Telflo Docs

The canvas is a graph editor. Components are nodes, and connections are edges. A connected chain of receivers, processors, and exporters forms a pipeline.

Work on the canvas

Action	How
Add a component	Drag it from the palette onto the canvas.
Move a node	Drag the node.
Connect two nodes	Drag from a source node's output handle to a target node's input handle.
Select	Select a node or edge.
Multi-select	Shift-select multiple nodes.
Pan	Drag on empty canvas space.
Zoom	Scroll, or use the on-canvas controls.

Toolbar actions for the canvas:

Duplicate copies the selected nodes. Shortcut: Ctrl/Cmd+D.
Delete removes the selected nodes. Shortcut: Delete or Backspace.
Undo and Redo step through canvas changes. Shortcuts: Ctrl/Cmd+Z and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z.
Clear canvas removes all components.

Connection rules

Telflo enforces the collector's connection rules as you draw edges.

A receiver has outgoing connections only.
An exporter has incoming connections only.
A processor has incoming and outgoing connections. Several receivers can feed one processor, and one processor can feed several exporters.
A connector has both, in two different pipelines.
An extension has no connections.

Invalid connections are rejected or flagged. See Validation.

Pipelines

A pipeline carries one signal type through a chain of components. Telflo supports the three OpenTelemetry signal types and custom-named pipelines.

traces, metrics, and logs
Custom names, such as traces/production, metrics/staging, or logs/audit

Edges define pipeline membership

Pipelines are defined by the edges you draw, not by the nodes alone.

Each edge belongs to one pipeline.
A single node, such as a shared batch processor, can belong to several pipelines.
Each pipeline is color-coded on the canvas.

Connect pipelines with a connector

A connector is the exporter of one pipeline and the receiver of another. It can change the signal type in between: the spanmetrics connector ends a traces pipeline and starts a metrics pipeline. It can also keep the signal type: the forward connector merges several same-signal pipelines into one, or fans one pipeline out into many. Connecting forward across different signal types is a validation error.

The spanmetrics connector joins two pipelines: spans flow in from the traces pipeline, and request, error, and duration metrics flow out into the metrics pipeline.

Manage pipelines

Use the pipeline controls to create a pipeline and set its name, change a pipeline's color, toggle a pipeline's visibility, or delete a pipeline.

Connected components appear under service.pipelines in the generated YAML.

Next steps

Configure each component in the configuration panel. See Configuring components.

Canvas & pipelines