Last week, the team headed to Bellevue, Washington, for NANOG 97. Three packed days of operator debates, deep-dive engineering presentations, and the kind of high-value hallway conversations you only get when this community piles into one building.
For FastNetMon, NANOG is always a priority. Over the years, it’s consistently been a place where we meet operators we end up working with, and have conversations that turn into something real later on. Among operator group meetings, this is one of the few where things don’t stay at the level of discussion; they tend to move into actual implementation very fast.
On Stage: Monitoring 2,800 BGP Sessions via BMP
The highlight of the week for us was Pavel Odintsov’s presentation: Monitoring 2,800 BGP Sessions using BMP protocol.
Pavel dug into why traditional monitoring setups such as SNMP, gNMI, and massive full-table dumps completely choke when you try to get real-time, per-peer BGP visibility at scale. He walked through how a BMP-based pipeline can handle full-fidelity telemetry across thousands of sessions and tens of millions of routes, backed by production benchmarks, showing how it holds up under heavy, real-world operational loads.
Watch the full presentation:
The room was packed with operators, and the Q&A afterwards got straight to the point. The technical questions and immediate real-world challenges raised by the audience showed us that the exact problems we’re trying to solve are top-of-mind for engineering teams right now.
In fact, the presentation didn't really end when the timer ran out — the debate spilled out into the corridors and kept going for quite a while.
Other highlights
Beyond the presentations and hallway debates, this was easily one of our busiest NANOGs for media and interviews. We caught up with Eric Chou from Packet Pushers and Network Automation Nerds for a quick micro-interview about network automation and visibility that will be going live very soon. On top of that, the official NANOG media team caught up with our very own Irina for a quick hallway interview highlighting her experience as a NANOG newcomer, sharing what it’s like to navigate the event for the first time. It was a massive week for the team on the media front, and we can't wait to share the footage once it drops.
Beer & Gear, Socials, and Catching Up
The main conference social was fantastic—great execution and an easy environment to reconnect with long-time industry friends and meet new operators.
A major highlight for us this year was the Beer & Gear expo. We actually featured Beer & Gear as part of a live stream this time around, which brought some great energy and broader reach to the room. It was awesome to see community content naturally evolving alongside the main event.
Some of the standout Sessions
The NANOG agenda is always intense, but a couple of presentations particularly hit home for us from a security and operations standpoint:
- The Kimwolf Aftershock: Residential Proxy Botnets One Year Later (Nokia): This talk looked at how residential proxy-based botnets have evolved over the last year and their massive footprint in modern DDoS attacks. The speakers showed how resilient these ecosystems are; even after major takedowns, successor botnets quickly fill the vacuum by recycling the same residential abuse vectors. The sheer scale of endpoint growth they discussed is a stark reminder that modern DDoS defense is no longer about handling isolated incidents—it’s about defending against highly adaptive infrastructure.
- 50 Years of Networking (APNIC): Geoff Huston delivered an incredible, reflective look at the last five decades of networking. He traced how open collaboration and operator-driven engineering built the modern internet, while posing some tough questions about whether those foundational models can survive today's commercial and technical pressures. It was a great reality check and a nice break from the immediate, day-to-day operational grind.
Thank you & see you again soon!
NANOG 97 delivered exactly what makes this event unique: deep technical transparency, honest operational feedback, and plenty of face-to-time with the engineers who keep the internet running.
A huge thank you to the NANOG organisers, and to everyone who stopped by to share feedback, talk shop, or catch up. Meeting existing customers, swapping notes with partners, and making new connections is exactly why we keep coming back.
See you at the next one!
