BSM Downtimes occurring hours after scheduled start time

Applies to:

BSM 9.2x

Issue:

Downtimes created in BSM are occurring hours after the scheduled downtime was set to start.  This will also cause the downtime emails to be received later than they were originally supposed to be sent.

The cause of this is when the MTime component is not able to contact a NTP server.  Please see additional info below for more on this.

Steps:

1.  Go to Admin-->Platform-->Setup and Maintenance-->Infrastructure Settings

2.  Select Foundations at the top of the page and in the drop down click on NTP Time.

3.  Under NTP Time Configuration click on the edit (pencil) icon.

4.  The first line needs to be changed from:

     <MTIME ADDITIONAL_OFFSET="0" ALGORITHM="NTP">

      to look like:

     <MTIME ADDITIONAL_OFFSET="0" ALGORITHM="Local">

5.  Restart the BSM by shutting down the services and bringing them back up.  Make sure you perform this in the correct order.

Additional Info:

According to R&D investigation Downtimes module uses MTime module to get the current date. The time reading strategy used in MTime by default is NTP. Its configuration also includes the list of NTP servers and a default time offset to be used in case all of the NTP servers are inaccessible. This offset is 0 by default.
Using Local time instead of NTP makes BSM sync time with the DB rather than the NTP servers.