Expanding Routing Visibility at IXPs with BMP

Route-server looking glasses already provide valuable visibility into routing at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), either by querying route-server software directly, as Alice-LG does, or through dedicated BGP collection sessions. They help operators and participants inspect exchanged prefixes, troubleshoot connectivity issues, and better understand route-server activity.

In this presentation, we introduce the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) as an alternative and complementary approach to monitoring routing at IXPs. BMP can provide visibility into routes at multiple stages of the routing pipeline, including pre-policy, filtered, and non-best routes. It also provides detailed information about BGP peers and session state. Both BIRD and FRRouting can export BMP data when deployed as route servers.

However, deploying BMP—particularly at large IXPs—still presents several challenges. How can we process and store the large volume of data exported through BMP? How should this data be made available efficiently? And how can we provide consistent access across different collection platforms and storage architectures?

We discuss the roadmap that the community could follow to enable broader adoption of BMP-based monitoring at IXPs. Finally, we present the bgproutes.io IXP Explorer as a practical example of what BMP-based routing visibility at IXPs could look like in the future.