Peering Analysis
Service Providers (SPs) are looking for ways to reduce the costs associated with providing Internet services. Chief among the costs is the transit costs, the cost of getting traffic to the networks that make up the Internet. Building “Peering” is one of the most effective methods of reducing transit costs for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Peering decreases the cost and reliance on purchased Internet transit.
An ISP Peering Coordinator’s job is to establish and effectively manage this interconnection between ISPs. Goals include maximizing efficiency and minimizing the costs of interconnections. To have this job well done, it requires a BGP routing correlated traffic visibility. Getting insights of how the traffic is entering and leaving an ISP’s network is important for the Peering Coordinator to monitoring, building, and optimizing their peering relationships with others.
GenieATM receives not only Flow packets but also BGP messages. By associating the BGP information with flow data, GenieATM provides traffic analysis with the knowledge of Origin AS, Peer AS, BGP communities, AS Path Length, etc. in its reports. Providing this BGP-aware intelligent visibility, GenieATM enables decision support on optimizing the traffic routing policies, and achieving the most cost-effective peering/ transit relationships. Thus BGP intelligence is embedded in the system predefined reports including Internet, Neighbor, Router, and Sub-network predefined reports all provide Breakdown analysis in terms of Origin ASN, Peer ASN, AS Path Length, Neighbor, BGP Message, and BGP Next Hop.
A unique Peering Analysis predefined report provides Top-N incoming and outgoing traffic statistics between the SP’s network and each other AS. The incoming and outgoing traffic statistics is further breakdown by what so-called “To/From” traffic and “Through” traffics. The “To/From” traffic represents the traffic originated from or destined to the ASN; while the “Through” traffic represents the traffic transited through the ASN and originated from or destined to other ASNs. This is an effective tool for peering relationship evaluation and management.
Additionally, GenieATM’s powerful customizable analysis reports and Snapshot tool supports BGP relevant analytic factors for users to freely combine and generate the monitoring reports and troubleshooting suiting their operation and business needs. The BGP relevant analytic factors include BGP Community, Peer ASN, Origin ASN, IPv4/IPv6 BGP Next Hop, etc.
Equipped with these BGP-aware traffic analysis capabilities, GenieATM helps a Peering Coordinator or a network manager optimize his network peering in terms of costs & reliability by peer analysis for peer candidate identification, peer behavior monitoring and traffic engineering over peers.