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Site survey — inventory a Brainboxes deployment with BB-Eco

You're handed the keys to a customer's network, an OT engineer's laptop, and an hour to document what's actually deployed. This guide walks through using BB-Eco to turn that into a complete, exportable inventory in under fifteen minutes — so you can hand the customer a real report instead of sketching on a whiteboard.

It works equally well for:

  • First-time customer site visits — figure out what's there before you change anything.
  • Pre-upgrade audits — confirm device counts and firmware versions match the customer's records.
  • Periodic asset reviews — diff against last quarter's inventory; new devices show up immediately.
  • Handover documentation — leaving a project? Hand the next engineer a CSV.

Before you start​

  • BB-Eco installed on a laptop you can plug into the site network. (See Install BB-Eco.)
  • A wired Ethernet connection to the same Layer 2 segment as the devices you want to find.
  • The customer's permission to passively observe the network. Active CIDR scans require the same permission for the subnets you intend to probe.

Step 1 — Plug in and let auto-discovery do its work​

Plug your laptop into a free port on the customer's switch and open BB-Eco. Within seconds the dashboard fills with every Brainboxes device on that broadcast domain. No buttons to press, no scans to start.

BB-Eco dashboard with three Brainboxes devices auto-discovered — an ED-549 (Online, Update available), an offline ED-560, and an ED-588 in Stuck recovery mode after an interrupted upgrade. Filter chips along the top show All Families and All Status, with an Add and Export button at the right.

If devices are missing, work through the no-devices troubleshooting checklist — usually a VPN or a cross-subnet topology.

Step 2 — Open Network Neighborhood for the rest of the LAN​

Click the Network Neighborhood icon (globe) in the left sidebar. This view lists every device on the segment that announces itself — printers, NAS, IP cameras, edge controllers, smart-home gear — using SSDP, mDNS, and WS-Discovery in parallel.

BB-Eco Network Neighborhood populated with six discovered devices grouped by role — Endpoint (Synology NAS, Brother printer, HP LaserJet), Industrial (Brainboxes ED-549, BB-400), Security (Axis IP camera) — with SSDP, mDNS, and WS-Discovery source badges visible.

Useful for surveys because it surfaces:

  • Brainboxes devices the dashboard misses — different VLAN, manual IP, you name it. The Neighborhood is broader than the main dashboard.
  • Adjacent infrastructure — the customer's NAS, printers, cameras. Often the customer didn't know either.
  • Anomalies — anything you don't recognise is worth flagging.

See Use BB-Eco as a network discovery tool for the full Neighborhood walkthrough.

Step 3 — Cross-subnet? Run a CIDR scan​

Auto-discovery only sees the broadcast domain you're plugged into. If the site has multiple subnets you can scan them actively from the bottom of the Neighborhood tab — enter the CIDR (e.g. 10.50.0.0/22) and click Scan. BB-Eco TCP-probes every host on common HTTP/HTTPS ports and enriches each responder with its Server header and page title.

BB-Eco's Network Neighborhood tab running a CIDR scan of 192.168.16.0/22. Progress bar advances from 0 to 1024 hosts; the device list groups results by role as they arrive.

A /22 subnet (1024 hosts) takes about a minute. A /24 is under fifteen seconds. Cancel any time; partial results are kept.

Always get explicit permission

Active CIDR scans send TCP probes. On production OT networks, customer sites without authorisation, or anywhere with intrusion detection, don't run a CIDR scan without sign-off. The passive Neighborhood view is fine — it only listens.

Step 4 — Capture configuration baselines for the Brainboxes devices​

While you have access, capture a per-device template for every Brainboxes unit you found. From the desktop app open the device's detail panel → Template tab → Export. Or from the CLI:

bb-eco template export 192.168.1.50 surveys/customer-x/ed-549-ip-50.json

These JSON files become:

  • The before picture for any future change you make.
  • The drift baseline for ongoing audits — see Detect configuration drift.
  • A handover artefact — committed to Git, the customer's IT team can reproduce the device's exact configuration on a replacement unit if it ever fails.

Capturing templates is a read-only operation; nothing on the device changes.

Step 5 — Export the inventory as CSV​

In Network Neighborhood, click Export in the toolbar. You get a CSV with every column visible in the UI plus the discovery-source list (semicolon-separated when a device announced on multiple protocols).

The Brainboxes-only dashboard has a separate Export button that saves a more detailed CSV — model number, MAC, IP, firmware version, capabilities, last-seen timestamp.

A typical site-survey output looks like:

mac,ip,model,firmware,family,interface,deviceState,lastSeen
00:0A:4F:06:4A:EE,192.168.1.101,ED-549,2.0.1,ED,en0,Online,2026-05-06T15:42:12Z
00:0A:4F:06:46:F8,192.168.1.102,ES-257,3.1.0,ES,en0,Online,2026-05-06T15:42:12Z
00:0A:4F:06:4C:9C,192.168.1.103,ED-560,1.0.0,ED,en0,Offline,2026-05-06T15:38:57Z
B8:27:EB:99:88:77,192.168.1.200,BB-400,4.2.1,BB,en0,Online,2026-05-06T15:42:12Z

Drop the file into the customer's report, an asset-management database, or a Git repo for versioned site records.

Step 6 — Cross-reference firmware against the latest release​

The dashboard's Firmware filter highlights anything with an outdated build. For a written report, the CLI gives you the same info in JSON:

bb-eco firmware status --json | jq '.[] | select(.updateAvailable) | {model, ip, current: .currentVersion, latest: .latestVersion}'

Output is a clean list of upgrade candidates that you can attach to your report or paste into a maintenance ticket.

Step 7 — Hand over what you have​

What a complete site survey deliverable looks like:

ArtifactSourceFormat
Device inventoryBB-Eco dashboard or bb-eco list --csvCSV — model, IP, MAC, firmware, last seen
Adjacent network inventoryNetwork Neighborhood Export buttonCSV — every announcing device on the segment
Configuration baselinesbb-eco template export per deviceJSON files, one per device, in Git or a shared drive
Firmware-update listbb-eco firmware status --jsonJSON or CSV — devices needing attention
Network topology notesYour own observationsPlain text — VLAN, switches, VPN, routing oddities
PhotosYour phoneJPG — physical install, panel layouts, label readability

Together these tell the customer not just what's there, but where the risks and opportunities are.

Tips from the field​

  • Plug into the customer's switch, not their access point. Wi-Fi access points often don't bridge multicast cleanly, and SSDP is multicast.
  • Run the CIDR scan before lunch. It takes a minute on a /22. While you eat, the report writes itself.
  • Capture templates before any maintenance. If you upgrade or reconfigure first, the baseline reflects the new state, not the original.
  • Check the timestamps on offline devices. A device last seen 6 months ago is probably retired; a device last seen 30 minutes ago is intermittent.
  • Save your survey directory to Git. Future-you will need it; future-you will not remember what was on screen today.

More resources​