What timezone is your server configured in?

This page will explain how to find out which timezone your server is configured in. This is useful if you want to configure cron job monitoring, where knowing the server time is important.

Find the timezone on a Linux Server

For this to work, you will need ssh access to your server. Once you are logged in, execute the date command:

$ date
Tue Jul 14 08:34:35 UTC 2020

$ date
Tue Jul 14 10:35:01 CEST 2020

The second-to-last value is the timezone, in this case it's UTC.

You can also use the date command to filter the output, and only show the timezone and time-offset:

$ date +"%Z %z"
CEST +0200

On some Linux distributions, you can check the contents of the /etc/timezone file to see which timezone your server is configured as.

$ cat /etc/timezone
Etc/UTC

As a last alternative, the file /etc/localtime can refer to the timezone as well. This is a symbolic link, and the easiest way to see your timezone would be to check where this symbolic link leads to.

$ ls -alh /etc/localtime
/etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Brussels

$ ls -alh /etc/localtime
/etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC

The destination of the symbolic link (the value on the right) will provide a human-readable timezone, ie Europe/Brussels.

Find the timezone on a Windows server

For a Windows server, you can find the timezone in the Date & Time settings.

Go to:

1. Start
2. Settings
3. Time & language
4. Date & time

There, you'll find the timezone.