About Polling Interval

Polling Interval is a site about network monitoring for the people who keep networks running: sysadmins, network engineers, NOC staff and home-lab builders. We explain how monitoring works, compare the tools, and write down the commands and checks that hold up in practice.

What we cover

Articles fall into seven categories:

• Network Monitoring: polling, checks, graphs, dashboards and logs, and what to watch on routers, switches and servers.
• SNMP & Protocols: SNMP versions, MIBs, OIDs, counters and traps, plus syslog, ICMP, NetFlow and sFlow, TACACS+ and NTP.
• Open-Source Tools: Nagios, Zabbix, LibreNMS, Cacti, Prometheus, Grafana, Icinga, Checkmk and the smaller utilities around them.
• Home Lab: Raspberry Pi boards, mini PCs, Proxmox, VLANs, UPS units and racks.
• Uptime & Alerting: alert design, on-call, SLAs and SLOs, uptime math, incident handling and runbooks.
• IT Careers: the path from help desk to NOC to network engineer, certifications, interviews and life on call.
• Tech Notes: documentation, IPAM, diagrams and the habits that keep a network understandable.

Everything is listed under all articles. A field manual of monitoring tasks lives under /docs/, and a few calculators for subnets, counters and uptime targets sit under /netcalc.

Who writes it

• Dana Whitlock is a network engineer with years in ISP and campus NOCs. Dana writes about SNMP, polling, counters, routers and switches.
• Marcus Oyelaran is a Linux sysadmin for a regional school district, covering open-source tools, syslog and Linux servers.
• Priya Raman is a site reliability engineer who writes about uptime, SLAs, alert design, on-call and synthetic checks.
• Tomasz Brenner builds home labs and is an electrician by trade: Raspberry Pi, mini PCs, VLANs, UPS, power and cabling.
• Ellen Hartigan moved from leading a help desk to technical writing. Her beat is careers, documentation, runbooks and IPAM.

How we write

We stay vendor-neutral. Where a tool is the clearest example we name it, and where two or three tools solve the same problem we show them side by side. Commands, OIDs and config snippets are checked before a piece goes up, examples use documentation address ranges, and when a detail depends on a software version we say so.

No one pays to appear in our guides or to be ranked in a comparison. Some buying guides, such as hardware for a home lab, contain affiliate links: if you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and those pages say so. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Commissions do not decide what we recommend, and the guides and tutorials carry no paid placements.

Corrections and contact

If something is wrong, such as an OID, a command that fails on your version or a broken link, tell us through the contact page. Name the page and what you saw, and we will correct it and change the page's updated date. We cannot offer one-to-one support for your network, but the help page lists the first commands to run and the right places to ask.