AWS Direct Connect BGP Status monitoring

Question

Hello,

(1.) CloudWatch seems to be able to monitor only the (Physical) Connection Status of the Direct Connect Connections. But there is no monitoring of the BGP Status, although we can see the status of up/down in Console.?

(2) I am not a network expert, but it looks like if BGP Status goes down, irrespective of the Physical Status, the traffic flow between On-Prem to AWS is going to stop. Is that so? If so, it would have been good to have CloudWatch metric for this. thoughts?

Thanks in advance for the answers.

Accepted Answer

You're correct that CloudWatch does not currently have a metric to directly monitor the BGP status or route count of a Direct Connect connection. CloudWatch monitors the physical connection status, but not the layer 3 BGP configuration.

Yes, if the BGP session goes down between your on-premises network and the AWS Direct Connect location, even if the physical connection remains up, your traffic will be disrupted until BGP comes back up. This is because BGP is responsible for exchanging routing information between the networks to know how to route traffic.

Some options to monitor BGP status are to:
- Check the BGP status and route counts on your on-premises router that is connected to the Direct Connect circuit. Most routers have CLI commands to view this status.
- Consider logging the BGP status from your router to a log aggregator like CloudWatch Logs. Then you can configure CloudWatch metric filters to extract metrics from the logs and monitor in CloudWatch.

Answer

Cloudwatch network monitor would allow you to monitor connectivity.

See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/monitor-hybrid-connectivity-with-amazon-cloudwatch-network-monitor/

Answer

Thanks Giovanni.

Thanks Kallu. A very recently introduced feature in Dec 2023. A good reminder that I should keep up with AWS releases.

AWS Direct Connect BGP Status monitoring

Relevant content