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Printer Ink, Paper, Error Reporting?

Hi,

I was curious if you would be able to monitor printer ink and paper levels and alert if they get to low? I been looking around for a while, and most the information I found has been referring to ipMonitor and setting up custom MIBs. Is there a way to do that with SAM, or will I need to setup some sort of performance counter monitor? I have added a couple printers and by default it polls rom, ram, nvram, but so far, I haven't figured out a way to monitor other things.

Can this be accomplished with SAM, or is that what ipMonitor is for?

Thanks,

Jeryn

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Accepted answers

aLTeReGo

It sounds like Lexmark is using enumeration, so what's actually occurring is that the device is returning "1" but the MIB file interprets that as being noTonerError. You should be able to confirm this by doing a MIB walk of the device and searching for

1.3.6.1.4.1.641.2.1.3.1.6.0.

I did a quick Google search and was able to confirm that the value returned from the device is an integer value -> http://www.mibdepot.com/cgi-bin/getmib3.cgi?n=LEXMARK-PVT-MIB&r=cai&f=lexmark1.mib&t=tab&o=prtgenStatusTonerError&v=v1&i=0&obj=prtgenStatusTonerError

All comments

aLTeReGo

This can be done in SAM using SNMP monitors. For example .1.3.6.1.2.1.43.11.1.1.9.1.1 is the OID for the amount of black toner remaining on an HP LaserJet printer.

jeryn

Interesting, will def. be reading more into that. Thank you for the info!

jeryn

Did some looking around and all the OIDs I can find online for Lexmark printers seem to be giving me a No such instance currently exists at this OID error. Will have to look around a bit more and possibly see if there is a way I can directly pull OID numbers from the printers themselves. Not sure if these are wrong OID numbers or I am just doing it wrong, will have to look into it a bit more.

mharvey

jeryn,

if you have a copy of the Engineer's Toolset you can use the SNMP MIB Walk tool to walk the private mibs on the device and you should be able to find the information you need to create the pollers. If not, you can download an eval version to get what you need. That's the route I would take. The No such instance currently exists at this OID usually means there is either too many numbers in the OID, likely leading to the wrong instance, or the device doesn't know how to interpret it.

Regards,

Matthew Harvey

jeryn

Thanks! I'll take a look at the toolset and see what I can find.

jeryn

Did a bit of looking around, and I was able to find the correct OIDs for this printer. When I test the OIDs it is going through successfully, so step one is down. Now I just need to figure out how to convert this information it is pulling into readable and usable data.

For example, the OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.641.2.1.3.1.6.0 pulls any TonerStatusErros, however when I apply it to the printer and check the details on the application, it is just showing things like component availability and Min / Max Average statistic Data. I think those are just the default information it shows, but nothing really helpful and not sure how this will actually alert. I will look into it more tomorrow.

jeryn

In case anybody came across this thread looking for a template to do what was discussed, I put one together and uploaded it. You can view / download it here!

If you see any mistakes, or have any questions about it, feel free to PM me or reply to the post. That template has been applied to about 20 heavily used Lexmark printers for about about two weeks now and so far been working great.

Thanks,

Jeryn