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Collecting with BMP

The Forward Collector supports BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) exporting of the routing tables. BMP allows for an extremely quick collection of those devices in the snapshot that have internet size routing tables.

Forward can collect the following BGP routing data:

  • received from peers, prior to any attribute modifications or route filtering (Adj-RIB-in pre-policy).
  • received from peers, after any attribute modifications or route filtering (Adj-RIB-in post-policy). This can be used to replace collection of installed RIB routes.

Forward automatically detects the device configured with BMP peering to Forward's Collector IP address. Upon detection of the BMP configuration on the device, Forward will automatically start a BMP daemon to listen on the specified BMP port number.

tip

Currently Forward supports BMP collection only from devices running Junos.

BMP configuration​

To configure BMP follow these steps:

  1. Configure route-monitoring in the network devices.
  2. Enable collection of received BGP advertisements (Adj-RIB-in) in the Sources page --> Devices. For more info, please see the BGP Collection page.
  3. Optionally, provide the BMP monitoring station IP/host in Sources --> Devices --> Edit Device --> Advanced Settings. By default is set to the Forward Collector IP address which is auto-detected.
  4. Optionally, select one of the following BMP/BGP collection options from Sources --> Devices --> Edit Device --> ** Advanced Settings** --> BMP/BGP collection option:
  • Use BMP/BGP if configured; on failure, stop the collection
  • Use BMP/BGP if configured; on failure, fall back to CLI
  • Ignore BMP/BGP configuration and use CLI
  • Only use BMP/BGP; if not available, stop the collection
  1. Finally, click on Save

BMP/BGP options

Configure route-monitoring in the network devices.​

Following are examples of BMP configuration on Junos devices.

Configure Adj-RIB-in pre-policy​

set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In local-port <local-port-number>
set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In connection-mode passive
set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In route-monitoring pre-policy
set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In station-address <forward-collector-address>

Configure Adj-RIB-in post-policy​

set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In local-port <local-port-number>
set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In connection-mode passive
set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In route-monitoring post-policy
set routing-options bmp station Adj-RIB-In station-address <forward-collector-address>
Tips
  • local-port-number: No TCP port has been officially assigned to BMP. Use generic TCP ports
  • forward-collector-address:
    • On-premises deployments: this is the IP address of the Forward Virtual Machine
    • SaaS deployments: this is the IP of the machine that hosts the collector
  • Please ensure that any firewall between the Forward Collector and devices running BMP is configured to allow the BMP traffic to flow