Time Zone Indicators

OK people... For all of us that work for companies that cross multiple time zones, it is time to breath new life into the age-old time zone conversation.

Back in 2004 @dimonet posted Feature Request - TIME ZONES. More recently, in 2012, XM07535 was able to drum-up 237 votes for and about a month later I started the conversation Local Time Field. While these efforts and my personal conversations with SolarWinds have started the ball rolling in the right direction, I think we need to re-visit the topic here in the community. And, I have a new suggestion.

"the ball rolling in the right direction" refers to efforts SW has made to standardize timestamps in some parts of the database and also to base some timestamps on a user's device's time zone. However, and I have not checked since our most recent upgrades back in November, the move has actually caused more confusion. You don't always know if a timestamp you are looking at is based on your time zone, the time zone of the Orion server or the time zone of the Node being monitored. This can get confusing.

Where it becomes even more confusing is if you take a screenshot of, let's say a Message Center search, and send it to someone half way around the world. Maybe this person doesn't know who you are or what time zone you are in so now they have no real way of deciphering what you sent. Even worse if they cannot get into Orion and perform the same search in their own time zone.

We just started working with a vendor who has added a time zone drop-down menu to the top of each page that contains timestamps. By default this time zone setting is to the current user's profile time zone but the user can change that value to any other time zone and view all timestamps from that perspective. My immediate thoughts when I saw this drew me right back here and to thinking how beneficial that would be.

So here is my feature request...

In the database, set all timestamps to GMT. No matter if they are Orion server generated or timestamps obtained from the Node itself.
Provide a time zone setting in user profiles.
Add a user customizable time zone drop-down menu to the title bar near the notifications and log out options and set it, by default, to the user's time zone.
When the user changes the value in this drop-down, redraw the page to adjust all timestamps on the page to that new time zone.

VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!!! Let's get this done as I could definitely use it now!!!

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Comments

jlhartsock

I would think that this would be embarrassing at this point that as an industry leading tool, browser adjusted times display isn't implemented already. My current deployment serves folks across four timezones and we struggle with this constantly. You have my VOTE!

That being said, I'm writing this comment at 8:29 AM ET and even thwack doesn't recognize browser time.

skip.taylor

In addition to allowing automatic timezone setting on the client we should have the ability to change the time zone so we can provide a report to users in different time zones. The recipient of any report needs to see it in their time zone. I can't believe how lacking this product is in Time Zone support. Additionally we need to be able to provide reports on devices in multiple time zones filtered on business hours. A single report for these kinds of metrics would be very helpful.

sander_franken

This would indeed be very nice and is exactly one of the first questions I got while doing trainings yesterday with our Support team in preparation of going live next week.

pkian

To make this even looking worse and more embarrassing than it was for Solarwinds, on the new release we upgraded to, 2020.2, some of the data started written into DB using UTC timezone after upgrade and messed up historical graphs all together.

We have an open escalated case but we are at the mercy of their developers now.

cmatrask

Yes, please we need this. This would help with our Support Teams - some of us have sites all over the USA or Internationally. And our support teams are also international such as Chennai.

alok.malvi

Still no update? 2 devices configured with the same NTP has their timestap for data as current and UTC. How does it get decided? All my pollers, DB and web server in same time zone. Still this discrepancy. Ingesting in Splunk is now a mess and management is having second thoughts on the tool

Mike_Lomax

@dc4networks , you are correct in your message to me that the links in my posting here don't work. Some of those are as old as 20-years and SolarWinds has changed platforms several times since then. While some links will undoubtedly not work, the concept is still the same today and SolarWinds has continued to not address the need over those past 20-years. If they haven't until now, they likely will not in the future. But, all of the up-votes do help. However, most of the people that even paid attention to these posts are no longer with the company, so we'll see.