Question
Which time zone does Zendesk Explore use?
Answer
Zendesk Explore uses the Timezone in the user profile. This timezone is used by dashboards, dashboard content, dashboard exports, the dashboard email delivery trigger time, query builder, query export, and drillthrough.
Dashboard content that is sent through dashboard deliveries uses the recipient's time zone. If the user views a non-password-protected dashboard, the timezone displayed there is the default Zendesk timezone.
For more information on dashboard deliveries, see the articles: Sharing dashboards and Sharing Explore dashboards outside Zendesk.
21 Comments
Hi James,
If I want to download a dashboard to share, is there a way to set the time zone manually? For instance, our leadership team is mainly ET based but my time zone is MT. How can I adjust the dashboard to export the queries in ET?
Cheers,
Candace
Hi Candace,
At this point there is not a way to specify the timezone for an individual dashboard within Explore. All of the dashboards will be based on your support user profile's time zone.
Please let us know if we can help with anything else!
Thanks for the confirmation, Austin.
If anyone else wants to see this feature added, please vote for this Product Feedback post:
https://explore.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360004395028-Allow-time-zone-to-be-set-on-the-dashboard-level
Hello,
I've run into the following problem.
I need to report by an hour (# of accepted calls between 8am and 5pm). Since the query is built in UTC, I select 4pm (16) and 11 pm (23) in the filter, as UTC is 8 hours ahead from PST. I would technically need to select an hour from the next day but I don't see how. So when I build the query, it looks more or less accurate. Then I add it to the dashboard, and the numbers are just completely ridiculously different from what it was in the query builder, and it indicates that time zone displayed is PST/Los Angeles (my actual time zone). I think the discrepancy comes from time zone confusion. Please advise how to build my report relying on a certain time zone.
Hello Stacy,
I'm so sorry to hear you're having trouble with that. Yes, I'm afraid that is expected since you have added the adjusted query report (your actual timezone) into your dashboard.
As quoted here: "Any query viewed in a dashboard is in your Support user profile time zone."
Instead of adjusting the time 4pm (16) and 11 pm (23) in the filter, as UTC is 8 hours ahead from PST, have you tried using the default 8am to 5pm since once you add that query into your dashboard it will adjust the time based on your user profile timezone (PST/Los Angeles).
Please let us know if we can help with anything else!
It's unclear which TZ is used for a date filter in Explore.
Let's say I am filtering to show all tickets created on date '2019-03-19' -> will the filter be applied differently for different users viewing the dashboard?
I understand that hours show differently when reporting by hour, but I am not sure about the cutoff of the filters. From my own QA, it seems inconsistent, so I am unsure what's the rule here...
Hi Gal!
Good day!
Sorry for the confusion, this depends on when account sync. For Lite account data is available for the previous day according to account time zone (all obtained before 00:00 of current day). For Pro data syncs hourly- so all before the current hour. For more information, please refer to this article: https://explore.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002118227-How-frequently-does-my-Zendesk-data-sync-to-Explore-
I hope this helps!
Hi Shera,
That's useful detail - although I am not sure that is what I'm still confused about.
I am looking at dates that are a few days ago, with a filter for a single DAY (let's say a week ago). I want to see all the tickets that were opened on that one day. How is that filter applied? How does Explore determine the midnight to midnight timeframe of a single day in the past, based on the date? What timezone is being used for that?
Hi Gal,
So this depends on which specific data you are viewing if it's a dashboard, then it uses:
And yes, it represents midnight to midnight in your timezone.
Thank you Shera!
Hello!
I noticed an interesting thing.
Just for a note, my Zendesk account and my profile TZ are both (GMT -4) Eastern Time (US & Canada).
What happens is that when I create a query and add it to a dashboard- I see disparency in numbers. In my query, the agents have 90 calls, tho the same query in the dashboard shows 85 calls.
I did double check if I don't have any filters enabled in the dashboard and if the agent is also in the same TZ as me and the account- all seemed right.
Does anyone have an idea what could cause this? Or maybe noticed the same thing?
Thanks,
Mari-Liis
Hey Mari-Liis!
The Query builder uses UTC whereas the Dashboards will use your User profiles time zone of GMT -4. Since there is a 4 hour difference between UTC and GMT -4 that is why you are seeing this difference.
If you want to review your data based on your timezone it will be best to use the Queries once they have been added to your Dashboard.
Hi James,
Thanks for helping to understand it :) Makes sense now.
Hey James,
I see in the article you wrote and the comment you made above -- "The Query builder uses UTC whereas the Dashboards will use your User profiles time zone of GMT -4." is contradictory. As in the original article, it says that query builder uses user profile timezones
I also see the timezone shown at the bottom that corresponds to my profile timezone. So I am a little bit confused at the moment.
Any help clarifying this would be great!
Hi Eugene,
Just jumping in here to clarify James's comment. There has been an update to Explore recently where the query builders and dashboards should all show in your user profile time zone.
The only data in UTC time will be the content of the delivered dashboards.
Hey Jessica,
Thanks for the clarification! :)
Hi all,
Is there any plans to add functionality that would allow to lock the whole Explore account to a specific timezone?
Many thanks
Hello Vladimir Petrushenka,
Currently, adding this functionality isn't on our roadmap, but I'll be sure to pass this on to our product team. I would suggest for now sharing your use case with our devs, so they can consider this for a future update.
Best regards.
Devan - Community Manager the use case should be obvious to anyone who uses this for real world analytics and reporting, especially in the world we live in today where teams are distributed and working from different time zones.
When we build dashboards showing any metrics, the data needs to be the same regardless of who is looking at them and what time zone they are in. There may be specific use cases where you would want the time zone to be dynamic, but generally the default would be that we'd want the metrics to use our Zendesk account time zone.
Without this ability, 5 different people in 5 different time zones see different results when looking at the same dashboard. This reduces confidence in the numbers, and introduces unnecessary complexity to constantly explain to people why they are not seeing the same numbers.
Pain point for our company as well.
We are recording backlog for the agents, and backlog differs depending on who is looking at it.
Simple example:
An agent is in GMT+0, he is working Mon-Fri, 9-18. We are capturing backlog at 19:00 (agent's time) every day. Tickets are assigned to all agents 9-18 daily (including sat and sun)
This agent has all tickets closed at 19:00 for the whole week (Mon-Fri). The agent looks at the dashboard and all is good for him. Side note: Sat and Sun are excluded from the dashboard.
But a manager is working in GMT+10. When it is Sunday for agent, and backlog is excluded for him, for his manager it is Monday already, so backlog is included in the dashboard.
So, the pain point: the manager thinks that the agent has a huge backlog (as agent's Sunday is included in manager's dashboard), but the agent actually does not have it.
Devan - Community Manager Is there a workaround here, or manager should set the agent's timezone in his settings?
We've got exactly the same issue - manager and direct reports are in different time zones. Makes so difficult to sync on KPIs using Explore.
You've got to consider having the option that would allow to lock the whole Explore account to a certain time zone so everyone across all locations are seeing the same data.
Thanks
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