Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) visibility or monitoring has a series of different statements, and these terms themselves are very vague. Therefore, it is important to understand what types of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring exist, how to distinguish them, and what key functions need to be found.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a path vector routing protocol, which involves two main functions:

• Establish routing peers (communication sessions) between autonomous systems (or autonomous system networks registered to participate in the Internet Border Gateway protocol structure) so that they can exchange routing information to various prefixes (network addresses). At present, there are more than 63000 autonomous system numbers (ASNs).

• Routes that propagate to IP prefixes on all autonomous systems. Routing is not through a single router, but through an autonomous system. Therefore, when people view BGP routing update messages, they will see a series of autonomous system numbers (ASNs), which form AS-PATH and correspond to a specific prefix.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing updates can include multiple AS-PATHS as prefixes and multiple AS Path attributes. At present, the IPv4 BGP routing table of the global Internet contains 768385 prefixes.

There is a hypothesis about the global Internet, but some countries set up firewalls, and it is difficult to reach anywhere. But in fact, the path required by Internet traffic will vary according to its source, and a single routing advantage point can introduce an untrue route.

If you want a clear understanding of Internet routing, it is necessary to deal with many different services from different network service providers (ISPs) to gain global visibility.

Understanding the global Internet performance is crucial for effective network performance monitoring (NPM) and digital experience monitoring (DEM). In sharp contrast to a few years ago, border gateway protocol (BGP) monitoring is becoming increasingly popular.

In the past, many network performance monitoring (NPM) providers either objected or ignored its existence. However, with the rapid popularization of cloud computing, the necessity of border gateway protocol (BGP) monitoring has become noticeable with the modernization of cloud computing, which is used to build applications and services, provide customer digital experience, consume SaaS, and WAN. Global connectivity is the goal of any competitive digital organization, which means that these enterprises must also establish expertise in inter domain routing and complex interactions with internal routing policies, border gateway protocol (BGP) policies and management network service providers (ISPs). Even sceptical vendors have turned to the visibility of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

Before in-depth study of the different types of border gateway protocol (BGP) monitoring products available, all these products provide varying degrees of insight into global Internet routing behavior. It is helpful to understand the key functions that support digital experience monitoring (DEM) use cases. The following are some indicators and visualizations required for time series history:

(1) Independent AS-PATH visualization, for example, linking to higher levels of monitoring for application or service URLs

• Automatically detect and monitor all prefixes related to the test connection of this URL

(2) Metrics:

• Prefix path change

• Prefix accessibility

• Prefix update

(3) Cross layer correlation

• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing data should be related to other data layer time series, including network layer path, end-to-end network performance indicators (packet loss, delay, jitter) and application layer indicators (response time and page load).

However, although the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has a clear protocol definition, the meaning of the term "Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring" may vary depending on who is filing a claim. The following are five ways to provide BGP routing data as "visibility".

1. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) visibility toolkit: Some large organizations will use open source and commercial tools that independently implement Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) prefix monitoring. However, it is difficult for IT teams to use these issues to solve application and service problems because they are usually provided as data sources. For meaningful troubleshooting, the IT team needs to integrate this data and perform its own correlation with other tools in the stack. It is also difficult to filter data from these toolkits, because routing problems can be filled from the most unstable edge of the global Internet, resulting in a lot of useless noise. Although this is technically legal Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring, it is not very useful for ordinary IT teams.

2. Light integration: This option involves integrating the feed of BGP routing attribute data into the network layer path to enhance the path information. The following may become semantic problems: By looking up the prefix of a single border gateway protocol (BGP) routing feed, you can simply mark each node in the layer 3 path with the name of its autonomous system number (ASN). But this can hardly be called "Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring" or "Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) visualization", because it can not make the organization visualization prefix or AS-PATHS.

3. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) traffic analysis: This method enhances the traffic data by matching the prefixes of the source IP and the target IP, and then maps them to the border gateway protocol (BGP) attributes of these prefixes, resulting in monitoring the traffic indicators from the source autonomous system (AS) to the target autonomous system (AS), and even transmitting through the autonomous system (AS). Undoubtedly, this is an interesting choice, which is very useful if the organization transfers a large amount of service traffic to the global Internet. But instead of monitoring or visualizing BGP routing, it focuses on traffic analysis.

4. Third party open source tools: There are some external open source tools, such as RIPStat BGPlay, and some monitoring products link to these tools. These advantages are that they have the prefix analysis function of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). However, the disadvantage is that continuous monitoring is not allowed. These tools mainly provide snapshot views, which are not integrated with the rest of the product workflow, so they are not very useful for enterprises.

5. Integrated Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing monitoring: This option means that it can directly pull the collected global routing table and update, and integrate border gateway protocol (BGP) prefix monitoring, accessibility information, and visualization of autonomous system (AS), autonomous system (AS) path, path length, etc., as well as other aspects of digital experience monitoring (DEM). It can provide real-time insight into application and service operation visibility. This method can provide organizations with the most accurate perspective, provide border gateway protocol (BGP) routing data from many points on the global Internet and use intelligent algorithms.

Determine whether the organization is looking at the real BGP monitoring or the fast intrusion of a less useful replica by searching for the product or vendor name, adding "BGP" and "prefix" and comparing the results. This will soon reveal who can speed up and raise the issue of Real Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) related to digital experience delivery; Who can provide useful insights on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing and the Internet to help organizations understand their digital experience delivery.