timedatectl
Local time: Tue 2026-11-10 20:46:31 UTC
Universal time: Tue 2026-11-10 20:46:31 UTC
Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000)
- NTP synchronized
Alarm notification message:
At {eventTime|yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss}, alarm "{name}" at "{displayPath}" transitioned to {eventState}.
Observed behavior:
Test alarm generated.
Alarm Status Table shows:
11/10/2026 16:33:21
Notification email shows:
At 2026-11-10 09:33:21, alarm "Alarm" at "" transitioned to Active.
The email timestamp is exactly 7 hours earlier than the Alarm Status Table timestamp.
Additional observations:
- Perspective alarm tables appear to display Eastern time correctly.
- Linux server remains configured for UTC.
- We previously found a Windows jump host (jump-manctil) that had been set to Pacific time. After changing the Windows timezone to Eastern and rebooting, Perspective trends began displaying Eastern time correctly.
- The Ignition gateway itself was not restarted during that change.
Questions:
1. What timezone context does alarm notification {eventTime} use in Ignition 8.3.8?
2. Is there a gateway-level setting to control the timezone used when formatting alarm notification emails?
3. Why would {eventTime} be 7 hours different from the Alarm Status Table while the gateway OS is configured for UTC?
Just above the Schema on the right side of the Database Query Browser, there is a drop-down for picking a DB connection that can be used even when the project doesn't have a default.
But you would need to look in the Gateway configuration for DB connections for Journal settings to see what kind of DB you are using for your alarm journal.
I suspect you are using a DB whose default datetime column is not timezone-aware.
Thanks for the suggestion. Oh boy, I had some other issues…
I dug into the Alarm Journal configuration.
Initially, the PostgreSQL datasource was faulted because the database credentials were incorrect. I corrected the credentials, the datasource now shows as valid, and I assigned the Alarm Journal to that PostgreSQL datasource.
However, after checking the database, there are currently no alarm journal tables present in PostgreSQL, so no alarm event data appears to have been written there yet.
For additional context, the Ignition gateway is running on Ubuntu, and the server timezone is currently set to UTC (timedatectl reports Time zone: UTC). The alarm timestamp issue was present while the server was configured this way.
The behavior I'm investigating is:
Alarm Table displays the event at the expected local time.
Alarm notification email generated from {eventTime|yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss} is exactly 4 hours earlier.
The offset matches UTC vs Eastern.
Changing the client/jump-host timezone had no effect on the email timestamp.
Given that the PostgreSQL journal currently contains no alarm journal tables, do you still think a database timestamp type could be involved, or would you focus more on how the notification system is rendering {eventTime}?
Make sure your user for the PostgreSQL DB in Ignition has create access. I also recommend setting the PostgreSQL translator to use timestamptz for date/time data types instead of the default timestamp. The timestamptz column type is UTC microseconds, which automatically gets java timezones correct. (java.util.Date is UTC milliseconds, and java.sql.Timestamp is UTC nanoseconds.)
