[c-nsp] Monitoring BGP with NAGIOS

[Frank Bulk]

We're a small shop and our group's upstream is single-homed in terms of
providers but dual-homed in terms of physical connectivity, with a private
ASN.

 

Occasionally there's BGP events and I would like to be remotely notified --
NAGIOS can do that and I prefer SNMP polling.  We're not doing an SNMP TRAP
or syslog processing at this time - that would be an obvious next step for
us.

 

Currently the NAGIOS plugin I'm developing polls the bgpPeerState,
bgpPeerIn/OutUpdates and bgpPeerIn/OutTotalMessages and alerts me if there's
a change.  Since a BGP session could be re-established in a short amount of
time, I would like to trigger an alert if the number of In/Out Updates or
Messages exceeds the regular value (I'm presuming that when the BGP session
re-establishes, these counters climb more quickly than during times of
stability).  But I'm not sure if Updates/Messages are normally sent every 30
or 60 seconds (I've seen 60 on a wiki page, but "sh ip bgp neighbors" says
that the "keepalive interval is 30 seconds" and "Default minimum time
between advertisement runs is 30 seconds".  I'm guessing this knob can be
adjusted in IOS, so ideally I would like the NAGIOS plugin to accommodate
for that, such that if the counters move '5' in 5 minutes that's OK with a
60 second period, but if it's a 30 second period, then those counts should
move 10 times.  But keep-alive/scan interval doesn't seem to be listed in
the MIB.

 

Also, there's a lot more information available at the Cisco CLI when
executing "sh ip bgp summary", specifically:

.         BGP table version

.         # of network entries

.         # of path entries

.         # of prefixes

.         # of paths

.         Up/Down times

Is any of that available via SNMP, because my walking isn't showing that at
all?

 

If you think I'm going about this the wrong way, please feel free to tell
me. =)

 

Regards,

 

Frank