As someone who has had to grind through heaps of logs over the years, from systems in various timezones, from products that disagreed on the ‘best’ datetime format, I’ve become a fan of adopting ISO 8601 as much as possible. For personal systems such as a laptop, that’s a different story. But if I’m spinning up an EC2 instance in us-west-2 or a VM in Central Europe, I avoid the whole “err, what TZ is this in, or should even be in?” decision-making process and just run with WHO CARES IT’S SET TO UTC NOW LET’S MOVE ON ALREADY 😀

And not that anyone here is likely to care, but here’s a quick shout out to lnav - The Logfile Navigator for grinding on system logs (for systems where something like Prometheus or whatever hasn’t been proactively set up).