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In order to get end-to-end visibility for applications, we need complete topology data from IGP domains. One approach is to set up a central...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of August, 2021.

Have you ever found that a network usage reported by your commercial NetFlow analyzer does not match the actual values or that software contains bugs? ...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of July, 2021.

In general, oversubscription is a subscription for more than what is available. Oversubscription represents an intentional business model and is a widespread practice in...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of June, 2021.

There is a lot of confusion around the 95th percentile bandwidth metering. Therefore this blog posting is intended to provide you with detailed information...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of May, 2021.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of April, 2021.

BGP blackhole filtering is a routing technique used to drop unwanted traffic. Black holes are placed in the parts of a network where unwanted...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of March, 2021.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of February, 2021.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of January, 2021.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of December, 2020.

As 2021 approaches, we thought it's a good time to look back at all the important milestones we've achieved in 2020. Moreover, we wanted...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of November, 2020.

A while ago, RIPE Labs published the two-part article BGP Communities - A Weapon for the Internet. That may have been a bit of...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of October, 2020.

Network professionals count on NFA when monitoring and analyzing traffic, controlling bandwidth utilization, gaining insights into potential security issues, and reviewing BGP peering relationships....

Noction Flow Analyzer is a flow-based monitoring and reporting software tool that collects, stores, and presents traffic data across an entire network. NFA enables...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of September, 2020.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of August, 2020.

NetFlow is a great way to gather traffic statistics from your network. With Noction Flow Analyzer, you can view all your NetFlow data in...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of July, 2020.

Network flow monitoring is an essential tool for a lot of network administrators. Flow monitoring allows you to collect and record all IP traffic...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of June, 2020.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of May, 2020.

As a router gains more and more BGP neighbors, two issues arise. The first one is that with many neighbors, whenever the router needs to...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of April, 2020.

Update: Tier 1 carriers performance March 3rd - April 6th Update: Noction Intelligent Routing Platform performance resultsThis is yet another COVID-19 related blog post. We...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of March, 2020.

In this blog post we’ll be looking at BGP errors. For that, our first question should be: is there an error, or is everything...

Like other very successful protocols such as HTTP and DNS, over the years BGP has been given more and more additional jobs to do....

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) system is a way to couple an IP address range to an autonomous system number through cryptographic signatures,...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of February, 2020.

Previously, we’ve already looked at traffic engineering in general and AS path prepending in particular. Traffic engineering is distributing the traffic load over available...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of January, 2020.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of December, 2019.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of November, 2019.

On the 25th of November 2019, RIPE NCC made the final /22 IPv4 allocation from the last remaining addresses in the available pool and...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of October, 2019.

When you’re managing a network, there’s so much to think about — from monitoring bandwidth, discovering traffic patterns to performing threat analysis and providing...

Usage-based billing enables customers to pay only for data that they have used.  In order to charge customers based on data usage, a company...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of September, 2019.

When it comes to major security concerns, one of the most serious ones are the data breaches and security exploits caused by insider incidents....

With the increasing popularity of multicast media applications, the monitoring of multicast traffic becomes more and more important. When it comes to NetFlow, it...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of August, 2019.

Role of RTT and OWD for TCP RTT stands for Round Trip Time and it is a length of time that a packet takes from...

In traditional methods for DDoS mitigation, such as RTBH (remotely triggered blackhole), a BGP route is injected, advertising the IP address of the server...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of July, 2019.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of June, 2019.

Network visibility is crucial because we cannot manage and secure what we cannot see. NetFlow plays a critical role in traffic visibility by helping...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of May, 2019.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a core routing protocol used by most of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). BGP’s role is to exchange routing...

This article gives some insights on how to set up a network traffic analysis and alerting system based on NetFlow. NetFlow is an advanced...

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in a Wide Area Network (WAN) - SD-WAN is a technology that simplifies management of WAN by decoupling control plane from...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of April, 2019.

On August 8th, 2014 some ISPs experienced a phenomenon called the “512k Day”. The global BGP routing table, which consists of the global Internet...

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a practice that allows users to bring their personal devices such as tablets or smartphones to the workplace...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of March, 2019.

So far, we have discussed NetFlow configuration for network devices from various vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, VyOS. We have collected layer 3...

Our previous article discusses flow-based SSH compromise detection. A force attack against SSH hosts consists of scan, brute-force and compromise phases that can be...

Secure Shell (SSH) provides a secure channel over an unsecured network in a client-server model. SSH is typically used to log into a remote...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of February, 2019.

The Internet we know nowadays cannot properly operate without using the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS syncs up domain names with IP addresses so...

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a well-known standardized application layer protocol, originally developed for network management but mostly used for network monitoring. SNMP...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of January, 2019.

Duplication of NetFlow occurs when the NetFlow records about the same flow are exported multiple times to a NetFlow collector. In turn, the volume...

In our previous article we have discussed the alternative way to get flow statistics using a NetFlow generator. One of the fundamental features of...

What is a NetFlow Generator? A NetFlow generator is a dedicated network appliance or software running on a PC and listening on a single or...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of December, 2018.

This is the second part of the post dedicated to NetFlow configuration. In the first part, we’ve discussed the configuration of Flexible NetFlow on...

One of our recent blog posts dedicated to NetFlow technology provides the necessary knowledge needed to understand NetFlow principles and what it is used...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of November, 2018.

Flow-based (NetFlow, IPFIX, NetStream) and packet-based (sFlow) network monitoring technologies enable network administrators to gain insight into traffic traversing a network. They provide various...

Network monitoring is a systematic effort to monitor parameters of a computer network in order to detect issues that degrade network performance. Network Traffic...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of October, 2018.

Nowadays, the very abstract ideas underlying the quantum physics are being translated into reality thanks to new technological capabilities in the field of nanotechnology...

This blog post discusses BGP Labeled Unicast (BGP-LU) which is used in multi-regional networks to carry the label information. While the RFC3107 “Carrying Label...

The aim of this article is to discuss the importance of Recursive Lookup in BGP. First of all we need to understand the purpose...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of September, 2018.

RFC 7311 defines an optional non-transitive BGP attribute called the Accumulated IGP Metric Attribute (AIGP).As we know, IGP stands for Interior Gateway Protocol...

Quality of Service (QoS) refers to a collection of technologies that networking devices use to apply different treatment to packets as they pass through...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of August, 2018.

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of July, 2018.

We have recently posted the BGP Route Aggregation eBook that discusses the benefits of route aggregation and explains the various optional parameters associated with...

The unstable route whose availability alters repeatedly is called a flap. When flaps occur, fexcessive number of BGP UPDATE messages are sent to BGP...

The BGP Attribute Filter feature enables BGP speakers to take a certain action based on the presence of a specified path attribute inside the...

Full iBGP Mesh and Route Reflection To avoid loops in a Full iBGP Mesh, BGP routers are only allowed to learn prefixes over iBGP from...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of June, 2018.

Network Address Translation (NAT) was originally described in RFC 1631. Although initially presented as a short term solution for preventing the IPv4 addresses depletion,...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of May, 2018.

The BGP advertisement of a prefix with new attributes replaces the previous announcement of that prefix. This behavior is known as an Implicit Withdraw,...

In this blog post, we will take a look at Kevin Myers's presentation where he discusses deployment of  both OSPF and BGP routing protocols...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of April, 2018.

What is BGP Hijacking? BGP hijacking is an illicit process of taking control of a group of IP prefixes assigned to a potential victim. Either...

In this article we’ll take a look at the architecture for multicast forwarding called the Bit Indexed Explicit Replication or simply BIER. However, we’ll...

The report offers specific insights into the performance of major Internet Carriers for the month of March, 2018.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attack in which the multiple compromised devices attack a target and cause the denial of service for...

In our previous blog article we’ve discussed the benefits and the fundamental principles of BGP/MPLS L3 VPNs. We have covered the definition of the...

The report is presented in a slightly different form from the previous ones. Besides the general analysis we have complemented it with data reflecting...

What is VPN? Virtual Private Networks (VPN) are designed to provide users with the private networks capabilities over a shared infrastructure. They connect remote sites...

IPv6 Addressing The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) adoption is growing at pace. According to Google statistics, 22% of the users reach Google over IPv6...

The report covers broadly used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US and the general spread for the month of January 2018. For...

Network congestion may occur when a sender overflows the network with too many packets. At the time of congestion, the network cannot handle this...

The Intent-based Networking (IBN) concept is actively being discussed by IT professionals over the last few months. It represents a new approach to networking,...

The presented analysis is based on more than 900 million successful probes that span the entire month. All data is aggregated per carrier on...

Internet traffic has a wide range of variability at all times. However, the fourth quarter of the year typically remains the busiest for a...

The recently published AT&T white paper "Towards an Open, Disaggregated Network Operating System" shows the company’s willingness to discuss and actively promote the creation...

Disclaimer*: The data presented in this report card is intended for information purposes only and is not to be interpreted as any form of promotion...

The Internet of Things (IoT) attracts huge public attention nowadays. It is a network of interconnected physical devices (things) which sense and interact with...

Disclaimer*: The data presented in this report card is intended for information purposes only and is not to be interpreted as any form of promotion...

What is Cryptocurrency? Cryptocurrency is a digital asset that works as a medium of exchange. It uses cryptography to secure transactions and to control the...

Recently, a new Internet draft - Internet Protocol Version 10 (IPv10) attracted attention of network enthusiasts. People on the Internet forums often ask if...

Disclaimer*: The data presented in this report card is intended for information purposes only and is not to be interpreted as any form of promotion...

Large-scale data centers (DCs) connect hundreds of thousands or even more servers, having millions of users. Generally, every DC runs two kinds of applications....

The current report covers widely used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US for the month of August 2017. Rare datapoints from distant...

Just like with the other routing protocols such as OSPF or EIGRP, BGP speaking routers first need to become neighbors prior to exchanging routing...

The current report covers widely used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US for the month of July 2017. Rare datapoints from distant...

BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) is a protocol used for monitoring BGP sessions. It is defined in RFC 7854. Prior to BMP, network operators used...

This analysis covers widely used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US for the month of June 2017. Rare datapoints from distant locations...

This article discusses BGP session culling techniques that mitigate a negative impact of maintenance of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) on IP networks. IXP represents...

This analysis covers widely used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US for the month of May 2017. Rare datapoints from distant locations...

In this blog post we are going to explain how Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnel might be used in a situation when the Border...

This analysis covers widely used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US for the month of April 2017. Rare datapoints from distant locations...

This analysis covers widely used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US for the month of March 2017. A new carrier, Hurricane Electric,...

Whether you are an experienced network administrator or you have just started to learn Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Looking Glass (LG) is definitely a...

Slack is a great communication platform that simplifies and streamlines day-to-day operations of various teams around the world.Integrating the tools that engineers adopt in...

This analysis covers widely used Tier 1 carriers performance results in the US for the month of February 2017. Infrequent datapoints such as data...

The analysis covers Tier 1 carriers widely used by US networks. Datapoints that appear rarely, such as data from Alaska, or a single use...

In the previous two posts we wrote about using PeeringDB to find information about potential peers and obtain the peering details using the REST...

As Noction continues to intelligently optimize routing for more and more networks around the world, we find ourselves in the unique position of having...

In our previous post, we wrote about using PeeringDB to find information about potential peers, and then after peering has been arranged, using PeeringDB...

At Noction, collecting and analyzing petabytes of data across all IRP instances worldwide offers us valuable data regarding overall Internet performance as well as...

When networks exchange traffic without having a customer-provider relationship, this is called peering. We've talked about peering in previous Noction blog posts, such as...

When first starting out with BGP, the typical way to advertise a network's prefixes is using the network statement with a prefix filter and...

While networks are agnostic to the content of the serviced packets, end users have a very good understanding of what traffic they have and...

In most cases, when you have multiple connections to multiple ISPs, you want to use both links side-by-side, with each handling a certain fraction...

What is Asymmetric Routing? Asymmetric routing is the situation where packets from A to B follow a different path than packets from B to A....

Here on the Noction blog we've covered many aspects of using BGP to connect your network to the internet. However, often implementing BGP isn't...

Last year, we discussed the MED attribute and how it can be useful along the local preference and the AS path as a tool...

One given in the network world is that bandwidth will increase. So that Gigabit Ethernet link that provided bandwidth to spare a year ago...

Before we look at BGP path hunting, let's first discuss the RIP count to infinity problem. RIP, the Routing Information Protocol, is pretty much...

It's been a while since we talked about filtering BGP updates. BGP routers need to be configured with the right filters so packets don't...

When the BGP session between two routers is established, the two routers exchange prefixes and then start sending traffic for those prefixes to the...

As end-users, we expect to connect to an Internet Service Provider which will take our packets and deliver them to all destinations around the...

Border Gateway Protocol is unique among routing protocols because it requires a number of parameters to be configured manually on each side before two...

The past few weeks we've discussed the main BGP path attributes: the next hop, the AS path, the MED. We also covered the community...

When BGP needs to choose which route to reach a certain destination is best, it first looks at the local preference and AS path...

In earlier articles, we discussed the next hop and local preference attributes. Today we'll be looking at the AS_PATH attribute as well as the...

In the previous blog post, we looked at the BGP NEXT_HOP attribute. Today we'll cover another attribute: the LOCAL_PREF or local preference. What is LOCAL_PREF? The...

Once a BGP session is established, routers will exchange two types of messages: KEEPALIVE and UPDATE. Keepalive messages are sent to let a neighboring...

In many online games, very good network performance is a prerequisite for satisfactory gameplay. However, there are many kinds of games, and their networking...

We've talked about network latency several times in previous blog posts. Today, let's drill a bit deeper on that topic, and especially how it...

Video is an interesting network application. Many users consume hours of video per day, and an hour of HD video is easily more than...

When flying, it's important to choose the right airline. Obviously, a direct connection is usually best, but if a layover is necessary, it helps...

The network that never needs any maintenance, along with the associated downtime, hasn't been built yet. You can plan your own downtime such that...

In our last post, we took a look at RPKI. With RPKI, it's possible to reject prefixes that are originated by the wrong AS,...

In our last post, we looked at protecting the TCP session that carries BGP information between two routers, mainly against spoofed TCP resets. However,...

Back in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when BGP was developed, security was still an afterthought for protocols used on the internet....

Yesterday, an incident occurred where an Autonomous System (AS) advertised more than 7,000 prefixes that belong to other networks. These are "more specific" prefixes—subsets...

As discussed in earlier posts, as networks grow larger it starts making sense to exchange traffic with other networks directly (peering) rather than pay...

BGP is older than IPv6. Even BGP-4, the version we still use today, predates IPv6: the first BGP-4 RFC (RFC 1654) was published in...

As explained in our last blog post, packet loss and latency can seriously impact application performance. There's not much we can do about latency,...

The triumvirate of network performance metrics are latency, loss and jitter. Today, we're going to take a look at how each of them —...

Business people often believe that in order to have a reliable system, you need reliable components. Using reliable components to build your network certainly...

In some ways, BGP is nice and simple. For instance, there's only one BGP: BGP version 4. Many network professionals have been asking the...

At home, we pay an ISP to transport our packets to and from the rest of the world. Most organizations do the same. But...

After reading the title of this article you may be thinking of small neighborhoods in the world's most-connected cities where BGP-minded people live together,...

One thing we all learn quickly after getting started with BGP is that if left to its own devices, the protocol will happily propagate...

It’s common knowledge that Border Gateway Protocol has no ability to make performance-based routing decisions and often routes traffic through paths that are congested...

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a standard protocol that network devices use to control each other and report critical information. The main advantage...

There are several route optimization techniques applied to networks distinguished by a single routing domain. The traditional approach requires network engineers to apply various...

Our customers ask repeatedly about the benefits IRP brings to their infrastructure. To address some of these questions we've compiled a few Overview Reports...

Conventional wisdom leads us to believe that interconnects between peering partners in an Exchange that is shorter will also be better than traditional links...

The typical fully-meshed iBGP configuration of routers can become very difficult to manage in large networks. Because of the increasing numbers of iBGP sessions...

There are various techniques for optimizing traffic routing across multiple transit providers available in a network. However, there are some additional challenges when there...

Nowadays, the Internet is made-up of more than 45,000 active Autonomous Systems (ASes), each with a different complexity level and specific configurations. To accomplish...

Inter-domain traffic engineering aims to optimize traffic performance, originating and terminating in different administrative domains. At the moment, Autonomous Systems exchange traffic via exterior...

Service Provider's customers want to know the time frames they can expect a response and resolution from the provider when they submit a request...

All organizations that depend on Internet for sales revenue or business continuity require internet redundancy. Downtime lowers productivity, yields losses and painfully affects the...

BGP is a protocol which performs routing information exchange among routers to determine the optimal paths for the traffic flow. A BGP router forms...

It’s a commonly known fact that congestion on the road significantly increases the time the auto vehicles must spend to get to the destination....

An operational network is a strategic business resource. It carries everyday messages and mission-critical data, and facilitates communication between people and business processes. It...

Speed is highly prioritized in networking. Applications with high bandwidth consumption and mission-critical systems demand ever more throughput and capacity. While the main demand...

 Most multi-homed networks need to engineer and control the traffic flow for both performance and economical reasons. This is commonly done by manually tweaking...

BGP multihoming has become as necessary to the networks connected to Internet, as the use of redundant power sources or multiple data centers. No...

During the transfer of information in the Internet, there are various situations related to certain host or network inaccessibility, or channels of communication overload....