[exporter/file]

[djaglowski]

What happened?

Description

rotation settings were added in v0.60.0. Unfortunately, they are enabled by default, which was an undeclared breaking change.

I'm opening this issue to discuss whether the previous functionality should be restored.

Steps to Reproduce

Configure the file exporter without specifying rotation settings.

Expected Result

File rotation is not enabled.

Actual Result

File rotation is enabled.

Collector version

v0.60.0

Environment information

Environment

OS: (e.g., "Ubuntu 20.04")
Compiler(if manually compiled): (e.g., "go 14.2")

OpenTelemetry Collector configuration

No response

Log output

No response

Additional context

The intended design would have file rotation enabled only if the user specified at least rotation: in the config. However, if specified, related default settings would apply. This would allow users to enable rotation very easily without having to specify specific settings.

Since the behavior has already changed, the question should be asked - should it be corrected in the next version, to behave as described above? Alternately, should it stay ie. is there a strong case to be made that rotation should be enabled by default?

[djaglowski]

@atingchen, I'm curious your thoughts on this.

[atingchen]

@djaglowski Sorry for causing this breaking change.
When the amount of data exported by the user is small or only some data is exported each time, I think the performance of the rotation exporting a 100MB file by default is the same as before.
When the amount of data exported from user data is large or grows infinitely, the following problems may occur:

• Larger files are harder to manipulate.
• File systems run out of space.

For these reasons, I set rotation as the default.
In order to avoid problems that may be caused to users by the infinite growth of files, should we set rotation as default and provide a flag to disable it？

[djaglowski]

I am in favor of having rotation disabled by default. However, if possible, we should find a way to do this that does not require a flag. My ideal would be that it behaves like this:

file/no_rotation:
  path: ./foo

file/rotation_with_default_settings:
  path: ./foo
  rotation:

file/rotation_with_custom_settings:
  path: ./foo
  rotation:
    max_megabytes: 1234
    ...

[atingchen]

I'll open a PR to fix this.

[djaglowski]

Thanks @atingchen

[evan-bradley]

Closing as resolved via #14705.