## Overview

**Particle Horizon Collector** is a purpose-built OpenTelemetry Collector distribution designed to provide a flexible, extensible platform for collecting, processing, and exporting infrastructure, application, and operational telemetry.

It combines the standard OpenTelemetry Collector ecosystem with proprietary Particle Horizon components, allowing organisations to deploy a single telemetry agent capable of supporting both conventional observability workloads and specialised data sources.

## Architecture

Particle Horizon Collector is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector architecture and follows its modular pipeline model:

**Receivers → Processors → Exporters**

Receivers ingest telemetry from systems and applications, processors transform or enrich that telemetry, and exporters forward the resulting data to observability platforms or other destinations.

The `pho-collector` distribution includes a broad selection of upstream OpenTelemetry components alongside Particle Horizon-specific extensions. This allows the same Collector installation to handle standard OTLP telemetry, infrastructure monitoring, cloud integrations, log and metric processing, and specialist Particle Horizon data collection.