# Receivers, Processors, Exporters — OpenTelemetry

Source: https://www.skillbyai.com/en/opentelemetry/c-components

> Building blocks of pipelines.

## Pipelines per signal

The Collector is built from components. **Receivers** accept data (OTLP, Prometheus scraping, Jaeger, Zipkin, filelog, host metrics, Kafka). **Processors** transform it (batching, memory limiting, filtering, attribute changes, sampling, Kubernetes metadata enrichment). **Exporters** send it to backends (OTLP, Prometheus, Kafka, vendor exporters, debug). **Connectors** join pipelines, and **extensions** add capabilities such as health checks. A **pipeline** wires receivers, processors and exporters for one signal type. The core distribution has fewer components; the contrib distribution has many more, and you can build a custom one.

## A telemetry pipeline

The Collector receives telemetry, processes it and exports it, decoupling applications from backends.

![Three ideas: pipeline components, configuration, deployment patterns.](assets/figures/opentelemetry/section-5-map.svg) — Figure 5.1 — Components, configuration and deployment.

## A mail sorting centre

Letters arrive at different entrances (receivers), are sorted, stamped and bundled (processors), and leave in vans to different cities (exporters).

## Check which distribution you run

A component in an example may exist only in the contrib distribution; the core image will reject the configuration.

**Quiz:** Which Collector component type transforms or filters data?

- [ ] Receiver
- [x] Processor
- [ ] Exporter
- [ ] Extension

*Answer:* Processor. Receivers in, processors transform, exporters out.