kb79: How do you offset collection schedules?

Longitude automatically introduces a skew factor of up to 10% of the interval in order to spread the load of data collection. However, users can introduce a specific offset by using the skew parameter in the schedule XML file for a Longitude collector.

Longitude schedule files are located under Longitude\applications\Application Name\collections, with each collector in the application having an associated application_collector.xml file. For example, the Windows CPU collection has a collection file:
Longitude\applications\Windows\collections\Windows_CPU.xml

An example of using a specific skew of 5 minutes for a collection scheduled to run every hour is:

<Schedule Name="EveryHour" Description="Every hour">
<Interval>3600</Interval>
<skew>300</skew>
</Schedule>

After making any changes to files in a Longitude\applications\Application Name folder, restart the Longitude services and register one instance of the modified application in order make sure the Longitude components have picked up the new values in the XML configuration files.