CMDB Relationship between Printer and print queue (and Windows Server)

[Robert McDonne1]

Has anyone in the community configured CMDB relationships between discovered printers and print queue objects.  I would ask the same question for cmdb_ci_print_queue and cmdb_ci_win_server CIs.

I was thinking of a hierarchy as such:

Windows Server (cmdb_ci_win_server) > Print Queue (cmdb_ci_print_queue) > Printer (cmdb_ci_printer)

This would also allow Print Queue objects running on the Windows Server CI to be viewed in a related list.

Has anyone done this to date?

What do you see as the benefits and or pitfalls?

I would assume that we would have to create some dictionary entries and some relationships and possibly some pattern additions.  Would there be any additional effort associated with this work?

[doug_schulze]

Ive done it once but you need the printer connected to the network and connected to the computer at the same time, never really came across a need for it, but its there.

[Robert McDonne1]

Thanks for the reply Doug.  Glad to see I got a response from one of the big names on the forum 😉

Are you talking about locally attached printers or network printers?

My thoughts on this are that we are actively discovering network printers using  SNMP (UDP161) to create the cmdb_ci_printer objects.  We are running Windows Server discovery using WSMan (TCP5985/5986) for creation of the cmdb_ci_win_server objects.  There really are no relationships created between the windows server, print queues and printer CI's when you do this.

For tracking incidents and change, there may be value to be able to track back to a print server or print queue for troubleshooting purposes.  Without the existence of an OOB relationship, there is no way for the Service Desk (or other itil users) to track back to the Windows Server where the print queue is hosted.   This would help with the example where there is a report from user "All of the printers are down!" and then we can trace back and say, "No, only certain printers are down and it because we lost a data store on the VMWare host that was hosting the virtual machine that was running the Windows Print server".

Does this make sense, if yes the do you have any recommendations on how I can do it?

Best regards,

-rm

[doug_schulze]

Hey Robert. Yeah, your use case is solid but to me it seems more like a monitoring requirement over what I've seen Discovery could provide.  The last time I made this work was when I had a computer physically plugged into the printer and the printer was discoverable on its own. I don't think anything has changed in this space but I would look a little deeper into what the pattern is asking for printer information and what the printer probes are doing along with any associated Business rules that would be building those relationships.

But back to your use case, even if you had these good folks sayin their printer is down!?! Well, which one that they could or are connected to is down? Would take a lot of correlation to identify that "Bill" spilled his coffee on the 2nd floor Konica and who it impacts over, where you would think a case might be opened on the printer that folks recognize is not operational, or an event trigger, while you would be able to see which uses might be connected to it.

[Ulrich Schulte]

I hope this one is not fully closed yet - this one came up as a requirement over here as well.

What I'm looking for is just the basic stuff - no discovery or automation. If I add a new network printer to the CMDB, how can I link that one to a certain print queue? I did not find any relationships I could click on and the dependency view is empty and says "Could not load map data"