Which time zone does Insights use?

Question

Which time zone does Insights use?

Answer

In Insights, there are three different time zones that apply in different situations:

• Your local time
• Any times displayed in the interface, like the data sync times under the Manage tab.
• Private emails that are scheduled directly from a dashboard.
• Your Support account's default time zone
• Date attributes in reports. If you filter for a certain date, Insights will display results from midnight to midnight of the account's time zone.
• Daily sync time for Professional accounts.
• Pacific Standard Time
• Global scheduled emails.

It is important to have some set standards for analytics. You can drastically change the results in a report by using a different time zone to determine the date. At best, that would lead to discrepancies based on who ran each report. At worst, it would undermine the integrity of your data and reporting.

To avoid those integrity problems, GoodData uses the account default time zone for report data. For convenience, it tries to present your local time whenever possible in the user interface.

The odd exception is the Pacific Standard Time for global emails. This is because Insights is managed by Zendesk, and Zendesk is based in San Francisco. Zendesk does a lot of work to maintain the data model, connectors, user provisioning, authentication, and other back-end functions. Global scheduled emails are included with those functions, and there isn't a way to adjust them separately without impacting the rest of the project.