All, Merit Network and the University of Maryland would like to announce the beta release of a BGP update messages research tool that might be of use to the NANOG community. The tool is called BGP::Inspect. The goal is to make the vast quantities of Routeviews data easily accesible to the network operator and research community. This involves not just allowing people to query and obtain the update messages, but also providing some simple analysis and statistics on the data which can help in locating anomalies and problems. At this point we feel that we could really benefit from some feedback from the community. A beta release of our prototype is available at: http://weasel.merit.edu:9191/ This version has been initialized with a limited amount of data. It currently provides information regarding 5 of the 40 routeview peers, and only contains data for the time period from Dec 20 - Jan 6. The basic interface has been kept simple. There are 2 types of queries that can be run "Summary Queries" and "Raw Data Analysis". The summary queries allow users to quickly focus on potential trouble spots(as observed at the routeview peers). Basic queries include things like most active ASes, most active prefixes, as well as prefixes that exhibited the most number of changes in their OriginAS. The second type of queries, "Raw Data Analysis" can be used to obtain information regarding specific ASes or prefixes for a given time range. A query for a specific AS will return not only the various prefixes announced by that AS, the times, paths, and communities, but also summary stats including total number of announcements in that time period and the number of unique prefixes announced in that time period. A 7 day summary graph is also returned which summarized the most recent activity as seen originating from that AS. A similar query for a specific prefix will return times, types(announce/withdraw), aspaths and communities from update messages as well as summary statistics that indicate the min/max/avg AS path length as seen over the query time interval, the number of originAS changes as well as the number of unique ASes that announced that prefix. A summary graph indicating the activity of that prefix over the last 7 days is also displayed. In a lot of ways this tool complements the Search by AS/Prefix tools from RIPE, BGP Monitor from MIT, and LinkRank from UCLA. The more views from different vantage points the better. In addition there is a real effort with BGP::Inspect to provide not simply access to the raw data, but some simple analysis and summary statistics as well. The hope is that people no longer need to write custom parsers to be able to extract the information they need. We would appreciate any and all feedback from the NANOG community. In particular, it would be instructive to us to learn what are some other "typical" queries that we could add, in addition to the the "Top 20 most active ASes/Prefixes" and "Top 20 prefixes which have most number of origin AS changes." What are some other basic questions that researchers and network operators ask when attempting to analyze problems. Please send feedback offlist to: mkarir@merit.edu thanks manish karir --------------------------------------------