Automation and Telemetry applied to BGP Routing Policies#

Henri Alves de Godoy (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), Ernesto Sánchez (Universidad Católica de Salta); slides also credit William Sánchez (Celsia Internet, Colombia)

• Why: A concrete, fully reproducible open-source stack for BGP policy automation plus link-quality-driven failover — exactly the adoptable tooling an operator program should surface, and squarely in the PM's BGP-internals/automation interest. The topology is even published on GitHub.
• What: A Containerlab-replicated model of Colombian ISP Celsia's BGP infrastructure with automated failover: link quality to each provider is scored every 30 seconds from MTR measurements (latency, jitter, loss); thresholds trigger automatic BGP policy updates (AS-path prepend / local preference) through the NetBox API — no manual intervention, full change traceability via version control, Grafana dashboards. Reported results: complete deployment in the test environment, reduced failover time, elimination of manual configuration, and an open, multi-vendor, auditable pipeline.
• How: NetBox as single source of truth (netbox-bgp plugin; custom fields for local ASN, prepend count, local preference) → webhook fires a GitLab CI/CD pipeline → Nornir (Netmiko over SSHv2) renders and pushes config to multi-vendor nodes (Huawei VRP core, Nokia SR Linux providers, Cisco IOL switch) → MTR JSON output lands in Elasticsearch → Grafana visualizes and alerts. Scoring: weighted latency (direct-to-peer 70% / public-DNS hop-by-hop 30%) plus penalties for loss and jitter, with configurable warning/critical thresholds (e.g., peer latency 12/25 ms, loss 0%/20%, 3-point change margin).
• Where applicable: Any multi-provider ISP or enterprise WAN; the entire stack is open source and the lab topology is on GitHub, so it is directly adoptable. Constraints: validated in Containerlab against Celsia's design, not yet a production-at-scale report, and the failover logic assumes broadly comparable service quality between providers.