Real BGP routing information is an essential resource for both researchers and operation communities in Internet routing. In order to collect large number of data in real time, BGP Monitoring System (BGPMon) is designed to monitor BGP updates and routing tables from BGP routers. It uses modular architecture to scalably onitor many BGP routers by distributed deployment while allowing a consolidated and neat interface to end users. BGPMon uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as BGP data log format. This format can accurately record BGP data without any information loss and it is extendable for possible new features in BGP updates.

Compared with other existing BGP monitoring software such as Zebra and Quagga, BGPMon has the following advantages

• Real-time access to BGP data
  • Bgpmon provides live BGP data stream to clients upon request.
  • As BGPMon is real-time system, the slow client will be killed after receive a warning message.
• New Monitoring Related Features
  • Periodic route refresh to keep monitor in sync
  • Objective labels to the data Can peer with very large number of routers
• Scalability
  • Chain BGPMon to monitor 100’s of peers, User interface can still appear as a single BGPMon.
  • Can chain BGPMon to provide robust protection against failures.
• New XML Log Format
  • Human Readable
  • Feeds Into a variety of existing tools
  • Trivial to extend using new tags or attributes
  • Choice of tags allow bit for bit reconstruction of update if desired
  • Unknown attributes simply displayed in hex
  • Can automatically annotate to mark events such duplicate updates, AS path changes, etc
• No BGP Complexity
  • No route selection, no policy, no forwarding, etc
  • Resulting code is extensible

Currenly the BGPMon release4 is available to download. And BGPMon is running stablely at Netsec lab of CSU which is peering with FRGP. We are setup peering session with RV now.

Real-Time BGPmon Clients -- The Extension of BGPMon

Our philosophy is to keep the BGPMon code itself as simple and light-weight as possible, but there are lots of features we plan to implement as associated client programs. Here are 4 sample clients that you can download from the downloads section:

1. Query Client: The Query Client allows a user to specify a boolean expression such that every update it receives that matches this expression will be printed to standard out. For example, you might want all of the update that have to do with a specific prefix.

2. Logger Client - The Logger Client allows a user to specify a series of boolean expressions such that every update it receives that matches this expression will be archived based on the parameters in the config file.

3. MRT Client - The MRT Client is included for compatibility with older software that depends on the MRT format. It translates the incoming XML stream into MRT binary format. This format can be read by bgpdump for software that depends on its output format.

4. Command Line Client - The Command Line Client allows a user to have an interactive session with bgpmon. This could be used to query the status of the monitor or to configure it while running.