Documentation

Why timezones matter

PingZen monitors run around the clock — and so do their incidents. Without a clear timezone label, a timestamp like 14:30 is ambiguous: your local 14:30, the server’s 14:30, or UTC? The wrong answer can shift the reading of a status page by hours.

Every PingZen timestamp is stored in UTC and rendered in the timezone you choose, with an unambiguous label.

The three timezones in PingZen

Your personal timezone

The Timezone selector in the sidebar (under Language) sets your preferred IANA timezone — for example Europe/Moscow, Asia/Yekaterinburg, America/Los_Angeles.

This affects every datetime you see inside PingZen:

• Incident “Started at” / “Resolved at”
• Maintenance window “Starts” / “Ends”
• Alert history “Last triggered at”
• Monitor last-check timestamps
• Heartbeat last-ping timestamps
• Date grouping in the Incidents list (today / yesterday / last 7 days is computed relative to your local calendar, not UTC midnight)
• MCP tool output (see Timezone-aware MCP below)

Auto-detect on first login

On your first sign-in PingZen reads your browser’s resolved timezone via Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone and writes it to your account. If that matches your real location you do not need to change anything.

Override later

Travel, VPN, or the rare case the browser guesses wrong — open the sidebar and pick from the curated list of ~40 zones, or use the one-click Use my browser timezone (X) link that appears whenever your saved zone differs from what the browser reports right now.

Status page timezone

Each public status page has its own Display timezone setting in the page editor (after Theme, before Monitors).

In pinned mode the page footer always shows the active zone:

Times shown in Europe/Moscow (MSK)

This indicator is intentionally visible on every public status page — visitors should never have to guess whether 14:30 means their local 14:30 or the server’s.

Timezone-aware MCP

Tool responses from the PingZen MCP server (used by Claude in Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, and other LLM-driven editors) render datetimes in the authenticated user’s timezone. For a user with timezone = Europe/Moscow, list_incidents shows:

! **Database connection timeout** (ID: 12)
   Status: ongoing
   Severity: critical
   Monitor: 47
   Started: 2026-05-12 14:32:05 MSK (+03:00)

Compare that to the same row for a UTC-locked user:

   Started: 2026-05-12 11:32:05 UTC (+00:00)

Both the abbreviation (MSK, UTC) and the numeric offset (+03:00, +00:00) are included on every timestamp — the LLM gets unambiguous context whether the same agent is parsing the row in Moscow or Yekaterinburg.

Tools that became timezone-aware in 0.16.0

REST API

Manage timezone preferences via REST.

Examples

Set your personal timezone:

curl -X PATCH https://pingzen.dev/api/v1/auth/me/timezone \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"timezone": "Europe/Moscow"}'

Pin a status page to Moscow time:

curl -X PUT https://pingzen.dev/api/v1/status-pages/42 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"timezone": "Europe/Moscow"}'

Switch the page back to Auto (visitor’s browser):

curl -X PUT https://pingzen.dev/api/v1/status-pages/42 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"timezone": null}'

Validation

The server validates each timezone against the official IANA database (zoneinfo.available_timezones() on the backend). Unknown names are rejected with HTTP 422 Unprocessable Entity and an explicit error body:

{
  "detail": [
    {
      "type": "value_error",
      "loc": ["body", "timezone"],
      "msg": "Value error, Unknown IANA timezone: 'Mars/Olympus'. Use names like 'Europe/Moscow' or 'UTC'."
    }
  ]
}

Backend also logs WARNING rejected invalid IANA timezone='Mars/Olympus' on every rejection so operators can spot bad clients in the audit log.

What stays in UTC (and why)

Some surfaces deliberately ignore your timezone preference. Each has a specific reason.

Daylight Saving Time

PingZen uses Python’s zoneinfo module on the backend and Intl.DateTimeFormat on the frontend. Both honor the official IANA database, so DST transitions are handled automatically:

You do not need to change your timezone setting twice a year. The abbreviation shown next to the time updates automatically on the DST boundary.

FAQ