About Cisco Business Dashboard

Cisco Business Dashboard provides tools that help you monitor and manage the devices in your Cisco Business network. It automatically discovers your network, and allows you to configure and monitor all supported devices such as switches, routers, and wireless access points. It also notifies you about the availability of firmware updates, and about any devices that are no longer under warranty or covered by a support contract.

Cisco Business Dashboard is a distributed application which is comprised of two separate components or applications as described below:

The Dashboard

Cisco Business Dashboard also referred to as the Dashboard, is installed at a convenient location in the network. From the Dashboard user interface, you can get a high-level view of the status of all the sites in your network, or concentrate on a single site or device to see information specific to that site or device.

The Probe

Cisco Business Dashboard Probe also referred to as the Probe is installed at each site in the network and associated with the Dashboard. The probe performs network discovery and communicates directly with each managed device on behalf of the Dashboard.

Note

Certain network devices support being directly associated with the Dashboard and managed without a probe being present. When network devices are being managed directly in this way, all management functions are available for the device, but the network discovery process may not be as comprehensive as when a probe is present.

Audience

This guide is primarily intended for network administrators who are responsible for Cisco Business Dashboard software installation and management.

New Release Information and Updates

This section provides information on new features in Cisco Business Dashboard release 2.5.x as of September 2022.

Table 1. New features and changed behavior in Cisco Business Dashboard, Release 2.5.1
Feature	Description	Where Documented
Guest Portal for Wireless Networks	Guest portals for wireless networks may be centrally hosted by Cisco Business Dashboard.	See Configuring Wireless LANs See Configuring Guest Portals

Table 2. New features and changed behavior in Cisco Business Dashboard, Release 2.5.
Feature	Description	Where Documented
Wireless configuration enhancements	Additional wireless configurations including radio settings, radio frequency optimization, rogue access point, and interferer detection can now be managed.	See Viewing Detailed Device Information See Configuring Wireless LANs See Configuring Wireless Radios
Authentication Services for user-based network access.	User-based authentication can be enabled on wireless LANs and switch ports using Cisco Business Dashboard as the authentication server.	See About Port Management See Configuring Wireless LANs See Users See Security Consideration FAQs
New Notifications	Additional notifications have been added to identify when a device’s administrative password has expired, and when there is a mismatch between the current device configuration and the desired configuration.	See Supported Notifications
Let’s Encrypt certificate management from GUI	Let’s Encrypt certificates can now be installed and managed entirely through the administration GUI.	See Managing Certificates

The system requirements for the Dashboard and Probe have been updated. See the Installation Guides in Related Documents for more information.

All formal Release Notes are located at Cisco Business Dashboard Release Notes.

Related Documents

The documentation for Cisco Business Dashboard is comprised of a number of separate guides. These include:

Administration Guide (this document)—This is a reference guide that provides details about all the features and options provided by the software and how they may be configured and used.
Device Support List—This list provides details of the devices supported by Cisco Business Dashboard and the features available for each device type. For a list of all the devices supported by Cisco Business Dashboard, refer to Cisco Business Dashboard Technical References.
Quick Start Guide—This guide provides details on performing the initial setup for Cisco Business Dashboard using the most commonly selected options. For an overview of the basic tasks required for managing a network, refer the Cisco Business Dashboard Quick Start Guide.
Release Notes— These are documents listing all the new features and fixes with each new Firmware Release. You will find them at Cisco Business Dashboard Release Notes.

Installation Guides

The following table lists all the installation guides of Cisco Business Dashboard software that can be deployed on different platforms.

Refer to these guides for the System Requirements for Cisco Business Dashboard and Cisco Business Dashboard Probe.


Supported Platforms	Location
Amazon Web Services	Cisco Business Dashboard Installation Guide for Amazon Web Services(AWS)
Micorsoft Azure	Cisco Business Dashboard Installation Guide for Microsoft Azure
Oracle VirtualBox	Cisco Business Dashboard & Probe Installation Guide for Oracle VirtualBox
Microsoft Hyper-V	Cisco Business Dashboard Installation Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V
VMWare vSphere, Workstation and Fusion	Cisco Business Dashboard & Probe Installation Guide for VMWare
Ubuntu Linux (Dashboard and Probe) and Raspbian Linux (Probe only)	Cisco Business Dashboard & Probe Installation Guide for Linux

Terminology


Term	Description
Hyper-V	A virtualization platform provided by Microsoft Corporation.
Open Virtualization Format (OVF)	A TAR archive containing one or more virtual machines in OVF format. It is a platform-independent method of packaging and distributing Virtual Machines (VMs).
Open Virtual Appliance or Application (OVA) file	Package that contains the following files used to describe a virtual machine and saved in a single archive using .TAR packaging: Descriptor file (.OVF) Manifest (.MF) and certificate files (optional)
Raspberry Pi	A very low cost, single board computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. For more information, see https://www.raspberrypi.org/.
Raspberry Pi OS	Formally known as Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi OS is a Debian-based linux distribution optimized for the Raspberry Pi. For more information, see https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/.
VirtualBox	A virtualization platform provided by Oracle Corporation.
Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)	Virtual hard disk is a disk image file format for storing the complete contents of a hard drive.
Virtual Machine (VM)	A virtual computing environment in which a guest operating system and associated application software can run. Multiple VMs can operate on the same host system concurrently.
VMWare ESXi VMWare Fusion vSphere Server VMWare Workstation	A virtualization platform provided by VMWare Inc.
vSphere Client	User interface that enables users to connect remotely to vCenter Server or ESXi from any Windows PC. You can use the primary interface for vSphere Client to create, manage, and monitor VMs, their resources, and the hosts. It also provides console access to VMs.
Hypervisor	Also known as a virtual machine monitor or VMM, is software that creates and runs virtual machines (VMs). A hypervisor allows one host computer to support multiple guest VMs by virtually sharing its resources, such as memory and processing.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)	An on-demand cloud computing platform.
Micosoft Azure Active Directory	A cloud-based identity and access management service that provides single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to help protect users from 99.9 percent of cybersecurity attacks.

Bias-Free Language

Results

Chapter: Cisco Business Dashboard Overview

Cisco Business Dashboard Overview