Aws direct connect introduces new CloudWatch metrics for BGP monitoring
AWS Direct Connect has introduced new CloudWatch metrics for monitoring BGP sessions, providing enhanced visibility and reducing the need for custom solutions. These metrics are available for all commercial AWS Regions.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the addition of three new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for its Direct Connect service, designed to enhance the monitoring of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions on virtual interfaces (VIFs). These metrics aim to provide network engineers and operations teams with deeper insights into the health of BGP sessions and route counts, eliminating the need for custom solutions or manual API polling.
The new metrics address critical monitoring challenges that previously necessitated the use of custom Lambda functions or on-premises network management tools. The VirtualInterfaceBgpStatus metric offers visibility into the state of BGP sessions, allowing for timely detection of failures. The VirtualInterfaceBgpPrefixesAccepted metric monitors the prefixes received from on-premises networks, enabling proactive alerts before prefix limits are reached, which could cause BGP sessions to become idle. Additionally, the VirtualInterfaceBgpPrefixesAdvertised metric tracks the routes advertised by AWS to the user’s network, assisting in the validation of configuration changes and identifying silent route withdrawals that can affect traffic flow even if BGP sessions are active.
These metrics are accessible for private, public, and transit virtual interfaces across all commercial AWS Regions. Users can integrate these with CloudWatch alarms, dashboards, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for comprehensive BGP monitoring. This integration is expected to reduce the mean time to detect network issues and simplify operations across multi-region and disaster recovery setups. For more information about AWS Direct Connect, visit the official AWS website.