Hackathon on BGP monitoring using BMP in OpenNMS

February 13, 2025 5 min read Monitoring BMP BGP OpenNMS Ronny Trommer

We have seen people in the OpenNMS chat who started playing with the BGP monitoring protocol. I had some notes in our MediaWiki which doesn’t exist anymore. To provide some background I’ve resurrected my notes and republished the content. I had to tweak a few places to make it a bit more current. During the 5 years, OpenNMS has fixed bugs and maintained the functionality. The main intention of resurrecting the article is to give people some insights and background on what approach was chosen and why things are as they are today.

BGP monitoring playground

Monitoring BGP can be done in various ways. First thing people want to know is if there is a way to get notifications in case a BGP peering session goes down. A pretty common way monitoring the BGP peering session state is using SNMP and the RFC1269 MIB. In OpenNMS Horizon we have the BGP session monitor which allows to track the state using the BGP peer table. The downside is, you need to configure for every peering session a monitor and this can be cumbersome and hard to maintain.