Define proper environment variable support for different transports

open-telemetry / opentelemetry-specification

Specifications for OpenTelemetry

https://opentelemetry.io

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Define proper environment variable support for different transports #1529

Open carlosalberto opened 3 years ago

carlosalberto commented 3 years ago

Historically we have tried to define transport configuration for exporters (OTLP, Jaeger, Zipkin). We should have a proper, clean, clear definition for all of them:

General configuration
Default value (if any) and whether we can define one across languages
Should we use this for agents/all-in-one packages only?

Related to #1336

anuraaga commented 3 years ago

Should we use this for agents/all-in-one packages only?

This seems like it applies to all variables and not just these ones?

carlosalberto commented 3 years ago

Well, I'm specifically talking about the fact that in some languages there are packages per each export-format/transport, i.e. jaeger/thrift, jaeger/grpc, jaeger/udp, etc. So unless you offer a package that has all of them, defining the Jaeger transport through an environment variable doesn't make sense.

Or maybe you meant something else? :)

anuraaga commented 3 years ago

Hmm - I guess it's not all of them but we have many variables like OTEL_PROPAGATORS / SAMPLER which I guess are similar. I figured by default the variables only applied to all-in-one type stuff but maybe wrong, would be worth clarifying that for other variables too :)