Timezone Matters When Multiple Webapps Talk to Each Other

The Grafana dashboard has a nice feature that users can scale the graphs to query the data for a specific period of time. However it did not work for me. It was quite strange at first glance: it shows an empty graph if you ask for the data from the past without an error message. Eventually I discovered the data returned does not fit into the designated time slot from the graph, but hours away from the limit of the x-axis. The reason was simple, Grafana is running on server local time (UTC), and graphite is running on Django default time (US/Chicago). Consequently it is needed to set “-5” as timezone difference in config.js for Grafana to conpensate this time difference. The ideal scenario is to let Graphite and Grafana run in the same timezone in case day time saving gives trouble.