No, the dashboard is just for monitoring, good, but not necessary.
If you’re doing the topology updated/announcer, it’ll take a while for other nodes to find you. Give it another day or so and you should get some more peers.
The key is to make sure your BP and relay are receiving (processing) transactions.
I assume your pre-prod pools is with ticker “loop”. You configured private IP as your relay IP, that is a root cause why no other relays can connect to you:
you need to resubmit your stake pool registration certificate, with correct IPs.
I didn’t use for a while topology updater, but I would assume you need to have proper config there too… I personally would not use topology updater anymore, especially on pre-prod where I suppose majority is running on p2p.
The topology log should give you the clientip in the same line as “nice to meet you”. Have a look at that and see if it is the same as what you put into your registration-certificate in this step Registering Your Stake Pool - CoinCashew
As @os11k pointed out, it looks like you have registered your pool using your internal IP address, e.g. 192.168.0.XX
You’ll need to redo your registration certificate (see the link I included before), and make it the public relay address (needs to be a static address).