Time Zones

Because SSD's main purpose is to provide transparency into the status of mission critical systems, it is critical that dates, times, and most importantly, timezones, are set correctly.

When SSD is initially installed, the SSD timezone must be set to the timezone of the server running SSD and the server's local time should be set correctly.  This allows the precise storage of dates/times with all events.  

To determine the timezone of your server, execute the date command:

# date
Sat Jun 15 15:23:25 PDT 2013

In this example, the timezone is PDT, or US Pacific time.  To set SSD to use this timezone, edit /opt/ssd-local/local_settings.py and set the TIME_ZONE variable.  If you change this variable, you must restart the SSD Apache server:

# Set the timezone to match the server's timezone
TIME_ZONE = 'US/Pacific'

A full listing of timezones that can be used in the local_settings.py file can be viewed here (TZ column): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

Once the timezone is set properly, any SSD webpages that are visited will use this timezone when displaying events or setting events.

SSD users may set their own timezone (for example, your operation is based in San Francisco but you have users in India) in the SSD footer using the 'Change Timezone' drop-down selector.  Once a user sets their timezone, all dates/times will be displayed in this timezone (but the server and DJango timezones must still be set properly).  The user set timezone is stored in a cookie, so it will need to be reset in different browsers, or if cookies are cleared.