Is letting routers generate traps on bgp changes a bad idea

Question

In a largish (1M+) IP environment I am responsible for monitoring/alarming and guarding IPAM integrity. Seeing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, I asked the guys responsible for the network (a mix of Cisco and Juniper) to configure the routers to send traps on BGP table content changes of internal networks. I want to use them for the NMS and to check for unauthorized networks.

They are convinced this is a bad idea but are not able to explain, or I am not able to understand why, except for that this will generate a lot of traps, which I don't care for. Filtering and fatter NICs will take care of that.

Is this a really bad idea and if so what would be a better approach? Keep in mind that a commercial solution is not an option.

Answer 1

The concern is that generating the traps will affect the performance of the router, especially on that day when things go wrong and you have a lot of changes. Some problem will cause instability, which will lead to a flurry of traps, which will tax the router, leading to even more instability,...

An alternative is to dedicate a router to monitoring the BGP table. This router does not route traffic. It participates in BGP, but does not advertise any prefixes. This router can send you traps -- if it runs into problems, your network is not affected.