We are moving our on-prem Orion server (single server with SQL Server installed plus the entire Orion application stack) into the cloud and leadership wants us to use Azure SQL or Azure Managed Instance.
We were leaning towards Azure SQL, however, this statement raised some eyebrows:
Make sure the server hosting your Orion server is using Central European Time (UTC). Azure SQL uses UTC and if your settings are different, you might experience issues with polled data.
After reading this, the questions started coming:
- Do we switch our on-prem Orion and SQL server to UTC before migrating the SQL data to Azure SQL? (We think the answer is "no")
- If the new server hosting the Orion applications is UTC, how will the times be displayed to end users browsing the web site? Will everything be UTC? (e.g, on the node details page, will the "Last Boot" and "Next Poll" times be UTC? What about performance analyzer, will the analysis information show UTC? What about alerts and alert information?)
- We already have a test server (with 2020.2.5) set for UTC that is running SQL Server locally with all the orion apps and it appears that performance analyzer shows the browser time, but the node details shows UTC. This inconsistency is a problem :-( .
- We don't really care what the server or database times are as long as the webpages are consistent and preferrably show all times in the timezone of the web browser.
Maybe this inconsistency is already telling us we're going to likely have issues and instead we should use a SQL Managed Instance? Or are there others out there using Azure SQL and have been able to get all the web pages to show the correct local time?
Thank you~!
