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Thomas Mangin edited this page Apr 11, 2026 · 12 revisions

Pre-Alpha. This page describes behavior that may change.

This is the day-2 operator's quick reference for the ze show family. The full command list is in reference/command-reference.md. What follows is the ten you will type the most.

ze show is the read-only path. It cannot mutate state, which makes it the right thing to put in monitoring scripts and dashboards. The same commands work inside the interactive shell after ze cli, just without the ze prefix.

The ten most-used

ze show peer list                 # Brief peer list with state
ze show bgp summary               # The BGP summary table
ze show peer <name> detail        # Everything about one peer
ze show peer <name> capabilities  # Negotiated capabilities for one peer
ze show rib routes received <peer> [family]
ze show rib routes sent <peer> [family]
ze show interface brief           # One-line-per-interface summary
ze show uptime                    # Daemon start time and running duration
ze show rpki status               # RTR sessions and VRP counts
ze show warnings                  # Active operational warnings
ze show errors                    # Recent error events
ze show version                   # Version, build, plugin list

peer list

Brief table for "is anything down right now".

$ ze show peer list
NAME       REMOTE          AS       STATE
upstream   10.0.0.1        65001    ESTABLISHED
ixp        192.0.2.42      65010    ESTABLISHED
backup     10.0.0.2        65001    CONNECT

bgp summary

The same shape network operators have been reading for thirty years.

$ ze show bgp summary
NEIGHBOR        AS       UP        STATE          PFXRCVD
10.0.0.1     65001    2h13m     ESTABLISHED      947213
192.0.2.42   65010    18d4h     ESTABLISHED       12047
10.0.0.2     65001    -         CONNECT               -

uptime

ze show uptime reports when the daemon started and how long it has been running. Two fields: start-time (RFC 3339) and uptime (duration string). Useful after a graceful restart or reload to confirm the process came up when you expected.

For per-peer uptime, use peer list or bgp summary, which both show the per-session uptime in their tables.

peer detail

Everything Ze knows about one session, including capability negotiation, families, prefix counters, and timer state. Use it the moment a peer behaves oddly.

rib routes received and rib routes sent

The Adj-RIB-In and Adj-RIB-Out, filterable by peer and family. Pipe through | match for a regex filter, | count for a row count, or | json for structured output.

ze show rib routes received upstream ipv4/unicast | count
ze show rib routes received upstream | match 192.0.2 | no-more

interface brief

ze show interface brief is the one-liner-per-interface view: name, state, MTU, and the first address. Drop brief to get the full interface dump (every address, counters, kernel attributes). Add a name to focus on one interface. Add counters after the name to get just the RX/TX statistics block for that interface. The long form returns structured JSON; pipe through | table or | json as needed.

ze show interface brief             # all interfaces, compact
ze show interface eth0              # one interface, full detail
ze show interface eth0 counters     # one interface, counters only

Connectivity tests: resolve ping, resolve traceroute

ze resolve ping and ze resolve traceroute wrap the host's ping / traceroute and make them available inside the shell (and over the API) without needing a separate shell account on the router.

ze resolve ping 10.0.0.1
ze resolve ping --source 192.0.2.1 --count 5 --size 1500 10.0.0.1
ze resolve traceroute 10.0.0.1
ze resolve traceroute --source 192.0.2.1 10.0.0.1
Flag Subcommand Purpose
--source <addr> both Bind to a specific local address.
--count <N> ping Number of probes.
--size <bytes> ping Payload size.

ping has a 15-second wall-clock timeout, traceroute has 30 seconds. Both use context-based cancellation under the hood so they cannot stall the dispatcher indefinitely. Tab-completion walks YANG and suggests the known interfaces for the source address.

rpki status, warnings, errors

rpki status shows your RTR session count, the cache server, and the VRP totals. warnings and errors query the operational report bus that the BGP reactor and the rest of the subsystems publish to. Warnings are state-based (something is wrong right now). Errors are events (something happened, with a timestamp). Both return JSON by default.

ze show warnings | json
ze show errors  | json

The login banner reads from the same bus and surfaces the active warnings when you connect.

Pipes

The shell understands a small set of pipe operators borrowed from network OS shells.

Pipe Effect
| json Render the structured response as JSON.
| table Render as a table.
| match <regex> Drop rows that do not match.
| count Just the row count.
| no-more Disable paging for long output.

See also

Adapted from main/docs/guide/command-reference.md and main/docs/features/cli-commands.md.

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