Integrating BGP and sFlow at the collector

Hi,

I'm glad to announce the pmacct project ( http://www.pmacct.net/ )
made a new successful effort in introducing innovation within a
sFlow collector by tying up BGP peering capabilities and per-peer
BGP RIBs with sFlow.

While some Extended Gateway fields remain currently not supported
(even though there are concrete plans to support them), there are
several advantages in the approach of implementing BGP peering
capabilities right in the collector rather than relying on the
information exported by the router - all mainly connected to the
augmented visibility into the network this gives; among those
implemented as of now:

* Routers with partial BGP tables or default-only; by having the
  RIB of the upstream router in the collector, the default route
  can be dynamically followed to grasp relevant BGP information
  (ie. AS-PATH, communities, local preference or MED).

* Map sFlow agents not running BGP or not supporting the extended
  gateway feature to a given BGP peer (one or multiple in cascade).

I invite whoever feels interested into this work to try these new
functionalities out, keeping in mind that the code it's currently
in a release-candidate phase: so, plenty of room for critics,
contributions and comments in order do do an even better job.

pmacct is free, open-source, GPL'd software. You can find more
details about recent developments on the pmacct webpage and
throughout documentation. A good high-level starting point being
the ChangeLog file:

http://www.pmacct.net/ChangeLog-0.12.0rc1

Regards,
Paolo
Received on Thu Aug 6 02:24:13 2009