Looking Glass

How to use the UAE-IX Looking Glass

There are two basic ways to get information: 

• The global search over all route servers (1)
• The neighbor overview (2)

With the global search, you can search for IP prefixes, peer names, ASNs and BGP communities. This is the fastest way if you need to get information about a specific network. 

With the neighbor overview, you can have a look at a specific route server. It shows you which networks are available at a specific route server, provides BGP session information (state, last state changed), and gives you a summary of received/accepted/filtered routes from each peer.

The global search over all route servers 

With the global search, you can search across all UAE-IX route servers. You can directly search for: 

• Prefixes
• Peers (by name, e.g. Packet Clearing House)
• ASNs (by prefixing them with 'AS', e.g. AS42)
• BGP communities (by prefixing them with '#', e.g. #65535:666)

Just type in what you're looking for.

Narrow down the search results 

On the results page, it is possible to narrow down the search results with three drop-down menus on the right. You can refine your search by: 

• Route server
• Neighbor (in case your search matches more than one route server peer)
• BGP communities (multiple BGP community values can be selected; the communities are ordered by value)

The selected filters appear above the drop-down field and can be removed easily by clicking the red 'X' icon. 

Please note: The database that is used to generate the search results in the global search contains data that may be up to 30 minutes old. The actual cache age is displayed in the upper right corner.

Get information about specific route server neigbor 

You can see more information about a specific route server neighbor by clicking on its neighbor IP. All routes (filtered, accepted, and not exported) are shown. If the selected peer operates more than one router, you can switch between routers by clicking the tabs shown at the top. There are also quick links available to jump to sections with filtered, accepted and not exported routes directly. Routes that are the best path are marked with a star icon.  

If a route is rejected, the reason is displayed in text below the affected route. You can hover over the text to get a detailed explanation of what went wrong and how to fix it. You can also click on the reject reason to explore the route in question in IRR Explorer. 

To get more detailed information about a route, just click on it. This will show you the BGP attributes: 

• Age of the route (when it has been learned)
• Origin of the route (IGP/EGP/unknown) 
• Local Preference 
• BGP next-hop 
• MED 
• AS Path 
• BGP Standard, Extended and Large communities in human readable format if known by the route server (i.e. UAE-IX Operational and Informational Communities and well-known BGP Communities)