isaacsam's avatar
isaacsam
Senior Member
2 years ago
Status:
New Idea

Displaying the data based on custom time zone or based on end user's device/browser timestamp

On the SmartBear AlertSite UI, instead of fixing the data timestamp to GMT, it would be better if we can configure the timestamp of the displayed data (Or) may be, the data can simply be displayed based on end user's device/browser timestamp.

 
 

2 Comments

  • You can update the Time Zone for the account, which would then display Dashboard and reporting data in the Time Zone you select rather than GMT. This is changed under Settings from the top right of the console - then Preferences on the left.

     
     
  • Yeah, but the problem with setting the timezone for the whole account is that, especially in today's modern work-from-home times, we have users in multiple timezones.  Having the timezone be static for all users just creates confusion.  It also effects the API timezone, which means, unless we set the whole account to display in UTC time, we can't use the AlertSite data in dashboarding tools like Grafana that require the data to be in UTC time.  But, if we set the account to output in UTC time, that means everyone that now uses the dashboard must manually subtract anywhere from 4 to 7 hours from the time they see based on what timezone they are in and whether it is currently daylight savings or not.  This is extremely confusing and makes working with the tool extremely cumbersome.

     

    It really should be setup to where all results are stored in UTC time (a longstanding industry standard.  And I do mean UTC, not GMT, as GMT is a deprecated standard and should not be used anymore) and that the time shown in the web console is solely based on the end-users' browser timezone and all results retrieved from the AlertSite API are in UTC time.  This is how nearly every monitoring tool and website I've used works.  Even SolarWind's web console, which is over 15 years old, has always worked this way. 

     

    But, even if the ability to display time based on end users' browser time isn't made available, at least the option to have API results returned in UTC time should be made available so that tools like Grafana or Dynatrace can retrieve results from the AlertSite API without having to have a script or custom plugin in between to modify the time.

     

    I went ahead and created a Feature Request for this as well:

    Please return all AlertSite API results in UTC tim... - SmartBear Community