BGP Dampening was purposed to keep route stability in the networks. Many ISP used BGP dampening to keep their infrastructure for instability. However, it has side effect. Customers prefix can be damped just because of one link flapping. Some customer prefix can be damped and received penalty from their upstream providers. This makes some problems become hard to troubleshoot and need human interference to clear damping status in upstream providers. Also, it will provides inconsistency route advertisement in the internet.
One of BGP community, RIPE.NET seen this problem and makes some recommendation to avoid those side effects. You can click this link to view the complete documentaton.
Quote from ripe.net:
“This Routing Working Group document proposes that with the current implementations of BGP flap damping, the application of flap damping in ISP networks is NOT recommended. The recommendations given in ripe-229 and previous documents [2] are considered obsolete henceforth.
If flap damping is implemented, the ISP operating that network will cause side-effects to their customers and the Internet users of their customers’ content and services as described in the previous sections. These side-effects would quite likely be worse than the impact caused by simply not running flap damping at all. “
So ??
Could you to think whats impact of your dampening configuration?
I don’t see the benefits of dampening configuration towards downstream connection.
