Phoenix always displays timestamps in the browser's local timezone by default, and there is currently no built-in per-user setting to display times in UTC within the web UI. This behavior is confirmed by both the Phoenix team and community: "everything in the UI gets localized to your browser鈥檚 timezone" and "Phoenix is our open source product... The docs you linked are for the Arize AX product"鈥攖he commercial version, which may have different features. There is no user preference or toggle for UTC display in the open-source Phoenix UI, and all users see times based on their browser settings, not a configurable Phoenix setting or profile option.
*Workarounds:*
- You can temporarily set your browser or system timezone to UTC, which will cause Phoenix (and all other sites) to display times in UTC, but this is a global change and not user-specific within Phoenix.
- For programmatic access, when you export or query data via the Python client or API, timestamps are stored and returned in UTC, so you can process or display them as you wish outside the UI.
- There is no current roadmap item or open feature request for per-user timezone settings in the open-source Phoenix UI. If this is important for your workflow, you may consider submitting a feature request on the <https://github.com/Arize-ai/phoenix/issues|Phoenix GitHub issues page>.
*Summary of technical details:*
- Timestamps are stored and processed in UTC on the backend, but the frontend (UI) uses JavaScript's `toLocaleString()` and similar methods to display times in the browser's local timezone (<https://github.com/Arize-ai/phoenix/blob/main/app/src/components/table/TimestampCell.tsx|source code example>).
- There is a React hook to get the UTC offset from the browser (<https://github.com/Arize-ai/phoenix/blob/main/app/src/hooks/useUTCOffsetMinutes.ts|useUTCOffsetMinutes.ts>), but no user-facing control to override this.
- The only way to see UTC in the UI is to set your browser/system timezone to UTC.
Let me know if you want code snippets for exporting data in UTC or more details on how timestamps are handled internally.
Sources:
- <https://arize-ai.slack.com/archives/C04R3GXC8HK/p1752059009.769209|Slack Community Discussion>
- <https://github.com/Arize-ai/phoenix/blob/main/app/src/components/table/TimestampCell.tsx|source code example>
- <https://github.com/Arize-ai/phoenix/blob/main/app/src/hooks/useUTCOffsetMinutes.ts|useUTCOffsetMinutes.ts>