I Failed to Get Any Devices Working: Am I Wrong About How Bad The Cisco Business Dashboard Is?

[@victorc26858]

OMG I thought I was alone in experiencing all of the hurdles that I encountered in attempting to deploy CBD in our environment. You've pretty much outlined everything I had to go through. Thanks for the sanity check.

[@adancalderon8915]

tell me about it. Maybe it will get better when more folks start complaining.

[@jmslagle1]

@@adancalderon8915 Doubtful. They really want you to buy Meraki in the space. I'm gonna tinker with it real quick.

[@ryzenforce]

@@jmslagle1 But Meraki is for the small enterprise and not really something you would put in a medium to large corporation due to lack of features, control and robustness. If you want to put Cisco in a business, you have to put their "real" $tuff (Catalyst/Nexus grade component.. and price). WIth Meraki, don't forget to PAY your subcribtion in time because your business will be DOWN - and even sometime, it comes down because it can't phone home and lock your network. Not really a serious product imo and I would stay away.

[@jmslagle1]

@@ryzenforce You're not using these small business devices there either. They are targeted SMALLER than Meraki. For the bigger iron you'd use Cisco DNA. Which BTW I've found you can't buy many enterprise products without licenses to these days.

[@philippjochem6308]

You did a great job. This is not a rant. Some really humble words for a guy with your experience. I like that attitude.

[@jfkastner]

Sadly they became more interested in selling services, subscriptions and licenses than in improving their products and really helping SMBs

[@christophercordray9529]

I found your video while searching for answers as to why Cisco Business Dashboard 2.8.1.20240508 was not allowing me to add CBS250 switches. Despite 30 years in IT and 25 years in IT Ops Management using leading monitoring products, this solution has me baffled. I appreciate you putting this video out there! It is clearly making a difference a year later.

[@christophercordray9529]

Quick update here. So the issue I ran into was that the CBD installer package for Ubuntu includes a probe but does not enable the probe by default. If you attempt to install the probe package, it will error out before actually starting the local probe. Once the probe is operational, you can begin discovering inventory using SNMP and user accounts.

[@coletraintechgames2932]

YOU ARE A GOD! I am so glad you provided this, I'm an amateur and have tried Cisco command line 3750x and Omada and now am happy as a lark with Unifi. I loved the way you faced the battle the way I would. I'm not moving off Unifi, but I'm so glad you presented it this way. In my mind, I can totally see how some large behemoth of a company like Cisco has too many departments and procedures to launch something like this effectively, and you have exposed as such. Anyway, thanks.

[@DiyDadFL]

The company I work for, we hired an entire Networking Engineering company to manage our Cisco Switches. I've watched them diagnose and swap a Cisco switch, I was definitely very lost on what they were doing.

[@stephenlipton525]

Part of that is to stop your average Joe from undercutting them on real world support. Cisco make a packet on training and certification. I’m a Ubiquiti Enterprise Wireless Admin. The certification cost about $500 including a three day course. Cisco exams are hugely expensive and only valid for a short time.

[@raiden72]

@@stephenlipton525 It's things like that why I stopped getting the CCNA. I can't keep paying them $400 every 3 years and wasting all of my time learning all of their BS. Sure, I would be "on top" of my knowledge but that isn't anything I can't Google in 5 minutes!

[@StevenLastname]

@@raiden72 I share your sentiments. I earned my CCNA in my junior year of college. However, once I got into the real world, I found it much easier to land a job at small and medium businesses. Needless to say, most of them can't afford Cisco infrastructure. So much for that expensive certification I haven't used in five years! On the extremely rare occasion I did work in a Cisco environment, and there was something I couldn't figure out (navigating the Meraki dashboard is awful), it was a five minute Google search! It doesn't make much sense to pursue Cisco certs unless you'll be working with it day in and day out, or if you need some resume padding.

[@VW_Fan]

Every visual interface created by Cisco is awful. This includes their website, exams, dashboard, management software. They are always horrific.

[@tomwyant9532]

I had high hopes for this so I tried it a couple months ago. It’s not worth the time. I do not believe that Cisco takes SMB seriously and I say that as a longtime Cisco tech and reseller.

[@raiden72]

Cisco is a shadow of its former self. If unifi invests enough, they might just take over. They already have their door access equipment line that's integrating with their single pane of glass! I even stopped getting my CCNA..... If that tells you anything...

[@tomwyant9532]

@@raiden72 I love Cisco in an enterprise environment, I just don't see the point in SMB. Cisco COULD clean up in SMB if they wanted to. Unifi's single pane of glass management is sweet and I hope they keep adding features so we can tweak things a bit more. I think the Cisco network and design certs are well worth it even if you don't work on their equipment because they will teach you things that can be used everywhere. I still use quite a bit of what I learned from getting the CCNP and CCDP.

[@raiden72]

@@tomwyant9532 I agree the Cisco learning path is definitely the "right path" but... In the world of "It's who you know not what you know",, My Cisco degree did not get me where I needed to be.... I needed to know the right people and I just did not... And then my Cisco degree lapsed. I'm just jaded because I was not able to fully use the knowledge that I wasted my time on. The whole three year thing really bit me. I was a double CCNA routing AND wireless. But I kept studying too many things.

[@pepeshopping]

When was the LAST time that mighty Cisco cared about small business? I dropped them 25 years ago and have not missed any features or regretted the decision!

[@MR-vj8dn]

I share this experience with Cisco, almost in general. But at the same time I am having difficulty adjusting to “modern” networks like Ubiquity as they tend to lock so many standard features of 2023 out, compared to other equipment. Thanks for sharing.

[@seanwoods1526]

I got a few APs working on this product over a year ago. In the ned I had over 5 tickets on bugs that APs and controller had on adoption alone. I didn't have a switch to test, but I had a router that was support to be supported and it also had a bug that got simi fixed. Before a full fix was released they EOL'ed the router. In the end I pulled all the gear and controller out.

[@ShadVonHass]

When the videos are usually "here's how you do something" and changes to "I can't figure this out, anyone else" and all the comments are "yeah idk how it works either", that REALLY doesn't instill confidence in the product. I've heard the name Cisco before, but who cares if it can't work for apparently everyone.

[@Itay1787]

This is one of the reasons why I hate Cisco, it is not enough that their products cost a lot of money, their software is not that good (for example their routers are not that good) and the licenses! Why do I have to pay for a product I already bought? If the software was in the cloud Ok, I understand that maintenance and infrastructure cost a lot of money, but that I host it, it shouldn't cost money and there shouldn't be any restrictions on it, especially since it's the only way to control their products properly. This is just some of the reasons I will never use Cisco products and will not recommend them. Yes, they are among the most reliable products available at the moment, but there are other options, such as Aruba, which are just as good, and with them I don't need licenses.

[@lukey3030]

Cisco routers are not that good? The only vendor what comes close to Cisco for routing is Juniper. Give me some other names and prove me wrong?

[@Itay1787]

@@lukey3030 pfsense

[@joaopedroalbernaz]

Mikrotik

[@lukey3030]

@@Itay1787 Ffs. You need to stop watching KZbin seriously. As a senior network engineer if I walked into a med/large enterprise and suggested pfsense you’d be laughed out the door. Your saying Cisco routers are crap mostly likely because you absolutely no clue on how to configure one

[@lukey3030]

@@joaopedroalbernaz I’m sorry mate but you’ve not a clue what your talking about

[@brettbump9491]

Love your videos Tom. Can't say I've tried CBD as everything at work is now Cisco Meraki (and a few legacy Cisco that is headed out the door). Started on Wellfleet before the Synoptics merger to BayNetworks so was never really a Cisco fan, but time moves on. Hope you figure it out, but don't put in too much effort (not really worth your time).

[@JimtheITguy]

Exactly the same experience I had and made a video on, I got told I wasn't doing it right, didn't know what I was doing, but at the end of it after many attempts to actually do much with it I gave up and had a rant as well. overall my opinion was that it was Cisco trying to say "We can do that" while keeping it locked into the Cisco system and ciscofying it to make the users feel they have to get specific people in to make it work, overall the Hardware was OK, the CBD just was awfull

[@mabildg1]

Been working with Cisco equipment for almost 20 years both in networking, wireless, firewalls, SDwan and voice and i was looking forward to work with this. Started a new job appr. 8 months ago as internal IT after consulting for many years. They have UniFi so off course - CISCO... 😉 Meraki and similar is NoGo as the IT- manager hates subscription.. so I thought that the CBD with the CBS250 and 350 series switches would be great.... Queue Frustration... CBD installed on VMWare, switch in same VLAN. But very little success.. tried reinstalling, reset but stuck... The CBD saw the switch but very limited contact.. Saw the SNMP post you have referenced.. checking credentials but nothing. After Almost 2 month on and off, I contacted TAC. When 3rd engineer looking at the issue, I had almost lost all hope.. The we tried disabling the local probe on the CBD an configure it on the switch(CBS350) and all worked... WHAAAT..... Disabled the probe on the switch and enabled local probe on CBD and voilà... All is good... Then she says: Yeah, the engineering have told us to restart the probe, if issues like this occurs... THANK YOU FOR THAT NOTE...

[@papypom]

Omada works fine in a small situation (biggest I've used is 6 switches/6 AP), just put a decent router/firewall in front of it (OPNsense/PFsense). Think of it as an Hikvision camera : use them, don't trust them.

[@YKSGuy]

Cisco has NEVER made a fully functional / reliable GUI product at least as far as I have ever experienced.. (other than some already working products they aquired)

[@BladeWDR]

Why do I get the feeling that that 7 min delay thing was a programmer adding that in to troubleshoot something and then forgetting to remove it when he fixed the bug?

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

It does make me wonder...

[@Milkmans_Son]

Would a programmer use an odd number?

[@bzmrgonz]

Guys, I suspect it’s a programmed pause to allow all other devices to come up, for the uninitiated you know… not waiting for all devices to be fully up and broadcasting.

[@monkinto]

@@bzmrgonz I get that if it was dependent on other things but what is it dependent on that would prevent it from starting?

[@bzmrgonz]

@@monkinto according to Lawrence, there was zero processing during the delay, so that’s why I think it’s a deliberate pause, in the event someone without networking knowledge powers everything up at once, the controller then is giving time for other devices to boot up so it can discover them and begin polling. It’s just a theory of mine, we would need to see the code and find a programmed pause command.

[@harrydenouden8221]

Had it deployed in a Factory enviroment. Few things I noticed: - FindIT is garbage so I had to update all the firmware to even had it working - Very unlogical to implement . You first need to set up the dashboard and generate an ID then on every switch you need to activate the FindIT probe with the dashboard ID. Leave it for about a day or two and then you will see slowly your inventory building. - It is very lagging and also you need to reboot the dashboard everytime it fails to query. What I only had different is that I used the OVA from cisco on an ESXi host but we noticed that it was even with enough resources it just was not doing the job correctly. We switched over to the Fortinet platform at a later date so all cisco hardware was swapped out including the Dashboard.

[@michaelamos75]

I have been banging my head with my cisco sb setup, switch and ap. I am so thankful I am not the only one having issues. The furthest I got was downloading the VMWare image then cloaning it to Proxmox.

[@engrpiman]

The fortune 200 company I work for configures everything using the cli. They are also deploying Cisco DNA. I'm no expert and have not tried the business center. From experience the small business series from Cisco works ok but has always been sub par compared to the full blown catalyst series.

[@bikes-hikes-travels8814]

Yea I recently installed a Cisco Business CBS250-8P-E-2G Managed Switch switch with 8 PoE ports, and ports 9 and 10 used as a LAG with two DAC back to my Netgate 6100 1GbE ports both have DAC cages. This is a good switch for this and for VLAN configuration. The Cisco Business Dashboard (CBD) implementation is another story. I tried a local install on an Ubuntu 20 on my ESXi and then their AWS cloud platform for the CBD EC2. In both instances I get it up and running and do the Access Key ID and Access Key Secret generation and exchange on the switch, and the CBD never ever sees the switch. Also, after a few reddit searches turned on SNMP which is not in the manual as you stated. Still, no luck, never got it to see the CB250 switch. Yea the little train that could have been. SMB deployment I will be using my EnGenius Switches which work without an issue and cloud management provisioning is under 2 minutes with no issues.

[@mrcrackerist]

Have you heard about the Grandstream APs no dedicated controller needed as the APs are the controller, currently using a 7660, 7610 and 7605. I am just running these in a home environment but I really love them compared to the old Cisco I used before.

[@Milkmans_Son]

Everybody has stuff that doesn't work, that I can deal with. What I can't deal with anymore is the big ego sales model or whatever it's called. If I've installed 100 firewalls, I'll probably do ok installing number 101 without paying some new guy to come in to baseline my network.

[@andreiyurevich6336]

It's better to use cisco prime or third party tools. Entry level models like cisco 350 is good for switching in mstp based topology without stacking, no more. I guess that CBD is still not ready now.

[@RonaldBartels]

I never used a Cisco management product to manage a cisco device but rather use a 3rd party. When you have the money of an enterprise you can double up on your budget...

[@NathanKull]

I've been running from Cisco for awhile now, there is something better for nearly everything they offer these days.

[@dalevought8054]

I struggled with it some months ago and put it aside also. I like the business line products CBW and CBS and have a few deployed.

[@TripTVx]

I really am curious how Cisco is still a "big player" or even in business. There just seem like so many better options..

[@lazr47]

The inertia of people buying a name is formidable.

[@KlausDiddy]

so please tell us : what are the better options ??

[@ThineHolyBacon]

We're a Cisco shop and refuse to use CBD products because of how bad it is to get working. We mostly deploy Meraki gear for customers both due to supply chain issues and because its at least a competent product.

[@andljoy]

The hell i had to go through to set up a cisco smart account!

[@arigornstrider]

Doesn't Ubuntu 16.04 have 10 years of extended support? I use another system for a hobby side business that is based on 16.04, and I mentioned that to them before I checked Ubuntu's support lifecycle.

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Yes, but not for free ubuntu.com/16-04

[@arigornstrider]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS makes sense. Yeah, not sure if this project has an agreement to distribute the security updates in their custom distro or not. I suspect not based on how the rest of the project is run, but that's why I'm not listing names.

[@chrispeak3928]

It’s too bad HP Aruba doesn’t have a self hosted controller. I have 2 of their APs and I liked the setup>deployment.

[@lukey3030]

The Aruba IAP’s use a virtual controller. One of the AP’s ince your local deployment will be selected as master to be that VC

[@BhaskarProsadBanerjee]

just enable the SNMP in cisco switch or AP, and create a public string, with read/write permission, that all, the probe will automatically discover the devices. by default it is disabled, i am using it for past few month.

[@SB-qm5wg]

There used to be a 3rd party Cisco app call 'MAP' that was much better than this mess. It had IPT/UCCE/CUCM/C{D/M}R, syslog, SNMPv3, alerting, oncall escalations, AI state-machines. etc etc

[@mdocod]

I sat down tonight to try to use this product to manage some CBS switches... So far this is not competitive with Unify products. My experience is similar to yours, it doesn't work.

[@DippyDolittle]

It's obvious why it's not working for you, you haven't spent $50k on course and accreditation certificates. Had you done all of those and brought the super deluxe support package at $8k a month, this would have been a breeze /s 😉

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

This answer makes sense 😂

[@perryuploads776]

Thank you for the video!

[@VioletDragonsProjects]

what switches and access points are required ?

[@TheCreat]

My argument would also be: if you can't get the self hosted dashboard working on your own, using the documentation, is it really a self hosted dashboard? If they really did just make this so they can say "but we have this, wesupport self hosting!", then it's really disappointing.

[@realmiamiunderground]

I can help you anytime I worked alot with cbd in multiple scenarios I also worked alot with cisco through the many limitations

[@lazr47]

I work with IOS, IOS-XE, AireOS, NX-OS, ASA, and FirePower on a regular basis. It's all subpar at best, dumpster fire at worst.

[@_rchi_]

Cisco Certified Business Dashboard Associate upcoming... lol

[@jmslagle1]

I'm pretty close to having it do something, but holy crap is it a POS :P

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

They made the process way harder than it had to be.

[@christopherpeterson6004]

Aruba 1930 - stay away from 1830 series as AutoVOIP does not work at all. CBS350 isn't that bad, but slow boot process. Immediate firmware updates necessary in both cases. Engenius has the best L2 multigigabit switches right now. HPE Aruba 2930M is better, but more expensive than Engenius

[@nixxblikka]

Oh man this video is a relief, recently tried a Cisco switch and was surprised how difficult (and slow) it was

[@loztagain8278]

Cisco are an embarrassment. I work with their stuff, ccnp etc. But it's just not worth the money. It's all bugs and marketing.

[@awstott]

The bugs just keep getting worse and worse too. We rolled out Snort3 on our Firepowers and just randomly dropped some packets but not all. Thankfully one of our guys was able to find it in the logs that it was dropping some, but not all of the traffic. TAC said yeah it's a known bug and to downgrade to V2 - so why not put a warning about enabling it?

[@loztagain8278]

@@awstott I've had exactly that. Best bet for troubleshooting is whenever there is an odd situation, create a fastpath prefilter for the interesting traffic, if it works after that, then snort is dropping without feeding back to the gui. I've had the bug you are on about, but now I have a new one where the drop is silent completely. Literally no feedback anywhere in any log, and yes confirmed its a bug with the latest VDB. I would whole heartedly recommend ignoring cisco if greenfield. Other products aren't much better. WLC problems, DNA Center is messy, I would say tho, that if you just stick to routing and switching they are good. But then, so is everyone else...

[@chrisslaunwhite9097]

Meh, another reason why as a large MSP I will never let my team sell Cisco. Cant justify there prices

[@davidclaveau4419]

am using Cisco Prime and it's not that good too hate those very unfriedly interface from Cisco but i do love their hardware... i don't know about CBD but more i look at it more i don't wanna try it.

[@andyroo24601]

Oh, the dashboard is 100% hot garbage. Similar experience in setting up both CBS 350 series switches and AX150 APs. No iteration of setting up, building and enrolling devices (and I tried a lot of different ways) seemed to work. Cisco give you this rich, powerful, promising tool, and out of the box, every setting that enables things to work fluidly is off or disabled by default. And they don't tell you what settings are required for all this to work, or in what order to change, or in what combination. The entire process is an exercise in humiliation, and will make you doubt any networking knowledge you think you have a decent handle on. Avoid this system at all costs.

[@amessman]

I'd guess it waits 7 minutes to let devices boot? Maybe after a power failure.

[@Gaijin101]

Cisco needs to milk the support costs somehow xD

[@RK-ly5qj]

I have passed cisco ccna/ccnp just for clarification of my knowledge, and i still think that cisco is overhyped. Licensing is so dumb .... cli? Ok its good, but not the best and it desnt solve many problems ;)

[@awstott]

Don't forget you have to pay the DNAC tax on everything now too - whether you're using DNA Center or not you still have to license it

[@ryanreich7635]

Cisco Prime management takes about 30 minutes to just do a reboot. Not surprising that their lower end system just sits there for 7 minutes and does nothing. Kinda comical. Cisco isn't known for their GUIs. Working around in ACI is a joke and DNA Center is no better.

[@awstott]

DNAC is quite the beast - we're working on rolling it out. It's been a year long deployment and we still don't have assurance data in it from the APs. From what I've seen the projected heat maps in Prime are more usable than DNAC but again we don't have everything built out yet.

[@ryanreich7635]

@@awstott I've been supporting a college for the last 3 years with their rollout. Multicast issues, AV DSCP master clocking issues. Enough to drive you nuts. But it keeps getting better each version.

[@tabascocrimson7865]

Their documentation sucks yes. It's a pattern, look at any other company which can benefit from bad documentation and it explains everything on WHY they will not fix this.

[@heavy1metal]

Look, if it was cut and dry / simple / easy ONTOP of offering some sort of free offerings - how else would they make money from certifications / trainings / engineers? lol /s

[@balla2172]

Dont worry, there is a paid service license for that

[@zacharyball7167]

Cisco business has always been trash. either buy meraki or use regular cisco products

[@a.g8517]

way too many problems with CBD

[@kenmurphy4259]

Why do they bother releasing crap that doesn’t work, wasting people’s time, I don’t get it

[@murderbymusic12]

Find IT was a complete pile of garbage that almost never worked so it’s not shocking at all that this is just as bad.

[@davidbooth1634]

Rubbish hardware / software

[@Lance_MadCat]

Would love to see where this goes