OTLP exporter defaults to insecure connection

[MikeGoldsmith]

Describe your environment
When trying to configure the SDK to send telemetry to a backend, the default OTLP exporter behaviour is to send using an unsecured connection.

This is not intuitive behaviour and goes against the specification. The environment variables are different, but the intent is the *_INSECURE environment variables default to false, meaning a secure connection is used.

Two nice to have:

• update the SDKs environment variable usage to match the spec
• if no environment variable is set, determine whether a secure connection is required using the endpoint protocol (eg http:// = insecure, https:// = secure)

Steps to reproduce
Setup SDK to send telemetry to an endpoint that required a secure connection (eg https://).

What is the expected behavior?
Telemetry successfully be exported to the configured endpoint.

What is the actual behavior?
Telemetry is not exported with an invalid protocol error. To get it to work, the SDK required the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_SSL_ENABLE set to true.

[lalitb]

Also, need to change the env variable used from OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_SSL_ENABLE to OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE

[github-actions]

This issue was marked as stale due to lack of activity.

[marcalff]

@MikeGoldsmith

Thanks for the report.

I think this is addressed by:

• [EXPORTER] GRPC endpoint scheme should take precedence over OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_INSECURE #2060 for the GRPC endpoint protocol (http vs https)
• [EXPORTER] Boolean environment variables not parsed per the spec #1982 for using *_INSECURE environment variables

Closing the issue as resolved.

Please reopen and comment if something is still not working properly.