Discovery - network printers

[wbwb]

Has anyone out there used ServiceNow's Discovery for discovering copiers/printers?  We have mostly Xerox printers but some HP's out there too.  I did a quick scan on the printer vlan they sit on.  For all of them I got "Active, couldn't classify".  Not sure where to start next. 

[Derek Behunin]

The "Active, couldn't classify" error typically means the Shazzam probe received a response at an IP address (Either a result, or a connection refusal) but when transitioning to the classification stage of discover either did not have a probe/pattern to identify a CI type for the device (Not not classify the device as a printer) or because of a refused connection, no data returned to the probe/pattern and again, could not classify the device.

You can gather more information on why exactly discovery is failing by scanning a single printer then looking into the ECCQ payloads (specifically the inputs, but the outputs may have some info as well) of that failed device. 

Hope this helps in your debugging!

[Jason Stephens]

Probably one of 2 things (assuming all network / access to the printer is good) - 

1 - SNMP is not turned on on the local printer.  I would check that by either hitting the printer IP address through a browser and looking at SNMP settings or manually on the printer control panel.  If it's not on, then turn it on and retry.

2 - Your printers have a custom SNMP string (something other than the default of "public").  I would check that the same way.  If it is a custom value, you will need to set up an SNMP credential with that string in the Discovery ->  Credentials table.

Also, SN is supposed to check the default "public" OOB, but I've found that actually creating a credential for that helped get a few more printers for some reason.

Good luck!

[wbwb]

Ok, I brushed up my knowledge on snmp and got things going.  It's finding printers!  Thanks for the help guys.  Knowing that servicenow uses public by default is a big help.  My next question is identifying these correctly.  I have Xerox copiers, OCE and HP printers.  I haven't gone through all the CI's yet, but I'm finding the description shows the info I need, but the model and brand fields are blank. For example, it extracted serial number nicely, but much of the useful info is just lumped into the description field.  Make and model fields are blank. Do I need to update the MIBs/OIDs? - did some reading but don't understand the entire process to do that yet.

[Jason Stephens]

Updating MIB's and OID's will help with the data.  The challenge I found there is to make sure you drill down to the correct OID level where the make and model live. I put a few in there at too high of a level and printers that weren't a match for the make and/or model would match. Not really a challenge, I just didn't know what I was doing and learned the hard way.... 🙂

You're on the right track though.