About the timestamp on ticket comments

For teams spanning multiple timezones, who have to communicate with each other (including at times sharing copy/pasted ticket comments), the only workable rendering of timestamps is in UTC.

E.g.  right now: Fri 2021-10-01 14:48 UTC

Please make this an option.

I sent an inquiry about this matter to the technical support in japan and they fixed it.

We recently changed time zone, our clocks moving forward 1 hour from GMT+10 to GMT+11 as we start Daylight Savings time.

While providing RCA for a critical incident that occurred before daylight saving changed, we noticed an anomaly with Zendesk times not matching those of Gmail and Slack. While Gmail and Slack showed the timestamps accurately, Zendesk was showing a 1 hour difference (+1 hour).

I then learned that Zendesk records ticket times in UTC and converts to the current time zone setting when viewing, rather than the time zone at the time of the event. 

This means we cannot reliably use Zendesk for creating an accurate time line of events because we would have to check if the event occurred in or outside of daylight savings. I find this quite incredible from a world class Support tool and does not align to expectation.

I would like to see Zendesk change this 'expected behaviour' so the 'issue' is fixed.

See: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408833830298-Why-don-t-timestamps-in-the-agent-interface-always-match-the-UTC-timestamp-

This is expected behavior and the issue only exists within the agent UI in Support. It is not present in the API which uses the hardcoded UTC timestamp or reporting which maintains the correct historical timestamp.

+1 ing above comment from Martin. Our team often reviews tickets related to past weeks, and this causes a lot of confusion in weeks after daylight savings time. The product should be able to identify the actual time of day at the date in question, based on the timezone, rather than the UTC timestamp shown at the current timezone setting. 

It has been queried from an audit perspective that timestamps change after daylight saving time etc. Has it been considered to hardcode the timestamps on tickets? For audit purpose, an auditor will want to see the actual date/time a note is added to a ticket, especially those of a higher priority. The timestamp should be the same no matter what time of year it is. 

I'm trying to build an app to literally just put the UTC timestamp of ticket creation in the sidebar but I'm getting stumped because it's getting converted to the user's time. Can Zendesk offer any help as to how to get at the UTC time? (I'll happily share my code with the community when it works! :D) 

Edit: I cracked it finally, it's uh, actually super simple. this assumes you have a span called "time" in there you want to show the time the ticket was created at: 

  async function displayCreatedTime() {
    const response = await client.get('ticket.createdAt');
    const time = response['ticket.createdAt'];
    const event = new Date(time);
    const utctime = event.toUTCString();
    console.log(utctime);

    const span = document.getElementById("time");
    span.innerText = utctime;
  }
displayCreatedTime();