BGP Monitoring Protocol

The BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) monitors Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions and provides a convenient interface to monitor BGP routing information on the routing device.

The BMP integration in Horizon lets you use these route views, status updates, and statistics for advanced monitoring and management, providing visibility into what BGP is doing.

Horizon BMP integration

Horizon leverages OpenBMP, an application that was developed as a reference implementation for receiving BMP messages from network equipment and presenting the state of the BGP network to the user.

BGP runs on routers and high-end switches. Those devices can send BMP data to Horizon directly or through a Horizon Minion collector.

bmp integration overview 2
Figure 1. BMP integration overview

The Horizon BMP parser accepts BMP connections from router packets using a TCP listener. Two adapters in OpenNMS read BMP data, including an inventory list of connected routers and the peers they are established with, and stats and data about what is being exchanged over those peers:

  • BMP telemetry adapter: Handles BMP statistics the BMP parser has received and parsed. Statistics received from the router are associated as performance data with that router. View metrics and statistics related to that peer and apply thresholding.

  • BMP peer status adapter: Handles BMP Peer Up and Down messages that the BMP parser receives and parses, and converts them to OpenNMS events. Allows alarm creation based on up/down status.

You can configure the parser and adapters in the telemetryd-configuration.xml file.

The BMP Playground provides a virtual lab that you can use to simulate BGP and BMP, and to see how the Horizon components can be configured at runtime.