Systems involved
| System | Role |
|---|---|
| LibreNMS | Utilization and growth trend data. |
| Transit provider portal | Quote, order, circuit ID, handoff details. |
| Datacenter colo portal | Cross-connect request, rack and panel location. |
| Juniper MX / Cisco ASR core | BGP session, interface bring-up, policy. |
| NetBox | Circuit record, IP allocations, ASN records. |
Slack #capacity | Engineering channel. |
| Gmail | Customer and transit-provider comms. |
| Studio Procedures | Transit BGP bring-up runbook. |
Walkthrough
Capture the growth case
Copilot pulls LibreNMS graphs for the last 180 days, fits the trend, and estimates the exhaustion date. The artifact is a Markdown case with the 95th-percentile chart, the growth fit, and the recommended upgrade window.
Quote upstream
Request quotes from two transit providers with 1 Gbps ports at the Auckland POP. Responses land in Studio; Copilot tables them side-by-side with port cost, commit, overage, MRC, and NRC.
Internal approval
The case artifact and the quote comparison go to the engineering lead and finance. Approved, PO raised, provider chosen.
Order the cross-connect
Through the colo portal connector, order the cross-connect to the new transit port with target date. The colo returns panel and cassette details; they get stored on the new circuit record in NetBox.
Pre-stage the BGP config
Before the circuit date, Copilot drafts the new BGP session config in Juniper syntax: peer ASN, peer IP, prefix limits, BGP TTL, MD5, inbound and outbound policies. The config stages as an artifact; it does not hit the router yet.
Cross-connect day
The colo confirms the cross-connect is done. SSH to the core router. Bring up the new interface, push the pre-staged BGP config, verify
show bgp summary shows Established, verify prefix counts match expected.Shift traffic gracefully
For 30 minutes, AS-path prepend on the old session. Watch the utilization move. When traffic stabilises on the new path, send graceful shutdown on the old session, then decommission.
Customer comms
Through Gmail, send a post-upgrade note to customers whose SLAs reference the specific POP: upgrade completed, capacity headroom restored, no action required. Status page gets a Completed Maintenance entry even though there was no scheduled outage.
Where Studio earns its keep
- The upgrade case is evidence-driven — the finance review isn’t a handwave about growth; it’s a chart with a fit.
- The BGP config is pre-staged and reviewed in daylight, not composed at 02:00 with the old circuit about to be disconnected.
- The graceful shift via AS-path prepend is visible in the live utilization graph, and the decommission only happens when the numbers confirm it.
- Post-upgrade comms reference the same circuit record and customer list the engineering work did.
Related
Procedures
Transit BGP bring-up is reusable whenever a new peer comes online.Network diagrams
Update the POP topology with the new upstream.