Meeting the BGP Management Challenge with Route Analytics
by Packet Design
Published 2005, Posted April 2005

Abstract:

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a critical piece of IP network infrastructure today - it is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol in the Internet, and serves as the routing basis for new IP services such as MPLS VPNs. Yet, while implementations of BGP have improved over the last decade to provide greater stability and scalability, BGP's manageability has not progressed significantly during that same time. Determining the root cause of BGP problems - involving hundreds of thousands to millions of BGP messages, is beyond human capacity. The lack of automated BGP diagnostic capabilities leads to undetected and hard to solve network problems, resulting in disrupted or suboptimal service, long Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), and reduced network engineering responsiveness and productivity. The impact on network performance can be devastating as increasingly stringent Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements are being placed on mission-critical Internet and IP WAN services. Network engineering organizations need a more effective way to manage and troubleshoot BGP networks.

The first part of this white paper discusses some of the problems encountered in managing BGP today, and the service impacts felt both in service provider and enterprise organizations due to these problems. The second part of this white paper introduces BGP route analytics, and explains how route analytics automates BGP management, allowing network engineers to understand, resolve and prevent BGP problems, and achieve higher service assurance levels for critical, BGP-based IP services.

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