Visualizing BGP RIB Changes into Forwarding Plane by Leveraging BMP and IPFIX

Abstract

At its core, the Internet and modern large-scale data centers use BGP as its main control-plane protocol to exchange routing and reachability information among its peers. BGP has been around for decades and has seen countless updates and extensions to support the growing number of use cases and ever increasing demands. The desire to gain deeper insights into the internal states of BGP prompted the introduction of the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP). We present a system that collects, stores and visualizes BMP messages in real-time in a lab network that supports MPLS layer 3 VPNs as well as in production. In addition, we collect forwarding-plane metrics and correlate them with BMP in time and on a VPN level to visualize cause and effect across both planes and pave the way for root-cause analysis and real-time performance monitoring.