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BGP Group

A group of BGP sessions that share, more or less, the same purpose. It is a common practice to group BGP sessions together. For instance, one may want to make a group composed of transit provider BGP sessions only. A group can be defined once but it is not tied to a router. This means that one group can be configured on several routers depending on which router the BGP sessions are attached.

In Peering Manager

Inside Peering Manager, you create a BGP group to aggregate multiple direct BGP sessions that you want to manage in the same way. A common use case would be to create one BGP group for transit providers, one for customers and one for private peering sessions. You can create as many groups as you want depending on how you want to manage BGP sessions in your network. For each group that you create, the following properties can be configured (n.b. some are optional):

  • Name: human-readable name attached to a group.
  • Slug: unique configuration and URL friendly name; usually it is automatically generated from the group's name.
  • Status: session's status such as enabled, disabled, etc.
  • Comments: text to explain what the group is for. Can use Markdown formatting.
  • Import Routing Policies: a list of routing policies to apply when receiving prefixes though BGP sessions in the group.
  • Export Routing Policies: a list of routing policies to apply when advertising prefixes though BGP sessions in the group.
  • Communities: a list of communities to apply on prefixes handled by sessions in this group.
  • Tags: a list of tags to help identifying and searching for a group.

Please note that an Internet Exchange is a kind of BGP group with more specific properties aimed to match the purpose of an Internet Exchange network. However while a group can be configured on more than one router, an IX can only be attached to a single router. This means that if you are connected more than once to an IX, you'll have to create one IX object per connection.