International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET) e-ISSN: 2395-0056 Volume: 07 Issue: 05 | May 2020 www.irjet.net p-ISSN: 2395-0072 © 2020, IRJET | Impact Factor value: 7.529 | ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal | Page 6755 Visualizing BGP Updates through Ladder Diagrams Vishwas A Deshpande 1 , Shwetha Baliga 2 1 Student, Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India 2 Assitant Professor, Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India ---------------------------------------------------------------------***--------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract - Almost 90% of all traffic on the internet is routed using the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP for short, which is a standard exterior gateway protocol (EGP) designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is the protocol of choice for all major ISPs in the world. It is classified as a path vector protocol, meaning that neighboring nodes in a computer network exchange routing information to build routes. BGP is highly scalable; However, with increase in network size, troubleshooting issues arising in the implementation of BGP becomes laborious due to a multitude of reasons. Troubleshooting issues in BGP mainly involves pulling up system logs which usually span thousands of lines from the routers in the network, and manually searching for the relevant logs, identifying the issue, and then taking corrective action. Furthermore, even when BGP is functioning correctly, identifying the reason why a particular route was installed in a router’s routing table is not intuitive, since one has to use the command line interface on the routers to get this information. The objective of this project work is to develop a tool which can help make troubleshooting and monitoring of BGP networks more intuitive and easy for the network engineers involved through the use of Ladder Diagrams or Sequence Charts, which show the flow of information between different stages of a process, and also filter system logs automatically to present only the relevant logs. The use of the tool developed through this project work greatly reduces troubleshooting speed, hence reducing the workload on network engineers, and greatly reducing network down time. Key Words: Border Gateway Protocol, Logs, Troubleshooting, Network Serviceability, Routing Protocol, Internet Service Provider 1. INTRODUCTION Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard, and the most scalable of all routing protocols. BGP is the routing protocol of the global Internet, as well as for Service Provider private networks. BGP has expanded upon its original purpose of carrying Internet reachability information, and can now carry routes for Multicast, IPv6, VPNs, and a variety of other data. When BGP is configured incorrectly, it can cause massive availability and security problems, as Google discovered in 2008 when its YouTube service became unreachable to large portions of the Internet. What happened was that, in an effort to ban YouTube in its home country, Pakistan Telecom used BGP to route YouTube’s address block into a black hole. But, in what is believed to have been an accident, this routing information somehow got transmitted to Pakistan Telecom’s Hong Kong ISP and from there got propagated to the rest of the world. The end result was that most of YouTube’s traffic ended up in a black hole in Pakistan. More sinisterly, 2003 saw a number of BGP hijack attacks, where modified BGP route information allowed unknown attackers to redirect large blocks of traffic so that it travelled via routers in Belarus or Iceland before it was transmitted on to its intended destination. Fig-1: Example BGP Topology When network engineers have to tackle any problems regarding either the configuration or maintenance of BGP on network routers, they use the logs generated by BGP debugging on the routers to gain detailed information about different events and updates with regard to BGP. However, a typical log file may exceed millions of lines, and it becomes very