Looking Glass (BGP)
Look up the announcing ASN, covering prefix, country, and AS neighbours for a public IP via RIPEstat.
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NetTests can run this check on a schedule, preserve historical results, compare changes over time, and alert you the moment something breaks.
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What does a BGP Looking Glass show?
For a public IP address, it shows the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing information: the Autonomous System Number (ASN) announcing the IP, the covering prefix (the IP block), the country where the block is allocated, and the AS path — the sequence of ASNs traffic traverses to reach the destination. Data comes from RIPEstat's routing information service.
What is an ASN?
An Autonomous System Number (ASN) uniquely identifies a network under a single administrative domain that connects to the internet via BGP. Large ISPs, cloud providers, and enterprises each have one or more ASNs. For example, AS15169 is Google, AS16509 is Amazon AWS, AS13335 is Cloudflare. ASNs are assigned by Regional Internet Registries (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc.).
What is a BGP prefix?
A BGP prefix is an IP address block announced to the internet as a routing destination. For example, 8.8.0.0/16 is announced by Google. Routers around the world use these prefix announcements to build their routing tables. Smaller prefixes (higher prefix length like /24) are more specific and take precedence over larger ones (/16) during routing decisions — this is called longest-prefix matching.
What can I use BGP information for?
Common uses: identifying which ISP/cloud an IP belongs to, detecting BGP hijacks (unexpected ASN announcing your prefix), confirming your IP is being routed correctly after a provider change, investigating spam source networks, and network debugging when traffic appears to take unexpected routes.