BGP.Tools
BGP.Tools is a community-maintained BGP analysis platform popular among network operators and internet infrastructure professionals. It provides enriched AS metadata, a looking glass for real-time routing queries, IRR data integration, and visual tools for understanding internet routing. We use BGP.Tools as a supplementary metadata source for AS information on rtsak.com and robtex.com.
Source:BGP.Tools
What is BGP.Tools?
BGP.Tools was built by Ben Cartwright-Cox, a well-known figure in the network operations community. It distinguishes itself from academic BGP data projects like RouteViews and RIPE RIS by focusing on practical tooling for network engineers who need quick answers about routing.
The platform offers several capabilities:
- AS metadata - Enriched information about Autonomous Systems beyond what RIR databases provide, including inferred network type (transit, content, enterprise, IXP), observed peer counts, and community-contributed tags
- Looking glass - Real-time BGP queries showing how routes propagate through the internet from multiple vantage points
- IRR explorer - Tools for examining Internet Routing Registry objects, helping network operators verify their route registrations are correct and consistent
- Prefix analysis - Detailed views of prefix announcements including origin AS, AS path, communities, and RPKI validation status
- Visual AS graph - Interactive visualizations of AS interconnection relationships
What makes BGP.Tools particularly valuable is its community-driven metadata enrichment. Network operators can add tags and descriptions to their own ASNs, and the platform infers additional metadata from observed routing behavior. This produces richer AS profiles than what raw RIR databases or BGP collectors alone can provide.
The platform is free for basic use and has become a daily tool for many network operations teams, complementing commercial platforms like PeeringDB and Hurricane Electric's BGP Toolkit.
How We Use This Data
On rtsak.com and robtex.com, we incorporate BGP.Tools metadata to enrich our AS profiles. When you look up an AS number, we may display additional context such as inferred network type and enriched organizational details that come from BGP.Tools.
This metadata layer helps users quickly understand what kind of network they are looking at. Knowing that an AS is classified as a transit provider versus a content network versus an enterprise network changes how you interpret its routing behavior. A transit AS with thousands of peers behaves very differently from a single-homed enterprise network.
We combine BGP.Tools metadata with our own BGP routing data, RIR allocations, and WHOIS records to build the most comprehensive AS profiles possible. Each source contributes a different dimension of information, and together they provide a complete picture of an AS's identity and role in the internet.