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Question about BGPtools and interpretation
Hi all,
So I've been reading about BGP on LET every once in a while and people then refer to bgp.tools, so I checked two providers I'm having VPS' with (see below).
But what I'm not getting from this, what do I actually learn by this? Provider 2 clearly has more Upstream, but is that necessarily better than a few? Or can I learn something about the quality of the upstream too somehow. Which one would you pick based on the below results and why?
PROVIDER 1:
Network status
Active, Allocated under RIPE
Network type
Content
Prefixes Originated
9 IPv4, 0 IPv6
Upstreams
AS174 - Cogent Communications
AS199524 - Gcore S.A.
AS197071 - active 1 GmbH
PROVIDER 2:
Network status
Active, Allocated under ARIN
Network type
Eyeball
Prefixes Originated
23 IPv4, 12 IPv6
Upstreams
AS174 - Cogent Communications
AS29802 - HIVELOCITY, Inc.
AS23033 - Wowrack.com
AS3170 - VeloxServ Communications Ltd
AS32097 - WholeSale Internet, Inc.
AS1100 - Nuday Networks Inc.
AS36352 - HostPapa
Comments
This is a high level overview of the network, there isn't much to extract from it outside of numerical data (like IP prefix count, and a limited view of upstreams)
The real power of BGP.TOOLS in my opinion comes from to-the-point information provided. For example, let's take a look at the prefix 193.148.249.0/24 from AS34927.
https://bgp.tools/prefix/193.148.249.0/24#connectivity
From this page we can infer the following (note, this is realtime data not historic):
This is all on 1 page just about a prefix. It has the potential to save you a lot of time in a debugging process amongst other typical processes.
Then we can go to the Super LG tab and we have access to see every route to the IP prefix in the global BGP table. More useful information comes from here such as BGP communities being expanded to useful terms (if submitted by the provider), AS path filtering etc, etc.
tl;dr it is sort of a supertool to view the live internet.
In answer to your question of "how do you pick the best one" this is a half subjective half objective answer. On one hand you could compare how many peers have a direct route to the prefix, how many upstreams does the provider have or some other objective metric. On the other hand you can compare immaterial things such as support times, IP reputation etc.
Really you would need a set criteria going into it to make a decision. Are you setting up a mail server? IP reputation is far more important.
Are you setting up a game server? Latency to for example LINX or peering with that countries ISP is probably the most important.
That's an elaborate answer, thanks for taking the effort!
in general more routes is not always better.