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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