The Complete Guide to Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Monitoring

BGP is the routing layer that helps hold the internet together, but when something goes wrong, the impact can be fast, confusing, and hard to trace from inside your own network.

This guide gives network teams a practical foundation for understanding how BGP behaves in the real world, including route monitoring, peer health, session states, path selection, route reflectors, multipath routing, LOCAL_PREF, MED, communities, resets, and hijacking risks. Each deep dive connects core BGP concepts to the monitoring signals that matter most, so teams can spot instability earlier, validate routing changes with more confidence, and protect service availability across complex, distributed networks.