A. 

Cisco Business Dashboard is translated into the following languages:

• Chinese

• English

• French

• German

• Japanese

• Portuguese

• Spanish

A. 

Connect to the server console and execute the command "sudo systemctl restart cisco-business-dashboard".

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Cisco Business Dashboard uses a variety of protocols to discover and manage the network. Exactly which protocols are using for a particular device will vary between device types.

The protocols used include:

• Multicast DNS and DNS Service Discovery (aka Bonjour, see RFCs 6762 & 6763)

• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)

• Link Layer Discovery Protocol (see IEEE specification 802.1AB)

• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

• RESTCONF (See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-netconf-restconf/)

• Proprietary web services APIs

A. 

Cisco Business Dashboard uses different discovery processes depending on the network management type:

Direct Managed Network

• You manually connect the first device to the Cisco Business Dashboard.

• This device reports information such as Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP), and Multicast DNS (mDNS, aka Bonjour) to the Dashboard.

• The Dashboard uses this information to identify additional devices in the network.

• It then automatically configures these devices to connect to the Dashboard, making them manageable.

• This discovery process repeats until all devices are found.

• Optionally, the Dashboard can explicitly search specified IP address ranges to discover devices in other VLANs or subnets by scanning for devices with active web servers and attempting to connect using provided credentials.

Probe Managed Network

• The Cisco Business Dashboard Probe listens for CDP, LLDP, and mDNS advertisements to build an initial list of devices.

• The Probe connects to each device using supported protocols and gathers additional data such as CDP and LLDP adjacency tables, MAC address tables, and associated device lists.

• This information helps identify more devices, and the process repeats until all devices are discovered.

A. 

The Cisco Business Dashboard Probe does not actively scan the broader network. The Probe will use the ARP protocol to scan the IP subnet it is directly attached to, but will not attempt to scan any other address ranges. The Probe will also test each discovered device for the presence of a webserver and SNMP server on the standard ports.

For direct managed networks, you may optionally create a schedule profile to actively scan designated IP ranges for manageable devices. If this is done, then the dashboard will attempt to connect to webserver ports on each IP address in the specified ranges to determine if a device is manageable.

A. 

The detection time depends on the network management type:

• For Direct Managed networks, Dashboard typically generates an offline alert up to 20 minutes after a device without CBD connection goes down. If the CBD connection itself goes down, the device is marked offline immediately.

• For Probe Managed Networks, the detection time varies based on the protocol and monitoring interval. Detection time ranges from 1 minute to 16 minutes for a Software Probe. Detection time ranges from 12 minutes to 30 minutes for an Embedded Probe.

Actual detection time may vary depending on network conditions and configuration.

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No, Cisco Business Dashboard does not support directly moving a device from one network to another. If devices are physically part of the same network - meaning they are connected or belong to the same VLAN - they will automatically discover each other using CDP, LLDP, or Bonjour, and the Dashboard will put them together in the same network. However, you can create separate device groups to apply specific configurations or monitoring profiles to each group as needed.

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New devices will be added to the default device group. If configuration profiles have been assigned to the default device group, then that configuration will be applied to newly discovered devices.

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Any VLAN or WLAN configuration associated with profiles that are currently applied to the original device group that are not also applied to the new device group will not change, and VLAN or WLAN configuration associated with profiles that are applied to the new group that are not applied to the original group will be added to the device. System configuration settings will be overwritten by profiles applied to the new group. If no system configuration profiles are defined for the new group, then the system configuration for the device will not change.

A. 

If a device displays a "Pending Configuration Out of Sync" or "Configuration Mismatch" status in Cisco Business Dashboard, you should:

1. Go to the Inventory page in Cisco Business Dashboard.

2. Select the affected device by clicking on its hostname to open its details page.

3. Check the "Pending Config" tab in the device details page.

4. If the current configuration in CBD is incorrect or outdated, click "Read Current Configuration" to retrieve the latest configuration from the device.

5. If the pending configuration is still out of sync after this, you can either:

   • Click "Accept Current Configuration" to replace the pending configuration with the current configuration from the device, or

   • Click "Apply Pending Configuration" to re-apply the pending configuration to the device.

Additionally, ensure that the device credentials are correct. If there are credential issues, update them in Administration > Device Credentials in the dashboard as needed.

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The following table lists the protocols and ports used by Cisco Business Dashboard:

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The following table lists the protocols and ports used by Cisco Business Dashboard Probe:

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The following table lists the Cisco servers that Cisco Business Dashboard communicates with, and the purpose of that conversation:

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The following table lists the processes and system services used by Cisco servers that Cisco Business Dashboard:

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The following table lists the processes and system services used by Cisco servers that Cisco Business Dashboard Probe:

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All communication between the Dashboard and the device/Probe is encrypted using a TLS 1.2 session authenticated with server certificates. The session is initiated from the device/Probe to the Dashboard.

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No. When Cisco Business Dashboard discovers a supported device, it will attempt to access the device using the factory default credentials for that device with the username and password: cisco, or the SNMP community:public. If the device configuration has been changed from the default, then it will be necessary for the user to supply correct credentials to Cisco Business Dashboard.

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Credentials for accessing Cisco Business Dashboard are irreversibly hashed using the SHA512 algorithm. Credentials for devices and other services, such as the Cisco Active Advisor, are reversibly encrypted using the AES-128 algorithm.

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If you have lost the password for all the admin accounts in the web UI, you can recover the password by logging on the console of the Probe and running the cbdprobe recoverpassword tool, or logging on the console of the Dashboard and running the cisco-business-dashboard recoverpassword tool. This tool resets the password for the cisco account to the default of cisco, or, if the cisco account has been removed, it will recreate the account with the default password. Following is an example of the commands to be provided in order to recover the password using this tool.

cisco@cisco-business-dashboard:~$ cisco-business-dashboard recoverpassword
Are you sure? (y/n) y
Recovered the cisco account to default password
recoverpassword Cisco Business Dashboard successful!
cisco@cisco-buisness-dashboard:~$

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The default credentials for the Virtual Machine bootloader are username: root and password: cisco. These may be changed by running the config_vm tool and answering yes when asked if you want to change the bootloader password.

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The dashboard uses two levels of authentication.

• First, the source IP address of the incoming request is compared with the external IP address(es) of the networks managed by the dashboard when NAT is in use, or the internal subnets of the networks when there is no NAT in use.

• Second, a unique, randomized RADIUS secret is created for each organization and must be used by the network access device in its request.

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The AI Assistant operates based of a large language model (LLM) which is designed to provide responses to your queries based on the questions it receives. It does this without collecting or storing any of your personal (PII) data. It does, however, retain past conversations you have had so you can easily reference them in the future.

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No, your data is not used to train the AI Assistant.

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Cisco Business Dashboard tunnels the remote access session between the device and the user. The protocol used between the Probe and the device will depend on the end device configuration, but Cisco Business Dashboard will always establish the session using a secure protocol if one is enabled (e.g. HTTPS will be preferred over HTTP). If the user is connecting to the device via the Dashboard, the session will pass through an encrypted tunnel as it passes between the Dashboard and the Probe, regardless of the protocols enabled on the device. The connection between the user's web browser and the Dashboard will always be HTTPS.

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When you access a device via Cisco Business Dashboard, the browser sees each connection as being with the same web server (the Dashboard) and so will present cookies from each device to every other device. If multiple devices use the same cookie name, then there is the potential for one device’s cookie to be overwritten by another device. This is most often seen with session cookies, and the result is that the cookie is only valid for the most recently visited device. All other devices that use the same cookie name will see the cookie as being invalid and will logout the session.

A. 

A. 

Yes, the connection is secure. Cisco Business Dashboard tunnels the remote CLI console access session between the device and the user through an encrypted tunnel. The protocol used to access device is SSH. The connection between the user's web browser and the Dashboard will always be HTTPS.

A. 

The Dashboard uses the Ubuntu Linux distribution for an operating system. The packages and kernel may be updated using the standard Ubuntu processes. For example, to perform a manual update, log on to the console as the cisco user and enter the commands sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. The system should not be upgraded to a new Ubuntu release, and it is recommended that no additional packages should be installed beyond those included in the virtual machine image supplied by Cisco, or those installed as part of a minimal Ubuntu install.

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Cisco Business Dashboard uses the OpenJDK packages from the Ubuntu repositories. OpenJDK will automatically be updated as part of the updating the core operating system.

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Cisco Business Dashboard uses the Ubuntu Linux distribution for an operating system. The packages and kernel may be updated using the standard Ubuntu processes. For example, to perform a manual update, log on to the console as the cisco user and enter the commands sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. The system should not be upgraded to a new Ubuntu release, and it is recommended that no additional packages should be installed beyond those included in the virtual machine image supplied by Cisco, or those installed as part of a minimal Ubuntu install.

A. 

The Raspbian packages and kernel may be updated using the standard processes used for Debian-based Linux distributions. For example, to perform a manual update, log on to the console as the cisco user and enter the commands sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. The system should not be upgraded to a new Raspbian major release. It is recommended that no additional packages are installed beyond those installed as part of the 'Lite' version of the Raspbian distribution and those that are added by the Probe installer.

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Unfortunately, the changes between the two operating system releases are too great to allow an in-place upgrade. If your current system is running Ubuntu 20.04, you should upgrade the dashboard to release 2.7.0 and then follow these steps to successfully upgrade to a Dashboard based on Ubuntu 22.04:

1. Take a backup from the existing Cisco Business Dashboard instance.

2. Please ensure to release any device licenses currently allocated to the existing Dashboard instance. To accomplish this, navigate to the System > License page, and select Deregister… from the drop-down list located at the top right.

3. Shutdown the current Dashboard server. The restoration process may assign the new server the same IP address as the current server, leading to a potential IP conflict. To prevent this, it is critical to shut down the current server prior to restoration.

4. Install a fresh Dashboard instance with latest version, then restore the backup file taken in step 1 to this new instance.

5. Please ensure the Dashboard server address remains consistent after restoration to allow connected devices to reconnect seamlessly. If using a domain name, update the DNS to point to the new Dashboard instance. For AWS or Azure, assign the same public IP address to the new Dashboard instance.