PacketVis offers an easy-to-use BGP and RPKI monitoring service, which can be integrated with virtually anything. Two weeks ago we explained how to integrate our REST API in your systems.
Today we are presenting a new feature that will make your day-to-day monitoring easier: interactive notifications!
PacketVis allows you to receive notifications on:
- Telegram
- Slack
- PagerDuty
- Jira
- Mattermost
- Microsoft Teams
- RocketChat
- Webex
- Pushover
- Opsgenie
- Syslog
- Website dashboard
- REST API
Motivations
If your network configuration changes (e.g., you are announcing a new prefix, or you establish a new peer), PacketVis informs you that the change is now visible from numerous BGP peers worldwide.
If you applied those network changes on purpose, you may want to confirm that everything is fine, and that from now on this is an expected situation. Or maybe it was not expected, and you need to fix that. There is also the possibility that you are not interested in that notification at all, and you would like to prevent further similar notifications.
As you may have noticed in previous communications, two of our priorities are:
- to keep the amount of notification to a minimum, by providing the most accurate and fine-tuned monitoring tailored for you;
- to simplify the way you interact with PacketVis and seamlessly integrate PacketVis in your toolbox.
In the past, we introduced several automated systems that understand the AS type and your use case to automatically tune the settings of your monitoring, update configurations, and reduce unwanted notifications. However, this is not enough, since in some cases the human input is needed to discern whether the notification is due to malicious/erroneous network activity or not.
Interactive notifications
With interactive notifications, all our integrations become bots you can interact with to investigate, resolve, or mute a network alert.
For example, if you are using the Microsoft Teams integration and your Autonomous System announces a new prefix, you would receive a notification similar to the one below.
The notification includes some actions you can perform.
If you click yes, you declare that everything is fine, and that the new prefix should be monitored from now on.
This means that the new prefix will be monitored for hijacks, RPKI invalids, visibility problems, and much more, while the network issue will be marked are resolved. Of course, the page of the notification on the PacketVis portal will reflect this new status.
This will allow you to have everything under control and keep your monitoring configuration up to date directly from your mobile device.
PacketVis supports also integrations with Jira, PagerDuty, and Opsgenie. These are systems more ticket oriented rather than chats. Below an example with Jira.
Interactive notifications for the entire team
When you create a PacketVis account, you can decide if you want to create a team or join an existing team (in PacketVis, teams are called “organizations”). If you are the admin of the organization, you can invite other members of your company to join your PacketVis’ organization. You can set the read/write access rights for each of them.
If you set up a common chat channel with your colleagues, they can see the notifications in real time and interact with them to keep the company monitoring up to date.
Escalation policies
Each notification type has a predefined severity. However, the user can click on the severity label of the notification and assign another severity among low, medium, high, and critical. This will affect not only the edited notification, but also all the future notifications of the same type.
All the integrations can be configured in settings. One of the parameter accepted by all the integrations is the minimum severity that the notifications need to have in order to be forwarded.
For example, the configuration below allows all notifications to be forwarded by email, but only the critical ones will be sent to PagerDuty to be resolved in a timely manner.
Start monitoring your BGP and RPKI operations now!
Enjoy!