I am running an Amazon linux AMI and the alarms that I've setup are coming in all showing UT (universal time). It is inconvenient reading these alarms and I'd like them setup to read in eastern time zone (or America/New_York).
I've already set my /etc/localtime to point to -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime
But it is still sending alarms in the UT timezone.
Does anyone have a solution to this?
Best Answer
CloudWatch uses universal time to record metrics. (As it ought to. Consider servers and people located in different time zones, different DST change dates, not to mention the insanity of DST itself. As in aviation, UT is the only reasonable way to cope.)
So the CloudWatch system uses UT. This is independent of the systems being monitored. Which is why changing the TZ on your server didn't have an effect.
It's understandable that you may want Amazon's console web app to report the times shifted to local TZ. Unfortunately Amazon just doesn't offer that AFIK. Some third-party apps like Ylastic might (but might cost extra money).