Technical Tip: How to check cluster clock update for High Availability

Description

This article describes how to check cluster clock update for High Availability (HA) in FortiAuthenticator.

Scope

 FortiAuthenticator.

Solution

Accurate time synchronization ensures that logs from different nodes in an HA cluster are consistent. This is essential for reconstructing events accurately, and any time drift can disrupt event sequencing and lead to incorrect root cause analysis.

Accurate time synchronization aids in troubleshooting by ensuring that all nodes in the HA setup have consistent timestamps. This consistency is crucial for diagnosing issues, as even minor time discrepancies can complicate the identification of problems.

In an HA environment, synchronization of time across all nodes ensures that failover and other HA operations occur smoothly. It prevents issues that might arise from time discrepancies, such as incorrect election of primary and secondary nodes.

When HA is formed, the following event log should appear to show that the secondary obtained clock update from the primary:

date=2026-05-21 time=10:44:55+0000 oid=8888 logid=40005 cat="Event" subcat="High Availability" level="information" nas="" action="" status="" msg="Clock updated from Primary node, old time is '2024-03-11 20:16:52 CET'" user=""

They can be viewed under Logging -> Log Access -> Logs -> Search, enter the event ID '40005'.