Date formats on Dashboards

[Ed-M72]

@DrMichael. I know you have been working own the dashboards, I could do with some advice. There are 8 dashboards with date formats, I would like to standardise the date formats across them.

Below is a table showing the eight dashboards and their output when displayed in a browser with a timezone of Europe/London. As you can see the date formats are inconsistent, arising from either a restriction in Grafana, the use of the distance unit as a flag for the date format and a mix between DateTime ISO & DateTime local being defined in the dashboards.

There is a restriction on the Grafana table which means you can only use either an US or ISO date format, which will stop me adding the date formats for other countries, e.g. the U.K.

I think the only way to make all the dashboards consistent, and readable to everyone is to add a new setting called "Date Formats", with the options "American/European" or "MM/DD/YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD", and use this to consistently set the date format across the existing and any new dashboards.

I have added an extra "date format" dropdown on the settings page of a local dev build, but would like some feedback before I spend time updating all the dashboards.

Below is the table I created during the initial analysis.
Ed

@adriankumpf

	Dashboard	Current Display (Miles)	Current Display (Kilometres)	Current Format	Proposal
1	Charges	MM/DD/YYYY	YYYY-MM-DD	Manual Overide based on Distance unit	Manual Override based on Date Format setting (American/European).
2	Drives	MM/DD/YYYY	YYYY-MM-DD	Manual Overide based on Distance unit	Manual Override based on Date Format setting (American/European).
3	Locations	YYYY-MM-DD	YYYY-MM-DD	Date with Datetime local	Manual Override on name_[Date_format]. Options become Datetime US or Datetime ISO.
4	States	YYYY-MM-DD	YYYY-MM-DD	Straight from DB, no overrides	Manual Override on name_[Date_format]. Options become Datetime US or Datetime ISO.
5	Statistics	YYYY-MM-DD	YYYY-MM-DD	Straight from DB, no overrides	Manual Override on name_[Date_format]. Options become Datetime US or Datetime ISO.
6	Updates	YYYY-MM-DD	YYYY-MM-DD	Datetime ISO	Manual Override on name_[Date_format]. Options become Datetime US or Datetime ISO.
7	Vampire Drain	MM/DD/YYYY	YYYY-MM-DD	Manual Overide based on Distance unit	Manual Override based on Date Format setting (American/European).
8	Dutch Tax	DD/MM/YYYY	DD/MM/YYYY	Date with Datetime local	Manual Override on name_[Date_format]. Options become Datetime US or Datetime ISO.

[DrMichael]

Hi, well, we had a discussion about that before: #1320

I tried to tinker with

#      - GF_USE_BROWSER_LOCALE=true
#      - GF_DATE_FORMATS_INTERVAL_HOUR=DD/MM HH:mm
#      - GF_DATE_FORMATS_INTERVAL_DAY=DD/MM
#      - GF_DATE_FORMATS_FULL_DATE=DD.MMM.YYYY hh:mm:ss

in the docker-compose.yml, but was not really successful. Might be, that Grafana does not really support that well. But I think, that would be the way to go. And I agree, it should not be based on km/mi setting.

[Ed-M72]

Yes, you are correct, I tried the the docker environment variables first, they seem to control the main dashboard date restrictions, however the environment variables make absolutely no difference to the plugins, which is where you really need them.

[DrMichael]

Ah, ok. I really like the idea of harmonising the date formats. I personally could live with ISO format ISO 8601/SQL standard | 1997-12-17 07:37:16-08 although it is not the date format of my native locale, de.

Formats like MM/DD/YYYY or DD.MM.YYY could lead to difficulties, when sorting...

[Ed-M72]

Agreed. I could live with that format too. Perhaps we standardise all of them on ISO 8601? That format is understandable by everybody, and reduces the amount of effort to maintain the dashboards.

I discovered last night that the Stats panel only accepts one hard-coded date format so even with a user defined date format in the config it would always display as ISO 8601 regardless of a user selecting MM/DD/YYYY.

[DrMichael]

Well, one could use Datetime ISO also in Statistics, but that includes the also seconds, which is not needed/wanted.

[rossnick]

I just came across teslamate. Wow !

I was searching on how to change the datetime formats in the grafana dashboards, and came to this discussion.

Any hints on how to achieve this ?

[DrMichael]

This here is quite outdated...
The date is formatted according to your browser settings. You would need to change it there.

[rossnick]

Oh, really ! I didn't know browsers could do that. I set my firefox to use the system settings to format time. But still, it the grafana dashboard shows time in 12H format and the system is showing 24...