Influxdb: Feature Request: Local TimeZone support in shell queries

[wrossmorrow]

If it isn't already included, it would be nice to include local timezone support in time-filtered queries. For example, a simple "local_now()" function that returns the local time (for me, now()-8h). Shouldn't a wrapper around now() be fairly easy? Or even now("America/Los_Angeles")? Let me know if I'm missing something, I'm new to influxdb. (I've seen the advice to write everything to UTC.)

[jsternberg]

An issue with this is that you would need to specify to the server which time zone your query is in. The server has no way of knowing the time zone without that. On the other hand, adding the ability to specify the local time zone in an HTTP request in a separate place other than the query may make it easier for editing queries in something like Grafana/Chronograf. Grafana/Chronograf could be set to use a global time zone and then something like tz(local) could be used (or something else).

Also, now() will still return the current time so adding local_now() wouldn't really do anything. It only matters if you have something like today() where time zones would matter since it involves truncating the time to some kind of offset.

[dandv]

Please add a CLI argument to set the timezone in which the time is reported, similar to the precision argument. Invocation could be something like,

influx -precision rfc3339 -tz America/Chicago

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically closed because it has not had recent activity. Please reopen if this issue is still important to you. Thank you for your contributions.

[dandv]

Please reconsider marking this issue as stale.