Autonomous Systems (AS) announce routes to the internet through their transit providers. These announcements are based on the routing policy that is defined locally within the AS and influenced by several factors, such as DDoS mitigation, cost savings, network performance, load balancing and business relationships. In this context, Autonomous Systems need to make sure that their routing policies are being effective. One way to do this is by using a looking glass to view the routing path. But a looking glass only offers one specific point of view. BGP Monitor by UPX does much more than that – it delivers network visibility at scale with several global points of view, provides continuous monitoring and alerts when the announcement for a specific prefix fails to meet its visibility expectations for each upstream provider.

BGP Monitor provides a consolidated display of several points of view, without detailing in which collector the incident was detected. The dashboard issues alerts when at least one collector finds a hijack, at least two collectors find a route that should not be visible, or when no collector finds a route that should be visible, i.e., it shows a monitoring view of the last hop.

BGP Monitor provides an outside view of the network, unlike other tools available that only look at the internal infrastructure. It allows you to detect upstream connection issues and helps you spot malicious activity such as phishing scams via AS prefix hijacking attacks.

BGP Monitor is a monitoring tool – it only alerts you when there are incidents or if your announcement does not meet expectations —, making it completely different from the services mentioned above, which are analysis/inspection tools that can be actively used by professionals to investigate issues. In addition, Radar Qrator, for instance, updates once every 24 hours and BGPmon also only provides daily reports, while BGP Monitor provides real-time change and incident notifications.

When monitoring global routes, BGP Monitor allows the Autonomous System to have visibility of Global BGP Routing Table (GRT) updates and announcement updates from its own AS. If any route change is not followed at some point, the dashboard will continue to show the incident until all routes are followed. In other words, it works as an ally in the identification of incidents such as blocked routes and route leaks, detects issues in your upstream network and helps you by providing information so you can fix them as soon as possible.

BGP Monitor is a monitoring tool, so it is not suited for analysis or inspection. It does not provide a detailed view or time-lapse monitoring, nor does it monitor past the last hop. As such, BGP Monitor does not detect hijacking with a forged AS path; it does not identify partial downtime issues; it does not identify geographic availability issues; it does not monitor the routes stored in RIBs (Route Information Bases) of routers on the internet; it does not monitor worldwide connectivity to your service; it does not identify problems with incorrectly configured expectations; it does not monitor the bandwidth of each upstream and does not assist in traffic engineering.

No installation or integration via API is required, because BGP Monitor is a fully web-based tool. All you need is a web browser.

All you need is to fill out a simple registration form, with your name, email and password. After the registration process, you'll be given access to our user-friendly platform. First you add your network prefixes that you want to monitor – each account is entitled to 5 prefixes –, then you can add the IP prefixes of your Autonomous System, associating them with your IP transit providers, and finally you can set expectations for your announcements. Okay, now you're good to go!

No. You don't have to make any changes to your network or router configurations, because the collectors monitor a network that is external to your infrastructure, consisting of the leading IXs in the world and the Global Routing Table (GRT).