Clients can be anywhere, and you don't want them to have to be aware of the remote server local time zone to have to translate that to UTC or to your own local time zone. Everything being in UTC aids that because if you need to convert it to your local time, you only have the single offset to be aware of to put into your context. Mix in clients in different time zones, and standardizing on something such as UTC is critical.

Logging, realistically should just be an artifact of the localtime set on the machine when the process launches, and that is typically set for humans to relate it to their own local time.

Hope that makes sense,

-Julia

On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 12:34 PM kaqiu pi <thremes172@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I have a openstack cluster. And the local time of server is different from UTC.

I saw that the log date of openstack service is local time. But when I use the command line to query the openstack service status, time zone is UTC. Such as `opentack compute service list`, "Update At" is UTC.

In the email archive[1], I saw that there was a discussion earlier:
> i would guess it a deliberate design descisn to only store data information in utc format and leave it to the clinets to convert to local timezones if desired

But at that time it was just a guess, I would like to ask if this is the meaning of the original design, why the service use UTC instead of local time?

I would appreciate any kind of guidance or help.
Best wishes.

[1] https://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2021-June/022857.html