Looking Glass

Give your customers, peers, and NOC teams transparent visibility into your network. Our Looking Glass product delivers real-time BGP route lookups, ping, and traceroute from every Point of Presence — powered by an edge probe with a built-in BGP speaker that peers directly with your routers.

What is a Looking Glass?

A network looking glass is a public tool that lets anyone query the live routing state of a network from the operator's perspective. It provides external visibility into BGP routing tables, reachability via ping, and path tracing via traceroute.

Interstellio's Looking Glass is a turnkey product you deploy across your own Points of Presence. Your operators, peers, and customers can verify routing, diagnose path issues, and validate peering from any location where your infrastructure is present.

The product is named after the stars. The backend probe is Orion — the celestial hunter whose constellation has guided navigators for millennia, fitting for a component that charts the paths your packets take across the internet. The frontend UI is Rigel — the brightest star in Orion, and the face your users see when they look into your network.

Transparency builds trust. A looking glass lets anyone verify how your network sees the internet.

Powered by Orion

The Looking Glass is backed by Orion, a lightweight edge probe you deploy at each of your Points of Presence. Orion exposes a simple REST API for BGP lookups, ping, and traceroute — and includes a built-in async BGP-4 speaker that peers directly with your routers to maintain a live view of the routing table.

Edge Deployed: A single lightweight process at each POP, running directly on the network edge.

Built-In BGP Speaker: Peers directly with your routers — no external daemons required.

Radix-Tree Prefix Trie: Fast exact, longest-match, and or-longer prefix lookups.

Authenticated API: Token-secured REST endpoints with input validation on every request.

Live Streaming Results

Unlike traditional looking glasses that run a command and return static output, the Looking Glass streams results to your users in real time:

Ping: Replies appear as each probe completes with per-packet RTT.

Traceroute: Hops fill in live with per-hop loss, latency, jitter, and packet counts.

BGP: Prefix, AS path, communities, and next-hop display immediately.

Cancellable: Users can stop any running query at any time.

BGP Route Lookup

Query the live BGP routing table at any POP by entering an IP address, prefix, or AS number. Results display:

Prefix & Path: Matching prefixes with full AS path and next-hop.

Communities: Standard, large, and extended BGP communities.

Route Age: When each prefix was last updated and its origin type.

Per-Neighbour Detail: See exactly which peer advertised each prefix.

Enriched Data: Each ASN in the path displays its registered name, and every prefix shows its geolocation and RIR allocation.

Your customers and peers can verify peering, debug route leaks, and confirm prefix reachability — all from your network's perspective.

Traceroute

Our traceroute goes beyond basic path discovery. It continuously probes every hop along the path, streaming statistics in real time as each cycle completes:

Packet Loss: Per-hop loss percentage updated continuously as probes complete.

Latency: Last, average, best, and worst round-trip time per hop.

Jitter: Standard deviation per hop for identifying unstable links.

Reverse DNS: Hostname resolution for every hop along the path.

IP Detail: Click any hop to view its reverse DNS, origin ASN and name, geolocation with RIR, covering BGP prefix, and full AS-path.

Multi-POP Architecture

Each deployment connects to one or more Orion agents across your Points of Presence. Your users select a POP from a dropdown and all queries execute from that location:

Geographic Querying: Run the same query from different locations across your network.

Cross-POP Comparison: Compare routing and latency between Points of Presence.

Local Execution: Each POP has its own Orion probe with direct access to the local network.

Easy Expansion: Add new POPs without redeployment — just deploy another Orion probe.

Custom Branding & White-Label

The Looking Glass frontend (Rigel) supports full theme customisation:

Your Brand: Custom accent colours, logos, and titles throughout the interface.

Themed Header: Glassmorphism header with configurable backdrop and styling.

Portal Integration: Home button links back to your own customer portal.

Flexible Deployment: Suitable for public customer-facing use or internal NOC tools.

Architecture

The Looking Glass consists of two components:

Rigel: The frontend that renders the looking glass UI. Fully responsive, dark-themed, and optimised for desktop and mobile.

Orion: The edge probe deployed at each POP. Built-in BGP speaker, radix-tree prefix trie, and REST API for route lookups, ping, and traceroute — all streamed in real time.

Both components are lightweight, stateless, and designed for containerised or bare-metal deployment.

Use Cases

ISPs & Carriers: Give customers and peers transparent routing visibility under your own brand.

NOC Teams: Deploy internally for fast reachability checks, path tracing, and routing diagnosis.

Peering Partners: Let peers confirm prefix advertisement and path selection from your network.

End Users: Empower subscribers to run traceroutes and pings from your network to troubleshoot their own connectivity.

Why Choose Our Looking Glass

Real-time streaming — no waiting for commands to finish

Multi-POP support — query from any Point of Presence

BGP, Ping, and Traceroute in a single interface

Continuous hop-by-hop statistics with loss, jitter, and latency

Enriched data — reverse DNS, origin ASN names, geolocation, and RIR for every IP and prefix

Fully themeable and white-label ready

Lightweight deployment — no heavy infrastructure required

Open and transparent — builds trust with peers and customers

Network transparency is a competitive advantage. Deploy the Looking Glass on your infrastructure and give customers, peers, and NOC teams the visibility they need — fully branded, fully yours.