Technical Tip: Analyzing NTP logs from FortiWeb CLI

For NTP-related issues, take debugs on the CLI by using below commands:

FortiWeb-VM-01 # diagnose debug application ntpd 7

FortiWeb-VM-01 # diagnose debug enable

Non-working logs will show up as below, for example:

FortiWeb-VM-01 # diagnose debug application ntpd 7

FortiWeb-VM-01 # diagnose debug enable

FortiWeb-VM-01 # ntpd.c[363] ntpd_main: old time is 1765863428
ntpd.c[62] run_ntpdate: ntp is enable
ntpdate.c[943] add server pool.ntp.org1
ntpdate.c[951] ntp server is 0, exiting
ntpd.c[65] run_ntpdate: ret is 1
ntpd.c[368] ntpd_main: new time is 1765863428, time diff is 0

1765863428 (and the other numbers) are Unix epoch timestamps, which means they are not human-readable form.

To convert Unix epoch timestamps, there are different converters available online.

Below is one example:

Another Important output: ntp server is 0, exiting.
This means that FortiWeb did not get any valid response from an NTP server, so no time modification was calculated

Which means that: new time = old time.

Workaround: Change the NTP server to another server IP/FQDN.

Note: If this does not resolve the issue, then contact Fortinet Support.