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 monitor many BGP routers by distributed deployment while allowing a consolidated and neat interface to end users. BGPmon uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for BGP data. 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
• New Monitoring Related Features
  • Periodic route refresh to keep monitor in sync
  • Objective labels for bgp data
• 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
• Simple Configuration
  • Configuraion is done via a command line interface
  • Mimic the CISCO IOS configuration

Currenly the BGPMon version 6.1 is available to download. And BGPMon version 5 has been running stablely for one year at Netsec lab of CSU which is peering with 5 ISPs.