Routing and connectivity in the Internet is largely governed by the dynamics and configuration of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). A configuration analysis toolkit enables network operators to discover, analyze and diagnose their BGP configuration, policies and peering relationships. Statistical variance analysis in such a toolkit exploits the recurrence of policies in large networks for analysis. In a large network, policies that have similar functions are examined, e.g. all inbound route maps associated with customer autonomous systems. For n occurrences of similar policy P, it is possible to flag k deviant configurations, and evaluate the probability that the deviant configurations are in error. Analysis and policy visualization of implemented BGP configurations enable service providers to move from checking of low-level configuration to extracting analyzable BGP level policy information across a multitude of BGP routers in order to validate consistency of policies and operator intent across distributed BGP configurations using a flexible, customizable analysis engine