Internet Exchange Visualization

Wed Aug 23 14:39:09 UTC 2023

I don't think any of us really understand what you're hoping to find.  I
sure don't.    I think that this might be a result of a disconnect between
your understanding of how these should be monitored and how they are
monitored.

Specifically, of your two statements below,  one is true and one is false.
Just because there are no free "visualization" tools available doesn't mean
that there isn't an understanding of the infrastructure.

I struggle to see how a visualization tool would help with a big picture
view.  The scale of interconnection is so staggering that any visualization
would of necessity be incomplete so mere mortals could process it with our
visual sensors.  Unless what you mean by visualization is different than
what I envision, the resulting visualization wouldn't be all that useful to
network operations.

As a result,  every network operator that I'm aware of relies on various
monitoring tools to alert them based on metrics previously set by humans.
 I.E. circuit congestion and peer status and so on.    There are advanced
tools which do sort through various data sets or traffic to try to alert
humans to things which seem out of place.  But these are not generally
visualization tools, but instead essentially report and alert generators.
 Some times the reports or tools show pretty graphs but I'm not sure I'd
classify that as visualization.

On the other hand, I wonder if I'm perhaps missing what your end goal is
here.  If you could be more verbose about the types of data you hope to get
out of the tool, then perhaps someone could reply with how that's monitored
today.

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 7:43 AM Thomas Beer <thomas.beer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All!
>
> to make an (intermediate) summary so far, it's 2023 and there are no tools
> available
> for BGP, ASN and IX interconnection visualization static or dynamic?!
>
> Nobody has a top-level understanding / awareness of the infrastructure
> topology and fixes
> "bottlenecks", route misconfiguration et al. on a peer - to - peer basis?!
>
> Cheers
> Tom
>
> On Tue, 22 Aug 2023 at 02:34, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I hear the cybergeography project is making a comeback.
>>
>>
>> https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/atlas.html
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 5:17 PM Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 11:06 PM Thomas Beer <thomas.beer at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hi Matt,
>> >>
>> >>>
>> >>> You might mean "exchange inter-connections" as "how are the different
>> internet exchanges connected to each other?"
>> >>> in which case the answer is generally "through the Internet".  ^_^;
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> I meant ix internet exchange path visualization and an online tool to
>> take a look at it in (near) real time!
>> >>
>> >> Cheers
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > Ah, thank you for the enlightening clarification.
>> >
>> > No such tool exists, sorry.
>> >
>> > Thanks!
>> >
>> > Matt
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxmoBr4cBKg
>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20230823/ba184a02/attachment.html>