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I use Cacti to graph various things on my network, and I want to understand load on my print servers. Cacti uses SNMP to monitor things. Can I monitor the size of the print queue via SNMP? If so, how.

I am already able to snmpwalk my print server, but I can't find anything that is obviously a print queue in here.

dunxd
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  • Should give more details about what you actually use for a print server. – brent Jan 08 '10 at 17:38
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    Windows Server 2003 R2 native print server. Searching for how to do this gives a lot of pages about SNMP to monitor print queues in windows can cause problems under certain conditions, but I can't find any info on what MIB or OIDS to use to do the monitoring. – dunxd Jan 11 '10 at 08:26

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I'll be annoying and say monitoring Windows systems should be done by tools who intimately know how to monitor Windows systems and what to monitor in the first place, but...

...suffice to say, Cacti should be able to query WMI (hopefully, the Cacti forum seem to be down at the moment) which should work well in the case of print queue monitoring and most things Windows when thought of.

SNMP Informant is another (costly) way of doing it if SNMP is some kind of super-requirement. The first link mentions perf2mib as an unsupported alternative as well.

Oskar Duveborn
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  • You mean use MOM? That created a lot of false alarms, and meant that while MOM knew what to monitor in the first place, network admins did not know what was being monitored. I prefer to start simple and build up. – dunxd Jan 11 '10 at 08:28
  • I guess it depends on the complexity of the environment but yeah, OpsMgr takes some initial quality time to teach what you really care about but calling it false alarms I dunno, more like alarms you for some reason are uninterested in? I abhor digging through server event logs at client sites finding hundreds of alarms and warnings no one's taken care of because "it still works"... ^^ – Oskar Duveborn Jan 11 '10 at 09:10
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I'm going to take a look at SNMPTools which exposes Perfmon counters via SNMP. My understanding of Linux accessing counters via WMI is that it is either very processor intensive, or you need a windows box acting as a WMI proxy with some kind of agent.

dunxd
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