Factories run on clocks. Shift starts at 06:00. Readings every 30 seconds. Reports aligned to the hour.
CollatrEdge uses two clocks. A monotonic clock for intervals (immune to NTP adjustments) and a wall clock for alignment (so your 30-second readings land on :00 and :30, not :07 and :37).
When the system clock jumps, the ticker detects it and re-anchors. No drift. No missed readings. No silent accumulation of timing error that shows up three weeks later as a mysterious data gap.
We added configurable jitter to prevent thundering herds. If you have twelve edge devices on one network, you do not want all twelve hitting the MQTT broker at exactly the same millisecond.
This is the kind of problem that sounds trivial until you have been woken up at 3am by it!