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If you have a server hosting Jira and Confluence, what timezone do you set it to? UTC, or the timezone your users are in?

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The web server and OS logs are all in the OS timezone, obviously. How about app server logs, atlassian-jira.log and atlassian-confluence.log?

Well, app server log timestamps will also be in the OS timezone, unless you've told Java otherwise, by explicitly setting -Duser.timezone . If you've set -Duser.timezone , you can no longer correlate datestamps between atlassian-jira.log, access.log and the rest of the system.

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Users report problems relative to their timezone. Screenshots might be saved with timestamped filenames. "Things got really slow around 4pm" they'll say, and off you go to find what was happening on the server at 4pm.

Perhaps my tooling is a bit primitive, but I work on Linux, and my tooling hasn't evolved much since the 1970s. I don't know an easy way to convert log timestamps from UTC to that of an arbitrary user, on the fly. If the log's timezone is that of the user, life just is just easier.

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But sadly, because the default user timezone must equal the timezone of atlassian-confluence.log , and (for your sanity) you want atlassian-confluence.log  in the same timezone as your OS, they must all be set to the default timezone of your users. Since you're doing this for Confluence, you might as well do it for Jira too.

Conclusion

The conclusions are:

• Don't ever use -Duser.timezone  as it leads to inconsistent timezones across log files.
• If you running Confluence, your OS timezone should be set to whatever you want your default user timezone for users to be.
• If you running only Jira, I still suggest setting your OS timezone to what you want the default user timezone to be, just to make debugging simpler. However you have the option to use UTC as your OS and Java timezone, as long as you set Jira's default user timezone explicitly.