Different uses of timeout on exporters

[mx-psi]

The exporterhelper includes a timeout mechanism, which is enabled by default (see #4455 for more on that), and sets a timeout for the whole Consume[Metrics/Traces/Logs] function call. Several exporters in contrib however rely on Go's HTTP client timeout instead (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), while still using the same timeout option.

This is an issue to discuss:

1. If a different option name should be used for these exporters use case,
2. if we decide that using the same name is okay, should these exporters avoid using exporterhelper.TimeoutSettings and use a custom timeout field instead?

This was originally brought up by @codeboten at open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib#6414 (comment). For context, in our exporter we don't rely on the global timeout mechanism because we need to do several network calls on a single Consume call and want to timeout on each specific call instead.

[jpkrohling]

@MovieStoreGuy, this would be a good entry to add to the doc you are creating.

[MovieStoreGuy]

Yeah, I remember seeing this in the kafka exporter and thought it was strange.

I do think I like the idea of option 1 though, having OperationTimeout and NetworkRequestTimeout would help clarify things as I do think each has a purpose and conflating the two would almost require User's to read and understand the setup code.

[jpkrohling]

@codeboten, are you able to summarize what was discussed yesterday? I had Zoom problems and missed part of the discussion.

[MovieStoreGuy]

Hey @codeboten ,

Was there more to add to this please?