CE APM timestamps on log are off by four hours following fall time change.

Products

• Cross Enterprise Application Performance Management (APM)

Issue/Introduction

We recently discovered a time stamp problem with CE APM.

It appears the problem started after the 2020 Fall time change, but did not self correct at Spring time change.

Here is an excerpt from the CE APM log:

10/26/20 10:12:33 PM EDT ÝERROR¨ Ýcom.wily.pow
10/26/20 10:12:33 PM EDT ÝERROR¨ Ýcom.wily.pow
10/26/20 10:12:35 PM EDT ÝFATAL¨ Ýcom.wily.pow
10/26/20 10:12:35 PM EDT ÝINFO¨ Ýcom.wily.powe
11/02/20 03:57:55 PM GMT ÝDEBUG¨ Ýcom.wily.pow
11/02/20 03:57:55 PM GMT ÝDEBUG¨ Ýcom.wily.pow
11/02/20 03:57:55 PM GMT ÝDEBUG¨ Ýcom.wily.pow
11/02/20 03:57:55 PM GMT ÝDEBUG¨ Ýcom.wily.pow

Fall time change was on Sundy, November 1.

Our client user tells us the time stamps in the server logs are four hours out now, meaning it is showing GMT now, not EDT (as the timestamp time zone says it is).

Our setting in JCL(STDENV) is:

TZ="EST0"
export TZ

 

Environment

Release : 10.5

Component : SOI ALERT MANAGEMENT

Resolution

The time formatting routines used in logging by CEAPM are called from the standard log4j logger and are using standard Java routines.  

When a machine has the clock and time zone misconfigured there is no Java or log4J feature to correct for that problem.  

The machine being used has a purposely misconfigured clock and time zone to support legacy applications.  

So it will be impossible to get both the proper time and the proper time zone abbreviation to show at the same time in the CEAPM log.  

We suggest that you configure for GMT0 and then change log4J format string so that it does not include the time zone abbreviation.   

To remove the time zone abbreviation
  *Edit ./Cross-Enterprise_APM/config/Introscope_Cross-Enterprise_APM.profile
  *Find all:
    log4j.appender.console.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{M/dd/yy hh:mm:ss a z} [%-3p] [%c] %m%n
  * At every location remove the z which causes the inclusion of the timezone.
    log4j.appender.console.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{M/dd/yy hh:mm:ss a} [%-3p] [%c] %m%n
  * Save the file.
  * Restart CEAPM Agent.