There are two workarounds.
1. Use 'Delayed Start' for the Splunk Forwarder service. (https://community.splunk.com/t5/Getting-Data-In/Why-quot-FormatMessage-error-quot-appears-in-indexed...). However it's hard to configure thousands of DCs.
2. Configure interval as cron schedule instead.
interval = [<decimal>|<cron schedule>]
[WinEventLog]
interval=* * * * *
By default wineventlog interval is 60 sec. That means as soon as splunk is restarted, wineventlog (or any modinput) is immediately started. Subsequently every 60( configured interval) splunk checks if modinput is still running. If not, re-launch modinput.
Instead of setting interval 60 sec, if we use cron schedule to run every minute, then splunk is not going to launch modinput immediately. So essentially the idea is to convert interval setting from decimal to cron schedule to introduce a delay.
