Hello all — I've been troubleshooting an issue with a provider's looking glass (won't name names yet) and need some sanity checking.
The LG shows my prefix reachable via their preferred path. Great! But actual traffic from my monitoring at three locations takes completely different routes — higher latency, different AS path visible in traceroute, and packet loss the LG doesn't reflect at all.
I opened a ticket. Their response: "The looking glass runs on separate infrastructure and is not representative of production routing."
Did you test your restore? Wait, wrong checklist — let me make the right one:
- [ ] LG disclaimer mentions separate infra
- [ ] LG disclaimer mentions non-production paths
- [ ] Actual routing documented somewhere accessible
None of these were true. The LG page just says "Looking Glass" with a search box. No warning, no asterisk, no "for entertainment purposes only."
This feels misleading. Not asking for perfect parity, but "not representative" buried in a ticket response isn't transparency. Following 3-2-1 rule for data, but what's the rule for routing verification?
Has anyone else run into this? How do you handle provider LG tools you can't trust?
