While I was troubleshooting a BGP routing issue, I discovered really nice tools to provide a historical BGP route path change on real BGP world. Probably some of you already knew this stuff, but for me it is amazing tool. I should have known this stuff for a long time ago.
Okay, it is called BGPlay and was designed and written by the Computer Networks Research Group at Roma Tre University. BGPlay is a Java application which displays animated graphs of the routing activity of a certain prefix within a specified time interval. Its graphical nature makes it much easier to understand how BGP updates affect the routing of a specific prefix than by analyzing the updates themselves. Wow! fantastic. To get More detail, visit origin website.

This tools will be useful on some weird BGP routing issues such as

• Inbound traffic was reduced in particular time frame.
• BGP route table is frequently changed.
• BGP was bouncing while TCP connection was okay.
• Someone reports reachability issue

Let's see how to use it. While I run thru this application, you will get some idea where is the best place you can apply this. Click below "Start BGPlay" icon.

 

It brings new popped up window. Put a prefix and date to see BGP route activity in that time frame.

Once another window is popped up and click play button. Then finally you can see BGP route path changes in time frame.

I hope this is informative for you.