I recently came across an excellent draft at IETF by Job Snijders &  friends.  This is to address scenarios where a network might miss communication about a maintenance activity when BGP shutdown happens. Once implemented, this can potentially offer to send peer a message with up to 128 bytes with info about shutdown like “Ticket XXX: We are upgrading the router, will be back live in 1hr” etc. It depends by appending such data to the sys notification which is part of BGP protocol. This is one which sends a message just before the shutdown of the session. So it similar to the way you see session tearing down due to prefix limits etc. This has already been implemented in some of the open source routing implementations like OpenBGPd, GoBGP, PMacct, Exabgp etc.

 

Here’s the latest draft of this change: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idr-shutdown-09. And here’s Job’s talk from NANOG conference at the start of this year.

 

Hopefully, we will see this implemented across large vendor routers!