Question - Location vs Timezone vs Group

jerryhung

Can someone briefly explain the relationships?

I used to not worry about this as all servers are simply in EST

but now we have different data centres, with SQL server/OS in different timezones (some in EST, some in UTC)

What's the best way to "logically" separate them?
say we have
Data Center #1 - Toronto (EST or EDT), servers EST and UTC
Data Center #3 - London (UTC), servers EST and UTC

Jason Cook

Hi Jerry,
The purpose of the time zone tab is to group servers in the same time zone together, so that the "now" times are all the same on the timeline. The location name is just a free-text description of the tab.

Groups are for organisational purposes only - they allow groups of servers to be displayed or collapsed out of view, and have no impact on time information.

From what you've got set up, my suggestion would be the following:

- Set up two time zone tabs - one for Eastern, one for UTC.
- In each time zone, add two groups, one for data centre 1, and another for data centre 3.

While you have to flick between the two tabs to view the state for one data centre, for a given tab you can quickly read off what is happening by just scanning down the list with the current time highlighted.

If you did it the other way (one data centre per tab) you would see a fragmented orange bar - appearing 5 hours apart depending on the server time. Not only would you have to keep scrolling horizontally, there's scope for misreading the timeline due to the mixture of time zones.

Hope that helps,
Jason

jerryhung

Thanks, let me give it a try