Investigate Stock OTel Configuration Experience

[bdarfler]

What is the Stock OTel Configuration experience with cmd line args, env vars, appsettings.json? Do they conflict? Is there a precedence hierarchy?

The intention here is to have this investigation inform what if any changes we would like to make to the beestro.

[robbkidd]

For environment variable configuration of stock OTel dotnet, I've had to use a naming convention that .NET uses to override appsettings (example: export Otlp__Endpoint="https://api.honeycomb.io:443") instead of the standard OTLP exporter spec environment variables (example: export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://api.honeycomb.io:443"). The only place I see the spec'd environment variable used in stock OTel dotnet is in the integration test where the test itself looks up the value of this environment variable to pass it to an OtlpTraceExporter constructor. Stock OTel libraries themselves don't appear to use the spec'd environment variables.

Update: Literally hours ago, a PR opened to work the open issue add support for the OTLP Exporter environment variables from the spec.

[robbkidd]

And the PR merged with support for a few, but not all of the OTLP Exporter spec's environment variables.