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 in Support 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 in Support. It is not present in the API which uses the hardcoded UTC timestamp or reporting which maintains the correct historical timestamp.
3 Comments
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 fix this. I'd like to know the exact time a ticket was received and responded to. It's 2021, there's no reason we should be manually adjusting for DST.
Hi everyone,
For visibility, I'd recommend someone post to our Feedback on Support topic, using this template to format your feedback. Add a link to your post to this comment thread and everyone else upvote and add your use case & comments as well. Thanks!
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