OVERVIEW: Datetime fields are a bit of a headache when going back and forth between AGOL and ArcGIS Pro. Users need to see the datetime in their local time zone and AGOL needs to store datetimes in UTC. Datetime fields to not currently store time zone information.
CURRENT STATE: The process of passing datetime fields back and forth between ArcGIS Pro and AGOL is getting better. Publishing to ArcGIS Online from ArcGIS Pro now includes more explicit timezone options that distinguish between the time zone of the data versus the time zone you want to view in applications, as well as the use of daylight savings time. This approach of displaying datetimes in the preferred time zone has also been recently standardized across the many software applications that view/edit AGOL data such as Survey123, ArcGIS for Excel and ArcGIS Pro.
PROBLEM: AGOL can only export file geodatabases with UTC datetimes, regardless of configuration at publish, and have to be manually converted back to local time in ArcGIS Pro. Exporting AGOL features and tables to a file geodatabase is a very common workflow (e.g., archiving inactive projects to save credits, exporting to FGDB for geoprocessing that is too cumbersome to perform in AGOL, and providing FGDBs as deliverables to clients). File geodatabases often have >10 datetime fields scattered throughout. I currently use a time-intensive, single-field update workflow calculating one field at a time with an Arcade function like DateAdd() or ToLocal(). It takes a long time and is prone to error if file geodatabases are exported and then re-published back to AGOL.
IDEA: Include an option to choose the timezone when exporting the data OUT of AGOL into a file geodatabase. If not any timezone, perhaps choosing to convert to whatever the "view preference" time zone was at time of publish? A third option, if these first two are unworkable, might be an ArcGIS Pro geoprocessing tool that can convert all datetimes in a file geodatabase from one time zone to another.
