Shaping the Future of BGP Observability: BMP Evolution at IETF#

Narasimha Prasad S — Cisco (with Paolo Lucente, NTT DATA; Thomas Graf, Swisscom)

• Why: BMP is quietly becoming the vendor-neutral BGP telemetry substrate, and its IETF evolution this cycle is substantial. If the PM's world includes BGP monitoring pipelines (and the Netflix talk explicitly names BMP activation as next), this is the standards map.
• What: A structured tour of the foundational RFCs (7854 Adj-RIB-In, 9069 Loc-RIB, 8671 Adj-RIB-Out — including the useful correction that pre-policy Adj-RIB-Out is not the Loc-RIB) and then the active drafts: BMPv4 TLV-ization making all message types extensible; Path Marking, which exports the best-path decision outcome per path with reason codes (finally answering "why wasn't this path installed" without memorizing the 13-step selection process); structured timestamps separating trigger time from export time; Generic Event Notification for non-route events; Route Event Logging for alerting on policy discards and validation failures; Snapshots for mid-stream collector sync and time-binned archives; ~20 new statistics types; and a YANG model for managing what gets exported.
• How: Performance drafts attack BMP's high-scale cost — Route Monitoring Aggregation across peers, Common Updates across RIB-views (up to 4x), and Multi-Peer headers — claiming up to n-fold reduction in router/collector CPU and message volume. Security: TCP-AO as the RFC 7854 IPsec alternative, plus early BMP-over-QUIC (multi-streaming + TLS) and BMP-for-RPKI-monitoring proposals.
• Where applicable: Standards-track and vendor-agnostic; directly relevant to anyone building or buying BGP observability. Implementation timing varies by draft status (some are WG documents, some proposed work) — the talk's own closing point is that operator use cases should drive which drafts advance.