> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.operata.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# How Operata works

> Collectors emit signals, Operata stores them as observations on a contact, the insight engine flags what matters, and Customer Journey Trace links contacts across platforms.

Operata runs one pipeline in one direction: collectors emit signals, Operata stores them as observations against a contact, the insight engine derives insights, and Customer Journey Trace links contacts across platforms into one path. Three things flow in; an API and Amazon EventBridge expose the result.

## How it works

Three collectors feed Operata.

* The [Agent Experience Collector](/docs/collector-overview) is a browser extension. It emits signals for headset audio levels, network quality, microphone state, page focus, and softphone CTI events — the agent-side measurements no central service can produce.
* The [Cloud Collector](/docs/concepts-cloud-collector) runs in your AWS account. It reads Amazon Connect Contact Trace Records (CTRs) from Kinesis, applies your redaction policy, and forwards the result.
* The [Cloud Orchestrator](/docs/concepts-cloud-orchestrator) runs in your AWS account too. It runs synthetic Heartbeat checks and Virtual Agent calls against your contact-center instance.

Each collector emits [signals](/docs/concepts-signals-and-observations) — single timestamped measurements. Operata ingests a signal, correlates it with the contact it belongs to, applies redaction and validation, and persists the result as an observation. Signals flow; observations are stored. Downstream consumers read observations through the API or [EventBridge events](/docs/concepts-eventbridge) — never raw signals.

A [contact](/docs/concepts-contacts-and-interactions) is the per-platform record observations attach to: `Contact` in Amazon Connect, `Interaction` in NICE CXOne, `Conversation` in Genesys Cloud. The [insight engine](/docs/concepts-insights) reads the observations on each contact and writes an insight when a known pattern matches — audio one-way, packet loss, agent inactivity, and the rest of the [insights catalog](/docs/insights-catalog). [Customer Journey Trace](/docs/concepts-customer-journey-trace) sits above contacts: when one customer crosses more than one platform, each platform's contact is one span of a single journey.

Amazon [EventBridge](/docs/concepts-eventbridge) is the way out. Operata publishes contact-lifecycle, insight, and Heartbeat events to a partner event bus in your AWS account, and you route them with standard EventBridge rules — to Lambda, SQS, Step Functions, or an HTTP API destination.

```mermaid theme={null}
flowchart LR
    A[Agent Experience Collector] -->|signals| O[Operata ingestion]
    B[Cloud Collector] -->|signals| O
    C[Cloud Orchestrator] -->|signals| O
    O --> D[Observations on a Contact]
    D --> I[Insight engine]
    I --> R[Insights on a Contact]
    D --> J[Customer Journey Trace]
    R --> J
    D --> E[API + EventBridge events]
    R --> E
    J --> E
```

## Why Operata splits signals from observations

The split isolates the wire format from the storage format. Redaction, deduplication, late-arrival reconciliation, and per-account validation all happen between the two, so the value a collector reports is not the value a consumer reads. CTRs can land 5–20 minutes after a contact ends; storing observations means a query returns a coherent partial view that fills in as more signals arrive, instead of a stream of half-correlated events.

The collectors also run where the data lives — inside your AWS account, or in the agent's browser — so your redaction policy runs before any data crosses the boundary to Operata.

## Related

* [Signals and observations](/docs/concepts-signals-and-observations) — what each collector emits and how Operata stores it.
* [Contacts and interactions](/docs/concepts-contacts-and-interactions) — the per-platform record observations attach to.
* [Customer Journey Trace](/docs/concepts-customer-journey-trace) — how Operata links contacts across platforms.
* [Insights](/docs/concepts-insights) — the named detections Operata derives from observations.