What is the benefit change cloud server time to local timezone

Solution 1:

You should set all of your servers to greenwich mean time so that they are all in sync. If you have some servers set to local time zone, then things may behave in unexpected ways, and you may experience unexpected behaviors.

One major thing that is affected by time zones is logging. If your servers are not all set on greenwich mean time, then the logging date tags will all be mismatched; if you are sending these to a centralized log collector, then you will introduce difficulties in troubleshooting and issue tracking.

Solution 2:

In general:

it is easiest for ordinary people to see the same time on their servers as they see on the watch on their wrist and the clock on their wall.

That makes it intuitive when they get questions such as: "yesterday around lunch time something broke in system B."

But when the servers are used and managed by people in different time zones and with daylight savings time changes that don't happen everywhere (at the same time) that tends to become a mess.

When the admin is at their desk in Paris on CEST (UTC +2), the database is in London on BST (UTC +1) the app server is in New York on EDT (UTC -4) and the user complaining is from the Los Angeles branch on PDT (UTC -7) and you need to correlate events ... Things get complicated when all systems only record events in local time.

Then it becomes easier when all servers are at least on the same time zone and the admin only needs to do a single date/time conversion.

Lunch for Alice in LA was around 21:00 CEST and the admin who keeps all servers on Paris time only needs to looks for events surrounding that time.

You would think that as long as all systems are on the same time zone, which time zone you select wouldn't matter, except ... Many time zones come with daylight savings times. That means either a 1 hour gap in logs or overlapping log entries at certain dates.

UTC doesn't have daylight savings time so that makes a better choice.

Many systems already use UTC internally and only in their UI will they convert the UTC timestamps to whatever time zone the user prefers.