BGP4 Network - Support

Summary

While running and maintaining an autonomous routing based network, BGP4 technical knowledge and experience is essential. One can choose to build up such knowledge internally (up to some level) or outsource the maintenance of the BGP4 network.

Very often however, internal and external knowledge is combined, either over time (by initially outsourcing and gradually taking over maintenance yourself) or based on the service level (by doing first or even second line maintenance yourself, and outsourcing second or third line support).

In a Non-Stop redundant setup outsourcing starts at € 225 per month for third line support, and goes up to € 900 per month for fist line maintenance.

Description

1e line maintenance (24*7/1)

First line maintenance of the BGP4 implementation means executing the day-to-day tasks to operate the router. This includes:

• In-band and out-of-band (modem, GSM modem) access to the router for maintenance and emergency purposes;
• Availability/responsiveness monitoring of the router;
• Automatic regular backups of the router configuration;
• Signaling (e.g. SMS and email) of an engineer upon problems detected by monitoring;
• A on-duty engineer availably 24*7 for receiving signals from monitoring and taking first action upon problems;
• A syslog server in order to be able to receive and check log notices of the router;
• Traffic graphs (e.g. cacti via SNMP) for the router for statistical, management, planning and financial monitoring reasons;
• The ability to do basic checks (e.g. ping, traceroute, looking up a route in BGP, checking status of interfaces and BGP sessions) checks upon reported problems (by monitoring or customers);
• The ability to determine where a problem might originate (in your network, in hardware, in the operating system, in the BGP4 configuration, with one of your bandwidth suppliers, or further on the Internet outside your responsibility and influence);
• The ability to open support calls with suppliers or second or third line support, including providing those parties with enough debugging information to allow them to be able to actually investigate and resolve problems;
• Setting up simple peering sessions (generally roughly a copy of earlier configs).

2nd line support (24*7/4)

Second line support is used for urgent problems with the BGP4 configuration that cannot be resolved by regular day-to-day engineers, and cannot wait until regular business hours and therefor need to be escalated to second line support with a rapid response time.

3rd line support (8*5/NBD)

Third line support is used for resolving non-urgent (things that can wait until business hours) problems in the BGP4 configuration or configuration changes that are to complex for day-to-day engineers.

Pricing

Open Peering can take care of the 1st line BGP4 Maintenance or 2nd or 3rd line BGP4 Support on a network, whether it is one router of a fully Non-Stop redundant setup with two routers.

Conditions

Working hours included

In the above products a maximum amount of management or support hours per month is included in the price as described below. Additional spent hours are calculated in rear at tariffs described below.

Non-Stop

The above prices for a Non-Stop setup apply when two routers within 1 network (AS) are used, in a load balancing or failover redundant configuration.

Not on-site

The Support is not done on-site but only via email, phone, inband (over the Internet) or out-of-band (dial-in) from the Open Peering NOC. The customer is responsible for remote access to the routers.