Skip to main content
A signal is a single measurement a collector emits in flight; an observation is the persisted Operata record that ties one or more signals to a contact. Signals flow; observations are stored.

​
How it works

Each of the three collectors emits a different class of signal.
  • The Agent Experience Collector emits signals for headset audio levels, network quality, microphone state, page focus, and softphone CTI events — the agent-side measurements no central service can see.
  • The Cloud Collector emits signals derived from Contact Trace Records (CTRs), Contact Lens, and contact-flow logs.
  • The Cloud Orchestrator emits signals from each synthetic Heartbeat run.
A signal is small, structured, and timestamped. It becomes meaningful only when joined to the contact it belongs to. The lifecycle runs in three stages. A collector emits a signal. Operata ingests the signal, joins it to the contact, and persists it as part of an observation. Downstream consumers — the dashboard, EventBridge events, and the contact endpoints — read observations, never raw signals. Two signals from two collectors covering the same moment of the same contact land as one observation with two contributing sources.

​
Why Operata stores observations, not signals

The split keeps the wire format separate from the storage format. Redaction, deduplication, late-arrival reconciliation, and per-tenant validation all run between the two. The value a collector reports is not the value a consumer reads: a signal can be dropped, deferred, or merged; an observation is the post-processing result a consumer can rely on. The split also makes the data model honest about latency. Some signals arrive within seconds; Amazon Connect CTRs in particular can lag the contact end by minutes. Storing observations means a query for a recent contact returns a coherent partial view that fills in as more signals arrive, instead of a stream of half-correlated events.