Hi,
I share the 'overloading bgp yet again is a bad plan' but also 'getting ops to run yet another thing on their hardware and arranging that to work properly amongst their peers' is not trivial. (so this goes into bgp, please keep it very simple, small payload + limited ascii-set)
Well I am not in the camp of folks who get high blood pressure if one wants to add new thing to BGP. I don't really think we are any close to overloading BGP or it's commercial implementations.
But whatever we add for one should be useful for the operation and in the same time should not provide any means for negative impact on the existing mechanism.
I am glad you share the small payload (hopefully with limited size) and limited character set to basic ASCII.
Would the latter be acceptable for vendors making domestic equipment in various parts of the world ?
But those are rather minor details which I think Tom would be willing to consider ... For me addition of free form text to fill your peer's syslog into BGP is questionable from the point of view that router will not be able to do any action on it. It is step into opposite direction as intelligent networks. It is forcing human to log in, search, read, parse, make a phone call (yes one of the example lists phone number) etc ...
Sometimes I do wonder why we are so behind in networking that so much human intervention is required to operate it. As one of million examples: we have planes which can fly, start and land on an auto-pilot even in complete fog .. yet here we are adding more stuff which will force more human labor and human operational dependability.
Cheers, R.