(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)
We have been using this feature off and on for a while but recent actions we are taking make us wonder the appropriate use of this option. In my mind, this is something that you would use to send out some new software that needs to go out to a large number of systems that would be scheduled in advance. This would give the environment the time to report back the relevance and then put everything in a waiting state until the start time is hit. This is typically the way that it has been used and seems to be working as expected.
Now there are a couple other scenarios that are coming up and I am not sure if this is the best solution. Would you recommend the stagger for any of these scenarios?
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Applying patch baselines to approx 1,000 targets. The baseline contains approx 50 fixlets (some have more). The action is submitted to start right away.
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same as #1 but to start within a couple hours.
The one thing that I seem to be seeing is that it appears that the targets will first determine relevance to the fixlets in the baseline and then they seem to wait for a while with the message “Waiting to satisfy temporal distribution time constraint”. The part that is really causing the problem is that it is being set to a short window (1-2 hours) for deployment and they are submitting just before the window starts. I am not sure if there is some formula that states something like “80% of the targeted systems my report relevance before the stagger is set”
If there is some document on the details of how this behaves, please let me know where. 
Thanks
Martin Carnegie
Gulf Breeze Software Partners