I've been running a couple of weekday Google Data Studio reports for many, many months this year. They are both scheduled to be delivered via email to their recipients at 6:00 AM every morning (CDT). Typically, they arrive in our Outlook email within about 10 minutes after the 6:00 AM hour each day.
Something changed starting October 26, 2020. The arrival times are delayed for both reports by over an hour (1:44, 1:23, 1:19, 1:03) to be exact. I changed both reports' schedules to arrive at 3:30 AM versus 6:00 AM. Still, they arrived an hour and 3 minutes later than scheduled.
Do you have any suggestions as to where to probe for the change which triggered these delays? It it our system? Is it somewhere within the Google's stack? Daylight savings time change triggered somewhere?
I provided a log of my experience with these delays for additional context.
Thank you!
On Sunday, October 25th happened the annual switch from daylight saving time to standard time. Maybe this explains the delay?
Related
EDIT
This post indicates that sessions should be interpreted as visitors for that hour.
Using the graph to identify which hour has the highest traffic and record
the number of visitors for that hour
I am looking at a Google Analytics report (Audience --> Overview) for a website. In section Audience --> Overview, I have selected Sessions vs. Select a metric. I have specified a frequency of Hourly.
I mouse clicked on a peak and saw
Thursday, January 17, 2019 10:00
Sessions:19,732
Is this telling me that I had 19,732 concurrent sessions open at 10:00? Or that in the hour between 9:00 and 10:00, that 19,732 sessions had been opened (and many likely closed)? Please note that
Avg. Session Duration = 00:09:07
I looked at How Count of Sessions is calculated and that leads me to believe that the 19,732 sessions is for the hour between 9:00 and 10:00.
Can someone confirm this?
Thank you.
Yes, that number would represent how many sessions were started during that hour.
You shouldn't interpret sessions as visitors/users. As one user can have many sessions during that hour. By default, max of 2 (new session at say the 5th minute, no activity, come back at the 35th minute, session 2).
I am constructing a link (programmatically) to create a google calendar link. I found that when I pass it a date in the following format
....&dates=20151005T170000Z/20151007T190000Z&....
where I'd expect it to show 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM, it instead shows 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Here is the full link:
`https://www.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE&text=The+Annual+%20Event&dates=20151005T170000Z/20151007T190000Z&sprop=website:turnaround.org&location=Fairmont+Scottsdale+Princess+7575+East+Princess+Drive+Scottsdale,+AZ+United+States&details&website=https://example.com&pli=1&sf=true&output=xml#eventpage_6'
My only thought would be that its a timezone issue, but I don't see that anywhere in the url.
You are passing the time zone as Z
20151005T170000Z <-- here at the end of the date/time
The letter Z ("Zulu") indicates Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or Coordinated Universal Time (see UTC±00:00). They are used in conjunction with military time: for instance, 6:00 a.m. in zone UTC−5 is written "0600R" and spoken "zero six hundred Romeo".
And
https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064?hl=en
Google Calendar uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to help avoid issues with daylight savings time.
When events are created, they're converted into UTC, but you'll always see them in your local time.
If an area switches their time zone, events created before we knew about the change might be in the wrong time zone.
So make sure all times are in UTC time or don't put a Z on the time and instead add the &ctz=TIMEZONE to the URL.
We're currently using MS Project for an exercise relating to an exam paper. We have to plan out the writing of this paper as a project and report to our lector once a week. This week we're ahead of schedule and and have completed a few tasks that arent planned untill next week. The problem is that when creating a report for earned Value, BCWP for these task is the cost of the hours used, not the hours budgetted for the work.
For instance:
We completed a task that was supposed to be started and completed monday and was baselined at 12 hours, yet we completed it in 8 hours today (thursday). The cost is set at 100$ per hour.
How I see it, the values for this task should be BCWS=0, BCWP=1200 and ACWP=800 yet for some reason it does not recognize the BCWP and ACWP when showing the EV-report. They both show up as 0. I cant change the task to having been performed today either. Can anyone tell me what went wrong?
OK here is a hardcore question that me and my friend are debating the proper programming solution for.
Let's say I'm running a business in New York at time UTC-4.
My sales rep based in San Francisco, whose time is 11:00 PM on December 31st, 2013 (which is 1:00 AM, January 1st, 2014 in my time) makes a sale that nets the company $1,000,000 USD. He enters the sale in the system as happening on December 31st, 2013, but really, in my time, it happens on January 1st, 2014.
For my 2013 report, do I include the $1,000,000 USD as profit, or does that go in my 2014 report?
A related question to hone in on the problem... how do most companies calculate daily sales for December 31st? Is it the last 24 hours from midnight in the company's HQ timezone, or is it for December 31st from each of it's market's time zones aggregated?
Further, if you only have the date (YYYY-MM-DD) entered for a sale, how should that be converted stored in UTC, being that a UTC day spreads over two unique dates?
Here's a helpful tool I've used to analyze this question:
http://everytimezone.com/#2013-8-27,-420,6bj
From a practical perspective:
It probably wouldn't matter which business day you recorded the sale. Many business end their days early, not necessarily at the stroke of midnight.
Some businesses might use the time zone of their headquarters, and some might use the time of the location where the sale was made. Either approach might be valid.
Of course, if this is an actual concern then you should ask an accountant or tax attorney. The answer may be different depending on your industry, state, or country.
As far as the technical parts to your question:
A date without a time or time zone is just a date. Think of it as a logical position on a calendar - not as a unique moment of instantaneous time.
Without additional context, you can't convert it to UTC. Or any other time zone for that matter.
Since UTC is a timekeeping system and not a time zone, then technically there is no such thing as a UTC day, but that is just semantics. Still, the idea of a "UTC day" would still only cover one calendar "date" - since that is part of the definition of what a "date" is.
It's just that the "UTC day" doesn't align with a "New York day". Just like a "New York day" doesn't align perfectly with a "Los Angeles day".
To blow your mind even more, consider that not every local day is 24 hours. Due to daylight saving time transitions, a "day" might by 23, 23.5, 24 24.5, or 25 hours long. Of course most are "standard days" - which are exactly 24 hours.
If you can keep separate that local time is a position on a calendar, while instantaneous time is universal, then you will find that it all makes sense.
That site you referenced has a nice visualization, and I reference it a lot. But IMHO it should have a different name because it doesn't cover every time zone. Use it carefully. See the IANA database discussed the timezone tag wiki, which has over 500 zones.
I don't know what language or database you are using, but you may find the concepts I described recently in this post on working with Date and Time in RavenDB useful. Specifically, read the section titled "Time Zone Conversions". Even if you use some other technology, the same concepts will apply.
I am using this example code to send a meeting request. I am having a problem: every time I use the code, the meeting time is always the wrong time.
For example: DTSTART:20120710T143000Z gives an appointment in Outlook Tuesday, July 10, 2012 4:30 PM-5:30 PM when it should give Tuesday, July 10, 2012 2:30 PM-3:30 PM. Why is that happening?
Our local time is UTC/GMT +3 (Jordan Standard Time) in the summer and UTC/GMT +2 in the winter. Every time I make an appointment through outlook it is always the right time.
The start time you place in your appointment should be a UTC time. I suspect you are a inserting local (Jordan) time. This explains the two hour difference, because afaik UTC does not take daylight saving time into account.
SO resources:
Convert somebody's local time to the UTC time
Daylight saving time and time zone best practices
Convert UTC/GMT time to local time