Cisco Business Dashboard Overview

This chapter contains the following sections:

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.

You can view the application by clicking Request a Demo

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.

Device Management Mode

Direct Managed

Certain devices can support direct association with the Dashboard and managed without a probe being present in the network.​

In a direct managed network, you will need to connect the first device to the Cisco Business Dashboard manually. Then, this device reports information such as CDP, LLDP, and mDNS (aka Bonjour) to Dashboard. This information is used to identify additional devices in the network, Dashboard then connects these devices to itself automatically hence those devices become manageable, and the process repeats until all devices have been discovered. Depending on the size of your network, this process may take tens of minutes. You may optionally have the dashboard explicitly search the IP address ranges to discover network devices, which can be in other VLANs or subnets.

Direct managed network is recommended if all your devices support direct management.

Probe Managed

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.

A software Probe is a probe running in a virtual machine or on a Linux host. A software Probe can generally manage up to 50 network devices.​ Certain devices include the Probe application embedded in the device firmware. An embedded Probe can manage up to 15 network devices.

In one network you should only enable one Probe.

Audience

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

Related Documents

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

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.