The Datapository

A collaborative network data analysis and storage facility

XMLRPC Interface to the BGP Monitor

For remote, automated access to the BGP monitor, we provide an XML-RPC-based interface that's much easier to use than scraping the HTML results. The server is www.datapository.net and the program path is /bgpmon/dataview-rpc.cgi. Please note that both of these are subject to change as we expand the datapository.

Interface

The server exports three functions:

• feeds() -- returns a hash containing information about the BGP feeds available.
  • name
  • type - can be bgpup, bgptable, ... and others.
  • public - a binary yes/no flag.
  • description - text string describing the feed.
• feeds_with_details(param_hash) -- returns the same hash as above, but includes several additional fields:
  • count - total number of entries in the feed
  • start - date (unix timestamp format) of first entry in feed
  • end - date of last entry in feed
  
  The param hash takes only a single argument, type for the type of feed.
• dataview(param_hash) -- returns a query result hash generated by searching on the specified parameters. The result hash contains four items:
  • type -- type of feed. For BGP view, set type to "bgpup"
  • list -- a list of BGP updates. Each entry in the list is a hash defining the time, prefix, mask, type, aspath, localpref, and med for the update. (not all of these are defined for all updates).
  • querytime -- how long the query took to process.
  • query -- what SQL statement the dataview script issued (for debugging).
  • queryid -- a hash of the query parameters actually used by the dataview code.

Dataview accepts a hash table of parameters to control the script. The parameters are:

• type- The type of feed to search (must be bgpup for bgp feeds)
• feed -
• origin_as -
• aspath -
• aspath_rel - How the AS path should be searched. Can be contain, start, end, or is
• time -
• stime -
• etime -
• prefix_rel - How the prefix should be searched. Valid relations are eq (exact match) lte (all subnets) and gte (all supernets).
• prefix - specified as ipaddr/mask
• limit - how many rows to return at most

Sample script

To get a feel for using the XML-RPC interface, grab our ruby command-line query script. Note that almost all of the code in there is actually just explaining to the user what the options are; the interface itself is very simple.

./bgpview-client.rb --feed=ana1_gblx --prefix="206.197.119.0/24" \
                    --prefix-rel="eq" --time=between --start-time="11/05/2005"  \
                    --end-time="11/12/2005"

2005/11/05 06:00:11   A  206.197.119.0/24     701 6315
2005/11/05 06:00:40   A  206.197.119.0/24     701 6315
2005/11/08 01:48:00   A  206.197.119.0/24     701 6315
2005/11/08 03:49:27   A  206.197.119.0/24     701 6315 

Last updated: Tue Feb 06 18:45:10 EST 2007 [validate xhtml]

datapository - at - emulab dot net.