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Datetime difference (elapsed time)

Serverless

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Serverless interfaces and procedures might differ from classic Elastic Stack deployments.

Stack

The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

Use either two numeric datetimes or two complex datetimes to calculate the difference (elapsed time) between two different datetimes. Use subtraction to calculate the difference between two numeric datetimes of the same time unit such as milliseconds. For complex datetimes there is often a method or another complex type (object) available to calculate the difference. Use ChronoUnit to calculate the difference between two complex datetimes if supported.

Datetime difference examples

  • Calculate the difference in milliseconds between two numeric datetimes:

    Java 
    long startTimestamp = 434931327000L;
long endTimestamp = 434931330000L;
long differenceInMillis = endTimestamp - startTimestamp;

  • Calculate the difference in milliseconds between two complex datetimes:

    Java 
    ZonedDateTime zdt1 =
        ZonedDateTime.of(1983, 10, 13, 22, 15, 30, 11000000, ZoneId.of('Z'));
ZonedDateTime zdt2 =
        ZonedDateTime.of(1983, 10, 13, 22, 15, 35, 0, ZoneId.of('Z'));
long differenceInMillis = ChronoUnit.MILLIS.between(zdt1, zdt2);

  • Calculate the difference in days between two complex datetimes:

    Java 
    ZonedDateTime zdt1 =
        ZonedDateTime.of(1983, 10, 13, 22, 15, 30, 11000000, ZoneId.of('Z'));
ZonedDateTime zdt2 =
        ZonedDateTime.of(1983, 10, 17, 22, 15, 35, 0, ZoneId.of('Z'));
long differenceInDays = ChronoUnit.DAYS.between(zdt1, zdt2);