• Documentation
    • Search documentation
    karat

    +

    K

    API Reference ↗
    AnalyticsContourPerformance and correctnessTimezones in Contour

    Timezones in Contour

    Contour has two different timezone configurations that affect how date times are displayed:

    1. Bucketing Timezone (board-level setting): Boards that allow users to group data by time - such as Chart, Histogram, or Time Series - require users to choose a timezone for the time column. This determines how the data is grouped. For example, if you choose UTC, then the data will be grouped by day starting and ending at midnight UTC. To ensure that boards show consistent data across users, this setting cannot be set to the user's local timezone and must be set to a fixed timezone. Below, an example of the configuration in the chart board is presented. Note that it states the data will be displayed in UTC, due to the visualization timezone configured for the analyses.

      Setting the bucketing timezone in a chart board

    2. Visualization Timezone (analysis-level setting): This is the timezone used to visualize date times in the user interface. This setting affects how every board in the analysis displays data. For example, if a board is configured to bucket by day in UTC and the analysis is configured to render timezones in UTC+5, then the board will show the day as appearing to start and end at 5:00 AM UTC+5. This setting - located in the Data settings section of the settings side panel - can be set to a local timezone so that each user viewing the analysis will view all date times in their own timezone. This setting can be found in the Data settings section of the settings side panel.

      Setting the visualization timezone of the analysis

    For example, in the chart board example above, the data is bucketed in EDT and the analysis is configured to show data in UTC. As such, the bars are bucketed in EDT but displayed in UTC, resulting in buckets that span from 8:00 PM to 8:00 PM the next day. If this analysis used "Local timezone" for the the visualization timezone setting, then this chart would look slightly different for users in different timezones but the buckets would represent the exact same data.

    A chart board bucketed in EDT and displayed in UTC

    Some older analyses may not have the visualization timezone setting configured. In this case, different boards will have different behaviors regarding what timezone date times are displayed in that board.