AWS Direct Connect adds CloudWatch metrics for BGP monitoring

AWS Direct Connect BGP Monitoring Enhancements

AWS Direct Connect now offers three new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for virtual interfaces (VIFs) to provide visibility into Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) session health and route counts. This update allows network engineers and operations teams to monitor BGP sessions natively through CloudWatch, eliminating the need for custom solutions or polling APIs.

These new metrics address critical monitoring gaps previously requiring custom Lambda functions or on-premises network management tools:

• VirtualInterfaceBgpStatus: Reports BGP session state, enabling detection of session failures.
• VirtualInterfaceBgpPrefixesAccepted: Tracks prefixes from your on-premises network, allowing proactive alarms before reaching prefix limits that could cause BGP sessions to enter idle state.
• VirtualInterfaceBgpPrefixesAdvertised: Monitors routes AWS advertises to your network, helping validate configuration changes and detect silent route withdrawals that impact traffic even when BGP sessions remain up.

These metrics are available for private, public, and transit virtual interfaces in all commercial AWS Regions. You can integrate them with CloudWatch alarms, dashboards, and Amazon SNS for comprehensive BGP monitoring, reducing mean time to detect network issues and simplifying operations for multi-region and disaster recovery architectures.

What to do

• Integrate new CloudWatch metrics with existing monitoring solutions.
• Set up CloudWatch alarms for proactive notifications on BGP session health and route counts.
• Review and adjust configurations to ensure optimal BGP session performance.

Source: AWS release notes

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