BGP Monitoring

Netreo is capable of monitoring a wide range of performance statistics for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) devices in your infrastructure. However, BGP monitoring is not enabled by default in Netreo and some configuration is required (see below).

Once Netreo has been configured for BGP monitoring, the follow data becomes available in the Device Dashboard for each BGP device:

• Overall view of peers on the BGP Dashboard
• Peer availability status and history on the Services tab
• Peer performance and history on the Performance tab

Enabling BGP Monitoring

To enable BGP monitoring in Netreo, each BGP device must have the “BGP Monitoring” device subtype assigned to it. Ideally, you should configure Netreo to do this automatically during device onboarding through the use of auto-configuration rules. See Auto-Configuration of Managed Devices in Netreo for how to do this.

However, if you have already onboarded your BGP devices, you may still assign the subtype to them manually by following the instructions in Manually Assign a Device Type and Subtypes to a Device.

On the first discovery poll for a device after the subtype has been applied, Netreo automatically adds passive service checks for each peer discovered to monitor peer availability status. These service checks are visible on the Services tab of the Device Dashboard for a BGP device and are named using the format "<peer IP address> BGP Status Check". They provide basic availability monitoring and alerting for each peer.

By default, when these checks are added to a device they are configured to send their alert notifications to the email addresses in the "Default Email Alerts" action group. However, alerts may also be sent to additional action group email addresses by editing the "Action" part of the "BGP Monitoring Alert" incident management rule.

If you would like to change the alert action groups for only certain BGP devices, the action groups for individual peer status service checks may be edited directly on the Service tab of the Device Administration page for the particular device.

Configuring Threshold Checks for Peer Message Levels

As is the case for all statistics collected by Netreo, each peer can have a threshold check configured for the number of messages sent or received in order to send an alert notification when a certain value is exceeded. Since this data is accumulated over time as messages per second, it is a good candidate for an anomaly threshold check to detect unusual changes in behavior rather than a simple "too high" or "too low" measurement.

See Threshold Check for more information about threshold and anomaly checks.

Best Practices

Full BGP performance monitoring is appropriate for customers who maintain BGP-based infrastructures and have multiple peers configured on their routers. Simple MPLS-BGP implementations with only a single remote BGP peer per router will probably not need this level of monitoring. If you wish to monitor only a single peer IP address for a device (availability status monitoring only) and would prefer not to enable full BGP monitoring, you may assign a "Check BGP Peer Status" service check to the relevant devices instead.

After being added to a device, this service check is visible on the Services tab of the Device Dashboard (as all service checks are). It monitors only the availability status of a single peer IP address and sends an alert notification if that peer becomes unavailable.

The "Check BGP Peer Status" check is found under the "Interface Check" category when adding a service check to a managed device or device template.

See Service Check for more information about service checks.