Printer Only Discovery

[doug_schulze]

So I have this friend from the Great White North who wanted to only capture printers in their environment. She had attempted to set up a behavior that used an SNMP/DNS functionality (since of course we gather printer metrics from SNMP). Well the problem was that the range being discovered also contained other SNMP enabled devices that wasn't helpful to her inventory.

The secret lied in the port probes and creating a proper functionality in a behaviour...

Being that we already check for standard printer ports (515/9100) for our credentialess discovery we have a unique way to trigger classifiers when we find ports open. By default when we check the printer ports we don't trigger any additional queries because by default we rely on SNMP to respond and classify accordingly. So we went into the port probe module and simply added 'SNMP Classify' to the triggers probe column for the printer.



This way when we capture these ports/services being available we will then trigger the SNMP query that would pull back the necessary information. Now we had to update the behaviors functionality so that when we scanned the network we ONLY looked for the printer ports...



So we called the printer only behavior in the schedule, kicked off the discovery and found only those printers she was looking for while passing over the other network enabled devices that we're not part of the scope.. Success!

I wanted to post this to get our Discovery community to think beyond out of our default box and to help all realize that discovery is near only limited by your imagination, the rest is just a few clicks away...

[doug_schulze · Accepted solution]

Correct, seeing that ports 515/9100 were open was the trigger to talk to the device with SNMP through the classify probe.

[SNowUser11]

Hi Doug,

So what ports have to be opened for Printers discovery  SNMP 161 OR 515/9100 in orlando version which uses patterns for discovery?

we have canon printers . Can the OOB discovery do that ?

Many Thanks

[doug_schulze]

Responsive SNMP is all you need for printer discovery today.