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Comment by gbrown_ | Hacker News Reader

> traditional timestamp

As as sysadmin I implore you use ISO 8601 format, preferably with the UTC offset.

Do you prefer the full format (2017-04-27T09:43:04,0010+0100) or a related but more readable format (2017-04-27 09:43:04.0010 +01)?

My personal preference would be sans TZ, since everything I can control is set to UTC immediately.

Technically "Z" postfix is a TZ identifier for UTC time. It's short and makes the timestamp compatible with RFC 3399:

    2017-04-27T09:43:04Z

Not only technically, but also practically, since many tools, libraries and service APIs accept and produce the Z as the TZ identifier for UTC.

Minus bugs, and then having the TZ (even though it always should be Z) saves your bacon.

Agreed.

Personally I prefer the RFC 3339 profile as most syslog daemons support this.

RFC 3339 allows application to use space instead of T between date and time:

      NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T".
      Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of
      readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by
      (say) a space character.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt

I prefer to use epoch as an additional timestamp - this allows us to parse the logs without being bothered about timezones and all.

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