Is there an inexpensive utility or tool available to monitor BGP status between peers that will page or send and email to me when the BGP connection is down? If you know one, let me know.
I have experienced that my BGP peer (upstream ISP) new network engineer change the BGP configuration on their side. The upstream ISP and their new network engineer made many mistakes; first, they should have proper procedure before making any changes; second, the new network engineer should ask the person who configure the original/previous working configuration why it was configured that way; third, after the new network engineer change the configuration he should check if it is working, if it's not he should have contacted the network engineers on the other side (that is me).
Monitoring only the BGP neighbor IP Address by PING is not good enough. Your BGP neighbor might do something stupid like what I have experienced. If you have multiple BGP peer with multiple upstream ISP, you won't immediately noticed the problem that I encountered until you check the bandwidth utilization or you execute "sh ip bgp summary"
Remind cisco to include ebgp multihop in the CCNP exam. Some doesn't know ebgp multihop.