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I monitor about 150 routers with MPLS links.
To check if connection is established, I'm pinging loopbacks visible only from WAN. If a loopback is not responding, I can see which link is not working properly.
What are better possibilities? Pinging public address is not possible, as I noticed, and, sometimes, I still have router-edge router connection, but BGP is not established.
What are other monitoring options?
The short answer is "SNMP" from a network management platform (canonically Nagios, but there's a world of alternatives).
You'd be interested in monitoring:
The BGP neighbour status of all those routers.
The presence of all those router's loopback addresses in the BGP routing table.
The MPLS path establishment status for each of those circuits.
and so on.
You can use TCL inside Cisco to ping, or if the links are reachable from your PC, then you can use Python or scapy framework to ping and capture IP addresses which didn't respond.
If you are monitoring 150 routers, I would recommend implementing a network monitoring tool like Solarwinds or Nagios. Solarwinds is a commercial product with a free trail and Nagios is an Open Source solution.
Both will allow you to setup SNMP monitoring, provide a graphical monitoring interface and allow you to configure notifications when a node goes down.
If they are Cisco routers, have a look at IOS Embedded Event Manager, EEM. You can have the router email you, for example, if a particular interface or subinterface goes down. It is a very flexible system in terms of options.
By using monitoring tool solarwind you will be able to get the BGP session status. And the reachability of that site, and lot more.
