otel collector.

The basic idea of otel collector is a streaming pipline engine. The data in pipeline can be metrics, traces, logs, or any other data.

Third party vendor can implement their own pipeline components, namely receiver, processor, and exporter, to encapsulate their own business logic.

## Development prior knowledge

Please read through these two docs first:

- [Official otel collector guide](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/)
- [AWS distro of otel collector](https://aws-otel.github.io/docs/introduction). 
  AWS distro is based on the official otel collector, with additional ec2 startup logic and selected third-party components.