HN845: Real Life Use Cases for BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP)

Ethan Banks (0:00)

Welcome to Heavy Networking with the Frames or Jumbo and the Packet's Fragmentation Free. If you've ever cut your thumb in a cage nut while solo-racking a router that you should have been racking with help, well, you've found your tribe. Heavy Networking is the flagship show of the Find Packet Pushers Podcast Network, a cornucopia of complimentary content for consumers of communications commestibles. I'm Ethan Banks for covering CCIE and your co-host since 2010 It's been so long that since episode one, I mean, my hairline has been through several RFC revisions, although it is now perfect. I am perfectly bald, as you can see here if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify. That's what I mean. With me is co-host Drew Connery-Murray, jet-setting international packet purveyor with me, and unlike me, he has fantastic Hollywood hair. If you can cut through the AI Slop, follow us on LinkedIn, where we express ourselves using our very own carbon-based brains or go Slop Free and connect with us on our community Slack, which you can join for free via packetpushers.net/community.

We swing the Slack ban hammer as needed to keep our group free of AI bots and folks trying to sell you something. On today's episode, Bart Dorlandt catches us up on his BGP Monitoring Protocol, that's BMP, his BMP project that's in production for a service provider. And if you don't know what BMP is, well, stick around. We're going to start by reviewing what it's all about, and then dig into Bart's project that'll help you make sense of how you might use BMP in your own network. Sponsor Itential's Flow AI delivers agentic operations for infrastructure, meaning easily build AI agents that actually work the way engineers need them to, governed, terministic, and built for production. Add intelligent automations to your network operations without the usual AI chaos. Find out more at itential.com/flowai.

That is itential.com/flowai.

So Bart, welcome back to Heavy Networking. We, it's been a minute. We talked about this project a couple of years ago in episode 759 So we're gonna need some review, man. Give us the plain language, no jargon version of this tool. What's it do? And what are the main use cases to set the stage for everybody?

Bart Dorlandt (2:09)

Yeah, sure. It's nice to be back. It's been a while. It's two years-ish something, right?

And trying to say BMP stuff without the jargon, it's gonna be challenging. Let's start high level, right? So the purpose is to provide feedback to the customer, in our case, a portal, right? A UI presenting the state of their advertised prefixes, because that's as short as it can go. And by doing that, having a feedback loop to the customer and saying, hey, you advertise stuff, you see stuff, and happy flow is green, right? That wasn't too bad, actually.

Ethan Banks (2:53)

So it sounds service provider-y then, you've got to, I'm assuming, I guess it doesn't have to be, but that's in my head, it would be a service provider that would be particularly concerned about their prefixes and the state. Is that a good observation?

Bart Dorlandt (3:06)

Yeah, I would guess so. It's not mandatory, obviously. And these days, people would advertise like BGP has to go everywhere, right? So you could do something with it.

But yeah, it tends to be in bigger environments, even though it's not frequently used. If you look around the globe, there is probably a handful of people that do stuff with it. Maybe a bigger handful, but it's not as common as the actual BGP protocol, right? Which obviously is right.

Drew Connery-Murray (3:41)

And what do the customers do with it when they go to this UI?

Bart Dorlandt (3:46)

So in our case, it is about the, we specifically monitor the customer prefixes, right? We don't monitor everything because that is huge, and I'm sure we'll get into that.

But the customer would advertise their prefixes, and this could be used in a DDoS prevention situation, right? So they would advertise their prefixes which they want to have protected, and they want to know that everything is well, right? How do you, I mean, you can advertise it and you hope for the best that it's not ignored or stopped or in any way blocked, right? So by monitoring those and eventually feeding that back in a form of a portal, they can, having a self-service portal, saying, hey, I want prefix A slash 24 to be advertised, okay? I'm advertising it. Have you received it? Is everything green, right? Instead of calling the knocker, sending an email like, hey, I did this, can you verify? And the person has to check it. You can have an automated feedback loop.