Blog

Notes from building Osprey against a lab of 192 real routers running three different IGPs. Every screenshot is taken live; nothing is mocked up.

Series 1: Trust

  1. Three IGPs, One Map

    What 192 routers, three carriers and three routing protocols look like on a single pane of glass
    • osprey
    • ospf
    • is-is
    • eigrp
    • topology
    • multi-tenant

  2. Zero Footprint

    How Osprey sees a network without becoming part of it
    • osprey
    • gre
    • bmp
    • snmp
    • ospf
    • is-is
    • passive-discovery

  3. Hop-by-Hop Truth

    Your path tool draws a corridor. Routers forward hop by hop. Here is the 4,032-pair measurement of the gap.
    • osprey
    • ospf
    • rfc2328
    • rfc3509
    • spf
    • bgp
    • path-analysis

  4. What Osprey Refuses to Guess

    The most important thing I built is a set of refusals
    • osprey
    • design
    • is-is
    • eigrp
    • bgp
    • honesty
    • observability

Series 2: Engineering the Truth

  1. The Same Router, Three Different Truths

    One physical box, several routing identities, and why a node-and-edge graph cannot hold them
    • osprey
    • ospf
    • ospfv3
    • data-model
    • abr
    • asbr
    • topology

  2. When the Network Disagrees With Itself

    Six sources of truth, one answer, and what to do when they contradict each other
    • osprey
    • evidence
    • provenance
    • lldp
    • bmp
    • snmp
    • bgp

  3. The Day My Topology Lied to Me

    An engineering postmortem on my own product, and the lab that caught it
    • osprey
    • postmortem
    • ospf
    • rfc2328
    • rfc3509
    • validation

  4. A Network Engineer's Unit Tests

    How do you test a topology engine when the network itself is the only oracle?
    • osprey
    • testing
    • fuzzing
    • validation
    • vendor-interop

Series 3: From Seeing to Reasoning

  1. What Happens If I Break This?

    A model you trust is only worth having if you can ask it questions it has not been asked before
    • osprey
    • simulation
    • what-if
    • spf
    • ospf
    • eigrp
    • resilience

  2. The Blast Radius

    Every link and every router tested at once, and why graph theory makes it take 13 milliseconds
    • osprey
    • resilience
    • spof
    • tarjan
    • graph-theory
    • dependency
    • bgp

  3. Estimating What You Cannot Measure

    A traffic matrix inferred from link counters, the flow collector I decided not to build, and the honest limits of my own lab
    • osprey
    • traffic
    • tomogravity
    • snmp
    • netflow
    • estimation
    • honesty

  4. The Network Has a Memory

    Reconstructing what the network believed at 14:02, and the difference between what changed and what you learned
    • osprey
    • time-travel
    • snapshots
    • bitemporal
    • bgp
    • forensics