Cisco – Monitor BGP connections

• It seems like a few internet exchanges are running bird as route servers in their production network see here for a few examples
• I am part of dn42(networking playground of sorts) and so far I had no problems with bird at all(unlike quagga, which burned me a few times, so it's safe to say it should work on an public production environment too.)
• If you like editing your configuration with an proper editor or want to generate the configuration from some datasource or so(which I do), then bird is for you. If you prefer to edit your configuration via an command line interface, then not so much.
• BIRD requires you to run a seperate daemon for IPv4 and IPv6(unlike quagga), but that's no big loss IMHO, as running IPv4 and IPv6 over the same peering is a PITA in quagga anyway.

Forget self hosting monitoring and use something like monitis - the big advantage is that it checks from multipel external (!) locations and is free / cheap, depending how you check. This way you not only know that your HTTP server works well (it can cehck outout of specific URL's) but also that you are reachable from various international locations.