Question
How do timestamps on tickets work with Daylight Savings Time?
Answer
Zendesk stores all of its data in UTC time. Everything, including the API, and any emails or ticket events, has a hardcoded UTC timestamp attached to it.
The agent UI is designed to convert the hardcoded UTC timestamp to the user's current time zone. As such, tickets created prior to or after DST may appear to be off by an hour depending on when you look back on them.
For example, an agent in Pacific Time makes an update at 10 am on Friday. Daylight Savings Time changes over the weekend, and they check their update again on Monday. On Monday, the update will appear to be at 11 am. The update actually occurred at 18:00 UTC. On Friday, the agent was at UTC-8, but on Monday, they're at UTC-7. The underlying data did not change. Zendesk's display did.
This is expected behavior and the issue only exists within the agent UI. It is not present in the API which uses the hardcoded UTC timestamp or reporting which maintains the correct historical timestamp.
2 Comments
Hi Zendesk,
This is really bad when it comes to the customer's calculating their SLA's and comparing it to ours to see if the ticket met it or not. You should consider being able to add to the formula the daylight savings so that all dates and times are in sync if not what is the point of SLA's if the customers are going to argue this all the time.
This is what we are going through right now.
Please consider fixing this since it is a Bug and not a feature to be off by 1 hour! They have view of this through "My Activities" of the time created.
This is also an issue for our team. We often have to go back to old Support Tickets to help our dev teams when they write RCA (Root Cause Analysis) documents for urgent customer issues, like Outages. Because of the ticket time being changed in the interface, what I reported to Dev for timing ended up being wrong. We're now correcting the RCA, but just didn't even think to check, and we don't want to have misses like that with our customers. Is there any plan to change this?
Please sign in to leave a comment.