There are numerous items that can be tracked on printers that support
SNMP. In general prtMarkerSupplies (toner) fuser life etc. can be
tracked. There are some standards for printer reporting, but the main
RFC has not formally been approved, so there are several variations
about. Several of the most important monitors use a percentage scale AND
a scale from -1 to -4, creating a minor hurdle, when most graphs expect
0 to 100 only. Some of our printers show toner at 0% when there are
still hundreds of prints available.

Generally, you need to perform both SNMP polling and monitor SNMP traps
(for alerts when paper is out or toner is completely out or cover is
open, etc) to get a complete picture of printer health. This website
provides quite a bit of insight into the OIDs available:
http://www.simpleweb.org/ietf/mibs/modules/html/?category=IETF&module=Printer-MIB

We ended up creating a separate class for each model of printer, and
designing a template for each, there was room for some consolidation as
we progressed. We focused on monitoring toner to begin with (since
anyone can replace paper.)

Of course if your printer does not support SNMP monitoring, there is not
much hope of using Zenoss to monitor it. We hacked one printer that only
had a web display by using the check_http with a regular expression
filter on the status line (error when "Status does not equal OK"), but
it means that you will need to jump for any minor error. We simply don't
provide any guarantees of support for these devices.

On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 07:05 +0000, iscream86 wrote:
> How can i monitor printers for example, i want to alarm if it is out of 
> paper, or out of ink??
> 
> I hope someone know the answer(s) :? 
> 
> Thanks for the help!
> 
> Regards!
> 
> ------------------------
>  Norbert Pomazi
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------- m2f --------------------
> 
> Read this topic online here:
> http://community.zenoss.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9166#9166
> 
> -------------------- m2f --------------------
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> zenoss-users mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.zenoss.org/mailman/listinfo/zenoss-users
-- 
James D. Roman
IT Network Administration

Terranet Inc.On contract to:
Science Systems and Applications, Inc.

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