I have a one host that has a time offset of +5 hours and would rewrite the timestamp to represent the local time zone before the event is indexed. What's the best way to do this?
You would use the TZ parameter in props.conf
Here is a link to the documentation:
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Data/Applytimezoneoffsetstotimestamps
Forgot to mention, there is no timezone or offset information in the timestamp... The timestamp format from the incoming event is %b %d %T
No need to have timezone information in events. As lukejadamec is saying, you can make use of TZ attribute