Approach for monitoring not always on devices

[jriker1]

It's a Canon MF8580CDW. According to the documentation and admin screens, supports SNMP 1 and 3 but no trap support.

JR

[bwallace]

Hi JR,

I haven't tested this one myself (obvious reason being no Canon printer around) but perhaps this will get you on track:

https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/T ... os/details

[jriker1]

Thanks. Some good information. I already know how to actively monitor Canon with SNMP but still good reading material. Sounds like there is no good solve for monitoring a system that is on at various times of the day only. Think my original thought of some kind of ping test to see if the printer is on and only when it responds do the checks. Not sure how I'll accomplish that yet, but perhaps something I read before about some kind of drop folder that Nagios can process may be an option. So have either a Windows or Linux box ping the printer, and if it's up, run the SNMP checks and log them somewhere that Nagios can process. At least I think I read something about that somewhere.

Thanks.

JR

[hsmith]

Have you thought about using dependencies? https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ncies.html

[jriker1]

now we may be getting somewhere . already half wrote the script as i described however if i use dependencies, would have to be dependent on itself:

if canon down don't alert on canon not answering its requests. would i have to setup canon1 with a basic ping, and then canon2 host with the ink cartidge and also ping checks and have it dependent on canon1 host? if that's the case is nagios able to completely hide canon1 from the visual web interface so it never alerts canon1 is down.

thanks

JR

[jriker1]

Open to evaluating the dependencies, however so far got my script working with passive notification working great.

Pings the printer, if it fails, exits the app. DONE
If it pings, runs thru each color in the laser printer, checks the status, gets back OK, WARNING, CRITICAL, or UNKNOWN.
Sets the status accordingly. Also checks the paper level.
Then parses the results of the queries and pulls out the detailed information of the status of each service and then outputs all the results to the command.cmd file.
Have the appropriate services setup in passive mode as well.
Every 10 minutes have a cron job running the script and update with information as appropriate.

JR

[hsmith]

Your method that you used to do this is why Nagios is such a flexible piece of software. This may work better than dependencies in your case, especially since you already got it set up. Is there anything else you would like help with in this thread, or shall I close it?

[jriker1]

You can close it. Thanks for the input.

JR