Does timezone differences between Zabbix server and proxy matter?

[teab]

Hi!

Could, please, someone explain if different time zones on server and proxy intervenes with data gathering and processing? It is not mentioned in Zabbix documentation. Only thing mentioned that I could find is about maintenance periods - one time uses users timezone, recurring uses server timezone.

As far as I know in both, server and proxy, item values in history tables get saved by Epoch time. My assumption is that Zabbix should work without issues if server and proxy is in different time zones.

For example, both servers have same UTC time, but has assigned different time zones, server is one hour before proxy after time zones. Server - Europe/Oslo, proxy - Europe/Riga.

Zabbix version on both server and proxy - 6.0.21.

[dimir]

My assumption is that Zabbix should work without issues if server and proxy is in different time zones.

Correct. What you want though is synchronized time on all your hosts using NTP, this is a requirement.

[teab]

Tested it also on different setup, looks like there is issues if Zabbix proxy and server is on different time zones. Created https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBX-23541.

[MikeP]

I would also upvote this as a problem.
With distributed setup and target audience on multiple time zones it is impractical to run proxies in the same time zone as the central server.
Besides - demanding users to recalculate schedules manually (to respect time zone of target proxy / or vice a versa recalculate local time to UTC/whatever / manually track DST changes when they occur) - that feels like a caveat on Zabbix side.

In practice it appears great that proxy/agent 2 use local time zone when applying schedules - at least in our case where users are assigned to their proxies and can configure their schedules easily in their own time zone.
It is annoying though that queue stats are reported incorrectly.

//br Mike

[MikeP]

P.S.
Adding zabbix host Time Zone information somewhere in the header (in addition to clock/ns per item) to current JSON-based server-to-proxy / anything -to-agent - would be an easy start to bringing some clarity in handling time difference in zabbix