---
name: cloud-logs-account_preferences
title: Configuring your account preferences
description: You can configure how the IBM® Cloud Logs UI displays data along with other personal preferences.
last-updated: 2026-08-10
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cloud-logs?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

# Configuring your account preferences
{: #account_preferences}

You can configure how the IBM® Cloud Logs UI displays data along with other personal preferences.
{: shortdesc}


1. In the console, click the **Navigation menu** icon ![Navigation menu icon](../icons/icon_hamburger.svg) > **Observability** > **Logging** > **Instances**.

2. Click **Dashboard** to open the dashboard of your IBM Cloud Logs instance.

3. In the IBM Cloud Logs navigation, click the **Avatar** icon ![Avatar icon](/icons/avatar.svg) > **Preferences**.

On the **Account preferences** page you can configure:

User-level default homepage
:   You can define the homepage that will be displayed when you first open the IBM Cloud Logs UI.

    You can select:

    * Home Dashboard
    * Custom Dashboards
    * Explore Logs
    * Incidents
    * LiveTail

To set which specific view opens within the **Explore Logs**, see [Managing default views](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cloud-logs?topic=cloud-logs-custom_views_default&format=markdown). 

Change your time zone settings
:   You can select if you want times to be displayed in your local time or in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). GMT is also known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

    Changing your time zone only affects time displayed and generated by the IBM Cloud Logs UI. It does not affect timestamps within log records (including log record timestamps displayed in the UI) or timestamps within alerts and incidents.
    {: important}

Change your date format view settings
:   You can select how you want dates formatted.

    You can select:

    * `MM/DD/YYYY`
    * `DD/MM/YYYY`

Alerts
:   You can enable the creating of a [gauge-type](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cloud-logs?topic=cloud-logs-widget_gauge&format=markdown) metric called `cx_alerts`. If enabled, the metric is generated whenever an alert is triggerred or resolved. You can add this metric to [custom dashboards](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cloud-logs?topic=cloud-logs-create_dashboards&format=markdown).