Alloy "Test Mode" / "draft mode"

[Jayclifford345]

Request

To have a -test or --draft flag for Alloy which allows you to launch Alloy's UI with a partially complete config. This would allow users to visually build their pipeline in stages and understand how components are connecting without needing to provide a fully complete config. If a component has not been created this would leave some form of indicator within the graph that this named receiver is missing.

Within --test mode you could always take this one step further and have Alloy run through each step of the pipeline without actually exporting the data from Alloy. Thus allowing you to use the new "live debugging" feature to its full effect.

Use case

When teaching users the concepts of Alloy one of the most important features is the Alloy UI itself. However for users to run Alloy and see the components within the UI they must have all of the components mentioned defined otherwise Alloy will fail to load the config. For many users, they will start from ingest and move through the pipeline step by step until they reach the output. To do this in Alloy and use the UI you would have to go backwards to not cause dependency issues. This feature flag would allow users to run partially built configs and understand what they need to do next as well as understand gaps in the pipeline. as well