Methods and apparatus to detect border gateway protocol session failures

A method comprising:

• obtaining provisioning data for a provider edge (PE) router;
• receiving one or more border gateway protocol (BGP) messages from a route reflector, the one or more BGP messages representing a list of active routes for the PE router;
• comparing the list of active routes with the provisioning data to determine whether a provisioned route is not present in the list of active routes;
• and
• declaring a BGP session failure when the provisioned route is not present in the list of active routes;
• counting a number of times that the provisioned route is not present in the list of active routes;
• comparing the number of times to a threshold to determine whether to declare the BGP session failure;
• comparing the number of times to a second threshold;
• and
• declaring that the provisioned route is flapping when the number of times is less than the second threshold.

A tangible article of manufacture storing machine readable instructions that, when executed, cause a machine to:

• obtain provisioning data for a provider edge (PE) router;
• receive one or more border gateway protocol (BGP) messages from a route reflector, the one or more BGP messages representing a list of active routes for the PE router;
• compare the list of active routes with the provisioning data to determine whether a provisioned route is not present in the list of active routes;
• and
• declare a BGP session failure when the provisioned route is not present in the list of active routes;
• count a number of times that the provisioned route is not present in the list of active routes;
• compare the number of times to a threshold to determine whether to declare the BGP session failure;
• compare the number of times to a second threshold;
• and
• declare that the provisioned route is flapping when the number of times is less than the second threshold.