Every once in a while we receive a support request from some customers asking us how to “fix” the timestamp in the log files because it’s few hours ahead/behind.

The thing is that such timestamp is not ahead nor behind: it’s always in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), and that is not our arbitrary choice; in fact, the W3C Extended Log File Format official working document clearly states that the timestamp must refer to the GMT time zone without daylight savings bias, which is – indeed – called UTC for brevity.

For such reason, all existing log analysis software products are designed to take that into account and adapt the generated reports to the current time zone of the machine that runs the analysis.

There are tens of log analysis software titles out there, but since sometimes our users ask us for a recommendation, here’s two among our favorites:

  • Sawmill
  • SmarterStats

Both of them are very high-quality products, and have been tested and confirmed to work flawlessly with the log files products by Syncplify.me Server!