A Note About Time Zones

Depending on the configurable settings for the current entity, date fields may be displayed with associated time fields. If this is the case, the time fields include a time zone field. All times are saved in the database using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) — the current time at 0º longitude. This allows users in various time zones to log and view events accurately and easily.

For example, if an incident is created in Tucson, Arizona, and later referenced in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the 15-hour difference could cause confusion. The incident is created at 2:38 PM on March 9, 2021, in Tucson with an occurrence date of March 8, 2021 - 10:30 PM. These times are saved into the database as "2021-03-09 21:38" and "2021-03-09 05:30" respectively. Since Tucson is in time zone -7, 7 hours have been added to each date/time to get the UTC time. You can see that this changed the date as well as the time of the occurrence date. When redisplayed in Tucson, the date/times are adjusted by subtracting 7 hours.

If someone in Tucson ran a search for this incident, they could specify an occurrence date of March 8, 2021, with times between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM. However, if someone in Kuala Lumpur ran the same search, their results would not include this incident because their local time is in time zone +8. They could get the desired result by simply setting the occurrence date time zone for the query to Tucson's -7 time zone. If the user in Kuala Lumpur were then to edit the incident, because all information is saved as UTC, the information would be just as easy to find again in Tucson.

To change the default time zone for your user account, choose Options > Settings > User Information.