Information
All devices should use the UTC time zone.
Rationale:
When a network comprises of hosts across multiple countries or states, the use of local time zones can make analysis of log events confusing and error prone, particularly when localized 'Daylight Savings Time' or equivalent changes occur, affecting one area but not another.
To prevent confusion Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) should be used for all routers to allow consistent logging timestamps. UTC can be considered equivalent to GMT+0 for the purposes of setting time zones (it is actually GMT with added leap seconds defined by atomic clocks at the US Naval Observatory).
By having all Servers and Network Devices utilizing the same time-zone for logging; correlation and co-ordination is greatly simplified and Incident Response time is decreased.
Impact:
System time, for example viewed with the show system uptime command, and timestamps in log messages will be given in UTC.
Solution
To configure the Time Zone, issue the following command from the [edit system] hierarchy;
[edit system]
user@host#set time-zone UTC
Default Value:
By default the time-zone is set to UTC.