AWS Direct Connect adds CloudWatch metrics for BGP monitoring

AWS Direct Connect now publishes three new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for virtual interfaces (VIFs) that provide visibility into Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) session health and route counts. Network engineers and operations teams managing hybrid cloud connectivity can now monitor BGP sessions natively through CloudWatch without building custom solutions or polling APIs.

These metrics solve critical monitoring gaps that previously required custom Lambda functions or on-premises network management tools. VirtualInterfaceBgpStatus reports BGP session state, enabling detection when sessions fail. VirtualInterfaceBgpPrefixesAccepted tracks prefixes from your on-premises network, allowing proactive alarms before reaching prefix limits that would cause BGP sessions to enter idle state. VirtualInterfaceBgpPrefixesAdvertised monitors routes AWS advertises to your network, helping validate configuration changes and detect silent route withdrawals that impact traffic even when BGP sessions remain up.

These metrics are available for private, public, and transit virtual interfaces in all commercial AWS Regions. You can integrate them with CloudWatch alarms, dashboards, and Amazon SNS for comprehensive BGP monitoring, reducing mean time to detect network issues and simplifying operations for multi-region and disaster recovery architectures. To learn more about AWS Direct Connect, visit https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/.